Joan Micklin Silver, the filmmaker whose first film, “Hester Street,” expanded the market for American independent films and broke the barriers to directing women, died Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.
Her daughter Claudia Silver said the cause was vascular dementia.
Me. Silver wrote and directed ‘Hester Street’ (1975), the story of a young Jewish immigrant couple from Russia on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1890s. It was a personal effort, a low-budget survey for 34 days, that became a family project.
Studios said the story is too narrow and historically ethnic. First, most of the film was in black and white in Yiddish with English subtitles.
“Nobody wanted to release it,” she said. Silver remembered in a visual history interview for the Directors Guild of America in 2005. “The only offer was to release it at 16 to the synagogue market,” she adds, referring to 16 millimeters. movie.
Mrs. Silver’s husband, Raphael D. Silver, a commercial real estate developer, stepped in to finance, produce and even distribute the film after selling it to a number of international markets during the Cannes Film Festival. “Hester Street” opened in October 1975 at the Plaza Theater in Manhattan, then in theaters nationwide, and soon earned $ 5 million (about $ 25 million today), nearly 14 times its $ 370,000 budget. sometimes an even lower budget figure: $ 320,000.)
Richard Eder of The New York Times praised the film’s “fine balance between realism and fable” and declared it an unconditionally happy achievement. ‘Carol Kane, who was 21 during the filming, in 1973, was nominated for Best Actress Oscar for her role as Gitl, the newly arrived woman who, in the opinion of her husband (Steven Keats), is humiliatingly slow to assimilate .
“Hester Street” called me. Silver’s reputation made, but the next time she wanted to portray Jewish characters and culture, the same objections arose.
‘Crossing Delancey’ (1988) was a romantic comedy about a sophisticated, single New York employee of the bookstore (Amy Irving) who constantly looks over her shoulder to make sure she’s a clean getaway from her Lower East Side made roots.
With the help of her grandmother (played by Jiddis theater star Reizl Bozyk) and a traditional matchmaker (Sylvia Miles), she meets a neighborhood pickle dealer (Peter Riegert) who has enough good qualities to make up because he is just still is a nice guy (her taste runs more in the bad boy direction).
The studios also found this film “too ethnic” – “a euphemism”, said me. Silver told The Times, “for Jewish material that Hollywood executives distrust.”
Fortunately, the man at the time, Mrs. Irving, director Steven Spielberg, himself loves Jewish history. He suggested she send the script to a neighbor in East Hampton, NY – a top executive of Warner Entertainment. The film grossed more than $ 116 million worldwide (today about $ 255 million).
It’s hard to say what Silver’s worst antagonist, anti – Semitism or misogyny was.
“I was told such blatant sexist things by studio managers when I started,” she recalls in an interview with the American Film Institute in 1979. She quoted one man’s memorable remark: “Feature films are very expensive to watch. to set and distribute, and female directors are another problem we do not need. ”
Joan Micklin was born on May 24, 1935 in Omaha. She was the second of three daughters of Maurice David Micklin, who ran a lumber business he and his father founded, and Doris (Shoshone) Micklin. Both her parents were born in Russia – like the protagonists in Hester Street – and came to the United States as children.
Joan grew up in Omaha and then went to the East, to Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, NY. She married in 1956 to mr. Silver, known as Ray, three weeks after graduation. He was the son of the celebrated Zionist rabbi Abba Hillel Silver.
For eleven years, the Silvers lived in Cleveland, his hometown, where she taught music and wrote for local theater. They moved to New York in 1967 and put her closer to the film and theater contacts.
A chance encounter with Joan Ganz Cooney, the co-creator of Sesame Street, during a political fundraiser led to her work with Linda Gottlieb at the Learning Corporation of America. Together they wrote and produced educational and documentary short films, including “The Immigrant Experience” (1972).
Me. Silver had a love-hate relationship with movie studios. She was one of several writers hired and fired by Paramount to adapt Lois Gould’s novel “Such Good Friends” (1971). Her first major screenplay was ‘Limbo’, written with Mrs. Gottlieb, on the wives of prisoners of war in Vietnam. Universal Studios bought the property but rewrote it and appointed a director whose vision is the opposite of Mrs. Silver’s was.
She would not let that happen to ‘Hester Street’. And she did not.
Me. Silver’s second film, “Between the Lines” (1977), was also a kind of assimilation story. The young, politically progressive staff of an alternative newspaper are taken over by a corporation that has radically different priorities and values. The film, which starred Jeff Goldblum, John Heard and Lindsay Crouse, was also produced by the Silvers.
For her third film, an adaptation of Ann Beattie’s moody bestseller “Chilly Scenes of Winter”, she works. Silver with United Artists. The studio immediately changed the title to ‘Head Over Heels’ (1979) and promoted the film as a light skirt. This has Mr. Heard and Mary Beth Hurt played as a loving civil servant and the married associate he adored a little too much.
After it bombed, the young producers of the film insisted on restoring the original title, giving it a new, less perky ending, and releasing it again. This time it was received much more favorably.
Me. Silver braved the Off Broadway theater with mixed results. Mel Gussow of The Times does not care about “Maybe I’m Doing It Wrong” (1982), her revue with Randy Newman’s music. But then me. Silver and Julianne Boyd devised and performed the musical revue “A … My Name Is Alice”, it had three runs in 1983 and 1984 and was pronounced “beautiful” by Frank Rich of The Times. There were two sequels in the nineties.
Finally, Mrs. Silver directed seven feature films. The other, all comedies with relatively foamy themes, was “Loverboy” (1989), about an attractive young pizza delivery man offering extras to attractive older women; “Big Girls Do Not Cry … They Are Equal” (1992), about divorced and remarried people being thrown together again by a runaway teenage daughter; and “A Fish in the Bathtub” (1999), starring Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara as a couple with a pet carp.
Me. Silver also directed more than half a dozen television movies, beginning with ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’ (1976), based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her last was ‘Hunger Point’ (2003), about a young woman’s eating disorder.
In addition to her daughter Claudia, me. Silver’s survivors two more daughters, Dina and Marisa Silver; a sister, Renee; and five grandchildren. Mr. Silver died at 83 in 2013 after a ski accident in Park City, Utah.
Looking back in the interview with the directors’ guild, Ms. Silver given a clear work preference.
“The more I am left alone, the better I do,” she said. ‘It’s not that I think I’m smarter than anyone or anything like that. It’s just whatever my instinct is, it’s better that I can play it in my own work. ”
In the same interview, she was asked about ‘Crossing Delancey’ and admitted her favorite aspect of the experience: ‘I got final cut.’
Alex Traub reported.