16:21 PST 1/1/2021
in
Katie Kilkenny
The pioneering writer and director struggled to bring Jewish stories to the screen at a time when some of her projects were considered “ethnic eccentricity,” she said.
Joan Micklin Silver, the pioneering independent director behind Hester Street and Crossing Delancey, among many other titles, which struggled to bring Jewish stories to the silver screen, died. She was 85 years old.
Silver died on Thursday at his Manhattan home of vascular dementia, said Silver’s daughter Claudia, The New York Times.
Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Russian Jewish parents, Silver left home to study at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Not long after her graduation in 1956, Silver married the son of a Cleveland Zionist rabbi, Raphael D. Silver, and the couple settled in Cleveland, where Silver taught music lessons and wrote plays while working to raise three children. .
Silver made his 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 script called Limbo was chosen by Universal Pictures, but it was not a positive experience: she refused to “soften” the female character in the script and the studio ordered a rewrite without her.
The experience informed his work in 1975 Hester Street, adapted from the novel by Abraham Cahan Yekl, which Silver wrote and directed. “I came of age for cinema at a time when sexism was very strong and although I could get a job as a writer, I couldn’t get a job as a director at all,” Silver described about the time she was doing Hester Street in an interview by the Directors Guild of America. “And I had the experience of watching young people who made short films, like me, award-winning short films, like me, starting to direct films and I couldn’t.”
Her husband was angry at the lack of opportunities, said Silver, and agreed to raise money for the film. He ended up funding, producing and distributing the low-budget indie, which Hester said was rejected by all major Hollywood studios as an “ethnic eccentricity”, but ended up earning a healthy $ 5 million at the box office and was nominated for Award Writers Guild of America. Silver again worked with her husband to produce and distribute her next feature film, Between the lines (1977); she finally collaborated with a major distributor, United Artists, on her third feature, Cold winter scenes (1979).
From 1988 Crossing Delancey once again saw her clashing head-on with the Hollywood system because of Jewish characters: Silver told the New York Times that the studios called the film “too ethnic”. Steven Spielberg, who at the time was married to the film’s star, Amy Irving, recommended that Silver send the script to a Warner Bros. executive. that he knew and the studio ended up distributing the film.
In addition to directing seven feature films throughout his career, Silver has directed titles for the theater, including 1992 A … My name is still Alice and 1982 Maybe I’m doing it wrong and a radio series for NPR, Great Jewish stories from Eastern Europe and beyond. For television, she directed the films How to be a perfect person in just three days (1983) and Point Hunger (2003), among others.
Silver leaves daughters Claudia, Dina and Marisa; his sister Renee; and five grandchildren.