16:21 PST 1/1/2021
by
Katie Kilkenny
The groundbreaking writer-director fought to bring Jewish stories to the silver screen at a time when some of her projects were considered an “ethnic oddity,” she said.
Joan Micklin Silver, the groundbreaking independent female director Hesterstraat and Crossing Delancey, among many other titles, who fought to bring Jewish stories to the silver screen, is dead. She was 85.
Silver died of vascular dementia at her home in Manhattan on Thursday, Silver’s daughter, Claudia, said The New York Times.
Silver was born and bred in Omaha, Nebraska under Russian Jewish parents, and left home to attend Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Not long after her graduation in 1956, Silver married the son of a Zionist rabbi, Cleveland, Raphael D. Silver, and the couple settled in Cleveland, where Silver gave music classes and wrote plays while working to raise three children.
Silver made her film debut after the family moved to New York in 1967, and Silver began writing screenplays for educational films for children. With The Learning Corporation of America, Silver wrote, produced and directed films such as the 1972 short The immigrant experience: the long long journey. Silver ventured into the studio system after an original screenplay Limbo was picked up by Universal Pictures, but it was not a positive experience: she refused to “soften” the female main character of the screenplay and the studio had a rewrite done without her.
The experience told her work in 1975 Hesterstraat, adapted from Abraham Cahan’s short stories Yekl, which Silver wrote and directed. “I came of age for film at a time when sexism was pretty strong, and although I could get a job as a writer, I could not get a job as a director at all,” Silver described the time she was working. Hesterstraat in an interview with Directors Guild of America. “And I had the experience of watching young men who made shorts, like me, award-winning shorts, like I had, go into directing movies and I could not do that.”
Her husband was angry about the lack of opportunities, Silver said, and agreed to raise money for the film. Eventually he financed, produced and distributed the low-budget indie, which Hester said was rejected by all the major studios in Hollywood as an ‘ethnic stranger’, but eventually earned a healthy $ 5 million at the box office and was nominated. for a writer. Guild of America Award. Silver again worked with her husband to produce and distribute her next feature film, Between the lines (1977); she’s finally working with a major distributor, United Artists, on her third function, Cold scenes of winter (1979).
1988’s Crossing Delancey saw her blunt heads again with the Hollywood system about Jewish characters: Silver went to the New York Times that studios called the film ‘too ethnic’. Steven Spielberg, who was married to movie star Amy Irving at the time, recommended that Silver send the script to a Warner Bros. executive he knew, and the studio eventually distributed the film.
In addition to directing seven feature films over the course of her career, Silver has directed theater titles, including 1992s. A … My name is still Alice and 1982s Maybe I’m doing it wrong and a radio series for NPR, Great Jewish stories from Eastern Europe and beyond. For television, she helped the films How to be a perfect person in just three days (1983) and Hunger point (2003), among others.
Silver is survived by daughters Claudia, Dina and Marisa; her sister Renee; and five grandchildren.