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Joan Micklin Silver, the director whose feature debut, “Hester Street,” expanded the American independent film market and broke barriers for women in filmmaking, died Thursday at her Manhattan home. She was 85 years old.
Her daughter Claudia Silver said the cause was vascular dementia.
Ms. Silver wrote and directed “Hester Street” (1975), the story of a young Jewish immigrant couple from Russia on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1890s. It was a personal effort, a shoot of 34 days on a low budget, which has become a family project.
The studios said the story was too narrowly and historically ethnic. For one thing, much of the film, black and white, was in Yiddish with English subtitles.
“Nobody wanted to publish it,” Ms. Silver recalled in a visual history interview for the Directors Guild of America in 2005. “The only offer was to release it on the 16th in the synagogue market,” she said. added, referring to 16 millimeters. movie.
Ms Silver’s husband, Raphael D. Silver, a commercial real estate developer, stepped in to finance, produce and even distribute the film after selling it in some international markets while attending the Cannes Film Festival. “Hester Street” first opened in Manhattan’s Plaza Theater in October 1975, then in theaters nationwide, and quickly earned $ 5 million (about $ 25 million today), nearly 14 times its budget. $ 370,000. (Ms. Silver sometimes cited an even lower budget figure: $ 320,000.)
Richard Eder of the New York Times praised the film’s “fine balance between realism and fable” and declared it “an unconditionally happy achievement.” Carol Kane, who was 21 when filmed in 1973, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress for her role as Gitl, the newly arrived woman who is, in her husband’s (Steven Keats) opinion, humiliating slowly to assimilate.
“Hester Street” made Ms. Silver’s reputation, but the next time she wanted to portray Jewish characters and culture, the same objections arose.
“Crossing Delancey” (1988) was a romantic comedy about a sophisticated, single New York bookstore employee (Amy Irving) who constantly looks over her shoulder to make sure she managed to get away from it all. its 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 neighborhood pickle merchant (Peter Riegert) who has enough qualities to make up for it. the fact that he was just another nice guy (his tastes were more in the bad boy’s way).
Studios also found the film “too ethnic” – “a euphemism,” Silver told The Times, “for Jewish material that Hollywood executives are wary of.”
Luckily, Ms. Irving’s husband at the time, director Steven Spielberg, himself loved Jewish history. He suggested that she send the screenplay to one of her neighbors in East Hampton, NY – a senior executive at Warner Entertainment. The film grossed over $ 116 million worldwide (around $ 255 million today).
It’s hard to say which was Ms. Silver’s most vicious antagonist, anti-Semitism or misogyny.
“Studio executives told me such blatantly sexist things when I started out,” she recalls in an interview with the American Film Institute in 1979. She quoted one man’s memorable comment: “Les feature films are very expensive to edit and distribute, and female directors are one more problem we don’t need.
Joan Micklin was born on May 24, 1935 in Omaha. She was the second of three daughters to Maurice David Micklin, who operated a lumber business he and his father had founded, and Doris (Shoshone) Micklin. Both of her parents were born in Russia – like the protagonists of “Hester Street” – and came to the United States when they were children.
Joan grew up in Omaha, then moved 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 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 it closer to cinema and theater contacts.
A chance meeting with Joan Ganz Cooney, the co-creator of Sesame Street, during a political fundraiser led her to work with Linda Gottlieb at the Learning Corporation of America. Together, they have written and produced short educational and documentary films, including “The Immigrant Experience” (1972).
Ms. Silver had a love-hate relationship with movie studios. She was one of many writers hired and fired by Paramount to adapt Lois Gould’s novel “Such Good Friends” (1971). Her first mainstream screenplay was “Limbo,” written with Ms. Gottlieb, about the wives of prisoners of war in Vietnam. Universal Studios bought the property but rewrote it and hired a director whose vision was the opposite of Ms. Silver’s.
She wasn’t going to let that happen with “Hester Street”. And she didn’t.
Ms. Silver’s second film, “Between the Lines” (1977), was also a kind of assimilation story. The young and politically progressive staff of an alternative newspaper are taken over by a company, which has radically different priorities and values. This film, whose ensemble 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 brooding bestseller “Chilly Scenes of Winter”, Ms. Silver worked with United Artists. The studio quickly changed the title to “Head Over Heels” (1979) and promoted the film as Light Madness. It starred Mr. Heard and Mary Beth Hurt as a loving sick civil servant and married colleague whom he adores a little too much.
After its bombardment, the film’s young producers insisted on restoring the original title, giving it a new, less perky ending, and having it reissued. This time it was received much more favorably.
Ms. Silver has ventured into the Off Broadway Theater with mixed results. Mel Gussow of The Times didn’t care about “Maybe I’m Doing It Wrong” (1982), his review with music by Randy Newman. But when Mrs. Silver and Julianne Boyd designed and directed the musical review “A… My Name Is Alice,” it had three runs in 1983 and 1984 and was pronounced “delicious” by Frank Rich of The Times. There were two sequels in the 1990s.
Ultimately, Ms. Silver directed seven feature films. The others, all comedies with relatively sparkling subjects, were “Loverboy” (1989), about a handsome young pizza delivery boy who gives extras to attractive older women; “Big Girls Don’t Cry… They Get Even” (1992), about divorced and remarried people reunited by a runaway teenage girl; and “A Fish in the Bathtub” (1999), with Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara as a couple with a pet carp.
Ms. Silver has also directed over half a dozen TV dramas, 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, Ms. Silver’s survivors include two other daughters, Dina and Marisa Silver; one sister, Renee; and five grandchildren. Mr. Silver died at age 83 in 2013 after a skiing accident in Park City, Utah.
Looking back in the Directors Guild interview, Ms. Silver said some well-defined work preferences.
“The longer I stay alone, the better I do,” she said. “It’s not that I think I’m smarter than anyone or anything like that. It’s just what my instincts are, it’s better for me to be able to bring them into play in my own work.
In the same interview, she was asked about “Crossing Delancey” and confessed to her favorite aspect of the experience: “I had the final cut.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
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