Joan Micklin Silver, the pioneering female filmmaker best known for her feature film debut, "Hester Street" and the romantic-comedy, "Crossing Delancey", has passed away on December 31st. The writer/director died from complications of vascular dementia at the age of eighty-five.
Born on May 24th in Omaha, NE, Micklin would attend Sarah Lawrence College and married Raphael Silver, a real estate developer, three weeks after graduation in 1956. The couple moved to his hometown of Cleveland, OH where she would get involved in writing and directing local theater. In 1967, the family, which had grown with three daughters, Claudia, Dina and Marisa, moved to New York. With major film and theater production now in closer contact, Silver seriously pursued a professional career. Her first opportunity came when she went to work for Linda Gottlieb at the Learning Corporation of America where she wrote scripts for children's educational films and directed three shorts.
Silver's first major break came when she sold a screenplay that she had co-written with Gottlieb called, "Limbo" about the wives of prisoners of war, to Universal Studios. But the script would be heavily re-written and the male director had a completely different vision for the film. Determined not to have that happen again, Silver decided she wanted to direct her next screenplay. However, she quickly ran in to sexism early on as she was told by a studio executive that movies were already too complicated and women directors were not worth the additional trouble.
Undeterred, Silver would form a production company, Midwest Films with her husband. He largely got involved due to the many frustrations he saw his wife having to deal with while trying to start her film career. The first film Silver wrote and directed was "Hester Street", the story of Russian Jewish immigrants who come to the live in Manhattan's Lower East Side. The very low-budget drama released in 1975 would prove to be a critical and box-office success with star, Carol Kane (in her first major film role) earning a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Silver's follow-up 1977 feature, "Between the Lines", about a group of people who work at an alt newspaper in Boston, would also receive critical praise. With her third film, Silver had adapted Ann Beattie's novel, "Chilly Scenes of Winter" for United Artists. But the studio changed the title to "Head Over Heels" and tacked on a happy ending to the film in 1979. This version was not very successful but it would be later re-released in 1982 with the original title and ending, faring much better with critics and audiences.
"Crossing Delancey" is probably Silver's most popular and enduring film. Amy Irving stars as Isabelle, a single, New York bookstore employee trying to put some distance between herself and her traditional Jewish upbringing in the Lower East Side. But her grandmother sets her up with a neighborhood pickle dealer (Peter Riegert). Isabelle realizes he's certainly a nice guy but thinks she wants someone a little rougher around the edges. Silver took her script to several studios who found the story "too ethnic". But luckily Irving was married at the time to one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, filmmaker Steven Spielberg. He suggested Silver give her screenplay to a neighbor who was an executive at Warner Bros. The studio would distribute the feature and "Crossing Delancey" became a box-office hit, earning more than one hundred million worldwide.
Silver would direct seven feature films (which included the 1989 teen-comedy, "Loverboy" with a young Patrick Dempsey as a pizza-delivery boy who offers extra services to older women and "A Fish in the Bathtub", her last film from 1999 which starred the comedy team of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara), several made-for-television films and directed two Off-Broadway plays.
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