Joan Micklin Silver, the filmmaker whose first feature, “Hester Street,” expanded the market for American independent cinema and broke barriers for women in the direction, died on Thursday at her Manhattan home. She was 85 years old.
Her daughter Claudia Silver said the cause was vascular dementia.
Mrs. Silver wrote and directed “Hester Street” (1975), the story of a young couple of Jewish immigrants from Russia on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1890s. It was a personal effort, a 34-day low-budget location , which has become a family project.
The studios said the story was very narrow and historically ethnic. On the one hand, much of the film, in black and white, was in Yiddish with English subtitles.
“No one wanted to launch it,” recalled Silver in a visual history interview for the Directors Guild of America in 2005. “The only offer was to launch it on the 16th for the synagogue market,” she added, referring to 16mm film.
Silver’s husband, Raphael D. Silver, a commercial real estate developer, intervened to finance, produce and even distribute the film after selling it to some international markets while participating in the Cannes Film Festival. “Hester Street” debuted at the Plaza Theater in Manhattan in October 1975, then in theaters across the country, and soon earned $ 5 million (about $ 25 million today), almost 14 times its $ 370,000 budget. (Mrs. Silver sometimes quoted an even lower budget: $ 320,000.)
Richard Eder, of The New York Times, praised the film’s “good balance between realism and fable” and declared it “an unconditionally happy feat” Carol Kane, who was 21 during filming in 1973, was nominated for an Oscar for best actress for her role as Gitl, the newly arrived wife who is, in her husband’s opinion (Steven Keats), humiliating to assimilate.
“Hester Street” made Silver’s reputation, but the next time she wanted to portray Jewish characters and culture, the same objections came up.
“Crossing Delancey” (1988) was a romantic comedy about a sophisticated single New York bookstore employee (Amy Irving) who is constantly looking over her shoulder to make sure she has made a clean escape from her roots on the Lower East Side .
With the help of her grandmother (played by Yiddish theater star Reizl Bozyk) and a traditional matchmaker (Sylvia Miles), she meets a pickle dealer (Peter Riegert) who has enough qualities to make up for being just another nice guy ( his tastes went more towards the bad boy).
Studios also found this film “very ethnic” – “an understatement,” Silver told The Times, “for Jewish material that Hollywood executives don’t trust.”
Fortunately, Mrs. Irving’s husband at the time, director Steven Spielberg, liked Jewish history. He suggested that she send the script to a neighbor of his in East Hampton, NY – a top Warner Entertainment executive. The film grossed more than $ 116 million worldwide (about $ 255 million today).
It is difficult to say which was Silver’s most cruel antagonist, anti-Semitism or misogyny.
“I heard things so blatantly sexist that studio executives told me when I started,” she recalled in an interview with the American Film Institute in 1979. She quoted a man’s memorable comment: “Films are too expensive to assemble and distribute, and women directors are more of a problem that we don’t need. “
Joan Micklin was born on May 24, 1935, in Omaha. She was the second of the three daughters of Maurice David Micklin, who ran a logging company that he and his father had founded, and Doris (Shoshone) Micklin. His parents were born in Russia – like the protagonists of “Hester Street” – and came to the United States as children.
Joan grew up in Omaha, then went east to Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, NY. She married Mr. Silver, known as Ray, in 1956, three weeks after graduation. He was the son of the famous Zionist rabbi Abba Hillel Silver.
For 11 years, the Silvers lived in Cleveland, her hometown, where she taught music and wrote for the local theater. They moved to New York in 1967, bringing her closer to film and theater contacts.
A chance encounter with Joan Ganz Cooney, the co-creator of Vila Sésamo, in a political fundraiser led to his work with Linda Gottlieb at Learning Corporation of America. Together, they wrote and produced educational and documentary short films, including “The Immigrant Experience” (1972).
Mrs. 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). His first popular script was “Limbo”, written with Gottlieb, about the wives of prisoners of war in Vietnam. Universal Studios bought the property, but rewrote it and hired a director whose view was the opposite of Ms. Silver.
She wasn’t going to let that happen with “Hester Street”. And she didn’t.
Silver’s second film, “Between the Lines” (1977), was a kind of assimilation story too. The young and politically progressive team of an alternative newspaper is being taken over by a corporation, which has radically different priorities and values. This film, whose cast included Jeff Goldblum, John Heard and Lindsay Crouse, was also produced by the Silvers.
For her third film, an adaptation of Ann Beattie’s temperamental bestseller, “Chilly Scenes of Winter”, Silver worked with United Artists. The studio promptly changed the title to “Head Over Heels” (1979) and promoted the film as a playful joke. He starred Mr. Heard and Mary Beth Hurt as a passionate civil servant and the married co-worker he loves a little too much.
After pumping, the young producers of the film insisted on restoring the original title, giving it a new and less cheerful ending and having it relaunched. This time, it was received much more favorably.
Mrs. Silver ventured into the Off Broadway theater with mixed results. Mel Gussow of The Times did not call “Maybe I’m Doing It Wrong” (1982), his music magazine with Randy Newman. But when Silver and Julianne Boyd conceived and staged the musical magazine “A … My Name Is Alice”, it had three editions in 1983 and 1984 and was declared “charming” by Frank Rich of The Times. There were two sequences in the 1990s.
In the end, Silver directed seven feature films. The others, all comedies with relatively sparkling themes, were “Loverboy” (1989), about a handsome young pizza delivery man who offers extras for attractive older women; “Big Girls Don’t Cry … They Get Even” (1992), about people divorced and remarried together 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.
Mrs. Silver also directed more than half a dozen films for television, starting 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, Mrs. Silver’s survivors include two other daughters, Dina and Marisa Silver; a sister, Renee; and five grandchildren. Mr. Silver died at 83 in 2013, after a skiing accident in Park City, Utah.
Looking back at the Directors Guild interview, Ms. Silver professed definite job preferences.
“The more I am alone, the better I do,” she said. “It’s not that I think I’m more intelligent than anyone or anything. Whatever my instincts, it is better for me to be able to put them into action in my own work. “
In the same interview, she was asked about “Crossing Delancey” and confessed her favorite aspect of the experience: “I made the final cut”.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.