Joan Micklin Silver, who forged her own path as a female director in the 1970s and 80s and directed seven films, including “Crossing Delancey” and “Hester Street”, died Thursday in Manhattan. She was 85 years old.
Her daughter, Claudia Silver, told the New York Times that the cause was vascular dementia.
The 1975 independent film “Hester Street” was the story of a couple of Jewish immigrants in the 1890s. The low-budget black and white film, in Yiddish with English subtitles, was difficult to sell to the studios and ended up being financed by her husband, real estate developer Raphael D. Silver. It received rave reviews and grossed $ 5 million at the box office, an impressive amount at the time. Carol Kane, 21, was nominated for an Oscar for best actress for her role as wife, Gitl.
The 1988 romantic comedy “Crossing Delancey” was also set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side Jewish community. Starring Amy Irving, Sylvia Miles and Peter Riegert, Silver said she had a hard time throwing him because, again, the studios felt the subject was “too ethnic”.
It was finally produced when Irving’s then-husband, Steven Spielberg, helped facilitate a connection with a Warner Entertainment executive who was his neighbor, and the film was also successful, raising more than $ 116 million worldwide.
Silver struggled to be taken seriously as a director and could not understand why it was so difficult for women directors to find opportunities. She told Film Comment that “I didn’t want to feel like the female director. I wanted to feel like one of many female directors
She also said that the head of a studio once told her, “A filmmaker is more of a problem that we don’t need.”
Born in Omaha, she started teaching music and working at the local theater in Cleveland before moving to New York, where she wrote and produced educational shorts at Learning Corporation of America.
In the early 1970s, Silver was hired to adapt Lois Gould’s novel “Such Good Friends” for Otto Preminger, but was replaced by a number of writers, including Joan Didion and Elaine May. His original screenplay, “Limbo,” POW’s wives, was purchased by Universal, but the studio replaced her with James Bridges when she disagreed with the director about making the film.
His other films include “Between the Lines”, starring Jeff Goldblum, John Heard and Lindsay Crouse, and the adaptation of Ann Beattie’s popular novel “Chilly Scenes of Winter”, also starring Heard, with Mary Beth Hurt.
United Artists tried to change the name from “Chilly Scenese of Winter” to “Head Over Heels” and sell it as a comedy, but the bittersweet dramatic comedy was a failure. The producers restored the original title and re-released the film with a new ending.
These films were followed by “Loverboy”, “Big Girls Don’t Cry … They Get Even” and “A Fish in the Bathtub”. She continued to work on TV films in the early 2000s, including “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, “Invisible Child” and “Hunger Point”.
Silver leaves his daughters, TV writer Claudia; screenwriter-director Marisa; and Dina; a sister and five grandchildren.