Desperately Seeking Something

The funny, first-person story of the trailblazing director of the 80s/90s indie-movie era, whose Cannes award-winner "Smithereens" and smash hit "Desperately Seeking Susan" led to a life in film

>She was in the right place at the right time: what was essentially a version of her student film project became the first American independent movie to be accepted at the Cannes Film Festival. From there, her career was off like a rocket: her second movie starred a cusping Madonna and became a cult mainstream hit.

Seidelman is a terrific and funny writer. She punctuates Desperately Seeking Something with photographs that are visual punchlines to jokes she's set up in prose. She has perspective on the times she's lived through (from that Ozzie-and-Harriet girlhood right through the Vietnam era, the "greed is good" '80s, to the dot-com 90s and beyond), and tells great stories.