Smithereens
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Wren is a 19-year-old New Jersey girl who goes to New York City to make it big in the rock music industry, undeterred by the facts that she cannot sing, write songs, or play an instrument. After getting a job in a photocopy store, Wren puts copies of her picture up all over the subway system with the caption, "Who Is This?" and is disappointed that no one seems to care. On her way to fame, she gets remantically involved with a nice boy from Montana named Paul, and a self-obsessed rock performer named Eric.
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Smithereens -
Upon her graduation in 1979, and emboldened by an award from the Chicago International Film Festival for her student film And You Look Like One Too (1976), Seidelman began plotting her first feature. Having traded the Pennsylvania suburbs for Manhattan's Lower East Side, Seidelman saw at first hand the burgeoning punk rock music movement, which formed the backdrop for Smithereens (1982). In an interview with Filmmaker magazine in 2009, Seidelman recalled: "I had stayed in touch with my friends from NYU and we decided that if we pooled our resources... we could make a low budget feature film, shot on 16mm, for about $20,000. My grandmother had recently died and left me some money which was set aside for my future wedding - but since that wasn't in the cards at that time, I decided to use it for camera equipment, film stock and lab expenses and make a feature film instead." Seidelman helped fund the venture by work as a freelance editor and production assistant on TV spots for Jordache jeans and through the sale of limited shares of stock.
With a cast and crew of friends, classmates, local musicians, and starving artists, principal photography for Smithereens began in the spring of 1979, four years into New York's well-publicized financial crisis: a time of fear, uncertainty, destitution... and unparalleled artistic freedom. A downtown take on All About Eve (1950), the film focuses on the machinations of a talentless hanger-on who drifts from scene to scene and man to man as she follows the punk zeitgeist from New York to Los Angeles, only to be left nowhere and alone by the final fadeout. Due to the fits and starts of DIY film production (which included, among other calamities, leading lady Susan Berman falling from a fire escape and breaking her leg), production stretched out over a year and a half while Seidelman's budget quadrupled. Not all of the delays had an adverse effect; during a four month halt in filming, Seidelman replaced her original leading man with Richard Hell, a founding member of Tom Verlaine's influential American punk rock group Television and a fashion innovator whose preference for spikey hair and torn clothing is said to have had an immeasurable influence on the aesthetics of punk.
"Thinking back on it, there was something wonderfully naive about the way the film came together," Seidelman said in 2009. "We never thought about how - or if -- the film would get distributed, or how it would be marketed. This was just a film I wanted to make that attempted to capture the spirit of a certain time and place." To the surprise of all involved, Smithereens was accepted by the Cannes Film Festival and garnered recognition as a succès d'estime, winning a distribution deal from New Line Cinema. In her encouraging, but not uncritical review of Smithereens in The New York Times in November 1982, Janet Maslin drew a parallel between Susan Berman's plucky but purposeless punk protagonist Wren with "the French movie waifs of yesteryear," a sentiment that surely vindicated Seidelman's choice to become a filmmaker. Though not intended as an industry calling card, Smithereens got Hollywood's attention. Rejecting a pile of teenage girl scripts, Seidelman signed on to direct Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), the film that made a movie star of singer Madonna and a career move that brokered Susan Seidelman's transition from DIY to A-list.
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
"Sets and the City: The History of Smithereens" by Jason Guerrasio, Filmmaker, October 8, 2009
"Since Making Madonna a Movie Star, Director Susan Seidelman Is No Longer Desperately Seeking Success" by Michelle Green, People, April 29, 1985
"Susan Seidelman, Survivor" by Christie Lemire, RogerEbert.com, July 12, 2013
"Susan Seidelman's True Grit" by Amy Virshup, by New York, November 26, 1984
"Susan Seidelman's DIY Spirit," IndieWire.com, November 3, 2009
Smithereens -
Smithereens on DVD
Synopsis: Four months behind on her rent, the energetic but misdirected Wren (Susan Berman) works in a copy center while trying to promote herself into a glitzy music career by latching onto a talented boyfriend. Not above abusing acquaintances, lying and stealing, she throws herself at a jaded musical burnout, Eric (Richard Hell) while callously using another boy, Paul (Brad Rinn). Paul has driven from Montana and lives in his van, and Wren treats him terribly until she uses up her options and needs a place to sleep. Paul tries to get her to commit to something more than her flaky self-interest, but Wren insists on trying to con herself into the graces of people like Eric who are more experienced users than she.
Smithereens gets right to the heart of the 'creative youth culture' of the late 70s / early 80s: Just as in every endeavor with potentially glamorous rewards, ambitious hangers-on outnumber the talented core by fifty-to-one. Jersey Girl Wren has migrated to Manhattan to crash into the scene and come out with a new identity or function for herself, her ultimate goal being to end up floating in a pool in California, sipping drinks and being famous. She has a long way to go. Having burned her bridges with her disapproving family and lost her rented room, Wren is forced to drift between whoever can put her up for the night.
That's not an easy task but Wren is determined to make it work no matter what the strain to her friends. She's a determined self-promoter, even if plastering photocopies of herself all over town (distant echoes of It Should Happen to You,there) accomplishes little except petty vandalism. Values-challenged but still recognizably vulnerable, Wren is willing to sleep with one boy while deceiving another. She breaks the heart of Paul, the boy from Montana, feeling a pull of attraction to him only when her other prospects look bleak. But the minute that the arrogant Eric acts interested, she ditches Paul like excess baggage.
The Smithereens script (co written by Ron Nyswaner of Philadelphia) puts this lifestyle into a thematic perspective without becoming pretentious. Wren is one of a million selfish self-promoters looking for an angle but expecting to advance on somebody else's dime. She preys on those less cool than herself, yet is easily victimized by people higher on the scale of coolness. She's so isolated from ordinary human connections that she's willing to commit armed robbery for Eric. "Smithereens" appears to be the title of an album promoted by Eric, but Wren also uses the word when referring to a dream she had about the world exploding into tiny fragments. The people living on the remaining bits don't realize what's missing. Wren's aggressive, me-against-everybody alienation results in more or less the same result as she systematically cuts herself off from living in the civilized world with other people. It's a great theme; Smithereens is almost like Conrad's Outcast of the Islands.
Director Susan Seidelman was apparently inspired by Nights of Cabiria for her freewheeling female protagonist, who shares a certain sassy resilience but lacks the dignity of Fellini's idealized streetwalker. When we last see her, Wren looks ready to make some even worse decisions for herself.
I didn't care much for the director's Madonna movie (although Rosanna Arquette was cute) and both Making Mr. Right and She-Devil leaned to the dismal side of the blotter. But Smithereens is reasonably fresh, especially in its casting of lively Susan Berman. Seidelman describes her has having a pixie twinkle in her eyes, and Berman indeed gives off a kind of Shirley MacLaine glow from time to time. She also excels at being loud, abrasive, blunt and pigheaded when needed. She's terrific.
Blue Underground's DVD of Smithereens takes a gritty film shot on 16mm and makes it look better than the original theatrical prints did. Color and grain are under control and the variable cinematography (hard to keep things in focus at night through those dark viewfinders, no?) has an appropriate rough quality. The sound is exceptionally good, and if the film was post-synched, they did a really good job. The music score utilizes some good tunes, including several by the notable group The Feelies.
Director Susan Seidelman provides a breezy commentary that outlines the genesis of the movie as an outgrowth of student work. The movie was essentially self-produced and Seidelman's tenacity must have been Herculean to keep things going when her actress broke her ankle in the very first week of shooting. That interruption turned out to be a blessing because it allowed her to recast roles that weren't working and to rethink the script in a completely new direction. The original story was reportedly more of a Holly Golightly tale where Wren eventually connected with a rich Prince Charming character.
The delightful Susan Berman and the thoughtful Richard Hell make a pleasant interview couple for a Blue Underground - produced docu. Hell volunteers a truthful account of himself during filming - he was almost as burned out and hollow as his character is supposed to be. Seidelman forced him to sleep at her apartment to guarantee that he'd show up on the set.
A trailer and stills gallery round out Blue Underground's superior package.
For more information about Smithereens, visit Blue Underground. To order Smithereens, go to TCM Shopping.
by Glenn Erickson
Smithereens on DVD
Quotes
Trivia
Miscellaneous Notes
Released in United States Winter January 1, 1982
Released in United States June 1982
Feature directorial debut for filmmaker Susan Seidelman who received her BA from Drexel Institute of Technology and an MFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Broadcast in USA over Sundance Channel as part of program "She Said Cinema" May 1-31, 1999.
The first independent American feature to be accepted in the main competition at Cannes.
Released in United States Winter January 1, 1982
Released in United States June 1982