The Making of Ms. Right: Susan Seidelman and the Persistence of “Women’s Films”

Susan Seidelman began her career at a unique moment when independent film production in the United States flourished within prominent film festivals and the ascendancy of home video. Coming of age professionally in the 1980s, Seidelman experienced the benefits of 1970s Hollywood feminist reform efforts, when the number of women directing narrative features increased for the first time since the silent era. In 1982, Seidelman’s first feature, Smithereens, became the first independent American film to screen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and was picked up by New Line Cinema. In the early-1980s, Barbara Boyle, production executive at Orion Pictures who was actively trying to hire women directors, signed Seidelman to a three-picture deal. By the end of the decade, Seidelman had made four female-driven comedies with themes of duality and the search for self-identity manifested through femme-themed production and costume design. Drawing on archival material not yet assessed, this chapter argues that the tenets of Seidelman’s auteurism stayed consisted throughout her career while situating her body of work within her origins as a New York-based filmmaker making smaller-budget studio films with women protagonists during a time when depictions of 1980s feminism were popularized in mainstream cinema.