Wren, the film’s punk heroine who wants to be a star. She works at a Xerox store.
If you live in New York, it’s supposed to rain this weekend. We suggest that you take this opportunity to watch Susan Siedelman’s indie classic Smithereens, which is streaming for free on Dailymotion. When we interviewed Siedelman about Smithereens back in June, she explained how it led to her breakthrough picture, Desperately Seeking Susan.
After it came out it got some attention because it was at the Cannes Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by New Line Cinema — again something I never expected. I started to get calls from agents out in LA who had seen the film and wanted to meet me. I also started to get a bunch of scripts, most of which were pretty terrible. But then I got this one script that had the title Desperately Seeking Susan. I didn’t put my name on that. [laughs] I thought that was a good omen, that it was desperately seeking me. I read it. Not only did I love the story and the characters, but it felt like it was the next organic step from making Smithereens, which was about the East Village punk/new wave culture of that time. Desperately Seeking Susan is a very different kind of story, but it is sort of based in that culture.
Read Janet Maslin’s New York Times review of the film, and watch the Smithereens trailer below.