Joan Micklin Silver, Director of ‘Crossing Delancey,’ Dies at 85
She broke
barriers for women, directing seven feature films, including “Hester Street”
and “Between the Lines,” as well as TV movies.
New York Times
January 1, 2021
Joan Micklin Silver, the filmmaker whose first feature,
“Hester Street,” expanded the marketplace for American independent film and
broke barriers for women in directing, died on Thursday at her home in
Manhattan. She was 85.
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 low-budget 34-day location
shoot, that became a family project.
Studios said the story was too narrowly and historically ethnic. For one thing, much of the film, in black and white, was in Yiddish with English subtitles.
“Nobody wanted to release 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 16 to the synagogue market,” she added, referring to 16-millimeter film.
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 to some international markets while attending the Cannes
Film Festival. “Hester Street” opened at the Plaza Theater in Manhattan in
October 1975, then in theaters nationwide, and soon earned $5 million (about
$25 million today), almost 14 times its $370,000 budget. (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 during the filming, in 1973, was nominated for the best actress Oscar for her role as Gitl, the newly arrived wife who is, in the opinion of her husband (Steven Keats), humiliatingly slow to assimilate[TB1] .
Hester Street” made Ms. Silver’s reputation, but the next
time she wanted to depict 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 is constantly looking over her shoulder to be sure that she’s made a clean getaway from her Lower East Side roots.
SILVER, Joan Micklin (Joan Micklin)
Born: 5/24/1935, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.A.
Died: 12/31/2020, Manhattan, New York, U.S.A.
Joan Micklin Silver’s western – screenwriter:
The Frontier Experience - 1975
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