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From the Jewish Repertory Theater to the Movies: Screenwriter Susan Sandler on Crossing Delancey
Reizl Bozyk, Amy Irving and Sylvia Miles in Crossing Delancey (courtesy of the Criterion Collection) When Joan Micklin Silver died on the last day of 2020, cinephiles mourned the passing of a major American filmmaker, a status to which she may have begun to ascend in late 2014, when IFC Center presented a 35mm screening of her third feature Chilly Scenes of Winter with its original title and the director’s preferred ending—the first time in perhaps a decade that the film had resurfaced in New York’s repertory scene. At that time, Vadim Rizov spoke to Silver, then in her late 70s, about her struggles to break into the film industry (“‘At that point in time, women directors just didn’t get jobs. I remember going to see one producer from one of the studios, and he said to me, ‘Feature films are expensive to make and expensive to market and women directors are one more problem we don’t need’”) and Hollywood’s mystification at a film now regarded as a deft adaptation of an ambivalent generational portrait.
Crossing Delancey, her most commercially successful film, grew from Susan Sandler’s play of the same name, which ran in 1985 at the Jewish Repertory Theater; having seen and admired it, Silverworked with Sandler to develop a screenplay which multiple studios passed on. As Silver told Graham Carter in 2018, she saw Amy Irving “scarfing popcorn” at a theater and immediately imagined her as Crossing Delancey’s Izzy; Irving’s then-husband, Steven Spielberg, admired the script and brought it to the attention of Warner Brothers. (Silver: “He said, ‘Well, how would you feel if I went to Warner Brothers?’ I said I would be just delighted. We finished our meal and Amy said ‘I guess we’ll make it at Warner Brothers.’ I said, ‘Amy, we don’t know that—he hasn’t even said anything yet!’ But she of course knew that if he wanted it to happen, it would happen.”)
The film in the headline of Silver’s New York Times obituary, Crossing Delancey is part of the Criterion Collection as of last month, following Chilly Scenes of Winter. It’s a fitting capstone to her canonization, showcasing Silver’s unshowy, story-forward style, which is harder to take for granted than it used to be, in a commercial, woman-centered genre which is harder to dismiss than it used to be; her delicacy with character and milieu; and her gifts as a collaborator. Crossing Delancey began as a personal play for Sandler, who drew on her own closeness with her grandmother, a Jewish Lower East Sider who represented a living link to the neighborhood’s history as a working-class, Yiddish-speaking immigrant enclave.
That relationship is represented in the film’s relationship between Irving’s Izzy and her bubbe (Yiddish stage star Reizl Bozyk), who still lives south of Delancey Street; Izzy lives on the Upper West Side, where she works in a bookstore and has eyes for the European author (Jeroen Krabbé) who reads sexy, poetic literary fiction there. Her bubbe sets her up with a matchmaker (local legend Sylvia Miles at her broadest), and the matchmaker sets her up with Sam Posner (Peter Riegert), the pickle man who runs his father’s old stand. The film used Gus’s Pickles on Essex Street, one of the film’s only still-extant locations.
Silver wrote her first feature, Hester Street, funded independently by her husband and producer Raphael, and took inspiration from the lives of her parents, Russian Jews who emigrated to America; she made her most personal film first, she always said, because she wasn’t sure she’d ever make another one. In a primarily Yiddish-language performance, Carol Kane stars as a young wife, newly arrived from the shtetl, facing an immigrant’s agonizing decisions around adjustment and reinvention in a new country on the cusp of a new century. Set 92 years and a few blocks apart, Hester Street and Crossing Delancey, watched back to back, evoke a single journey, and the competing demands of tradition, assimilation and aspiration across multiple generations. The film is is filled with thumbnail sketches of a cross-section of New York City: the then-hip “Cal-Mex” restaurant Lucy’s, single women grabbing dinner for one at the corner deli’s hot-cold salad bar, elderly women dry-firing mace at self-defense class. (The alternative-newspaper ensemble piece Between the Lines and Ann Beattie adaptation Chilly Scenes make another, more side-by-side diptych as portraits of the long, sour echo of the ’60s counterculture.) Throughout a career compromised by a system unwilling or unable to recognize her voice and talents, Silver nevertheless created an enduring oeuvre of deceptively lighthearted films about characters making real, adult decisions about how much they owe to the past.
Sandler, Irving and Riegert are justifiably proud of the part they played in making a masterpiece, and all three seemed happy to talk to me about Crossing Delancey on the occasion of the Criterion release, in separate conversations which Filmmaker will publish across three days this week. Click here to read my conversation with Irving.
Filmmaker: I’m curious about your collaboration with Joan Micklin Silver on the screenplay, specifically the process of opening up a five-character play into this film. I don’t know much about the Jewish Repertory Theater that was on East 14th Street, at the 14th St Y. What kind of place was that? How did you find yourself involved there?
Sandler: I was invited among a number of really talented writers in the playwrights group [including future Pulitzer winner Donald Margulies]. It was funded, it had a season, it had a built-in audience and an integrity that looked at stories that would speak to the Jewish experience without any restrictions. At some point, at the intermission there was a certain Jewish food stand in the lobby. It was pretty haimish, a very supportive environment that flourished for a couple of years, maybe five or six seasons.
Filmmaker: Though the material is opened up on screen, it retains the dichotomous structure of uptown and downtown, secular and Jewish, career and family. One of the supplements on the Criterion disc has a still of the stage set, with what looks like the bookstore stage right, Bubbe’s kitchen stage left.
Sandler: The limitations of small theaters are very specific. You create areas and lighting takes you there; sometimes you can revolve. The center of the stage became a restaurant, a park bench, a space for phone conversations. So, those were the islands, and we had a beautiful score that supported that movement. It was very filmic in the way it moved between those scenes, very fluid beat-to-beat, and that replicates the rhythm of the film in many ways, as I built out more of Izzy’s and Bubbe’s world without the restrictions of a theater.
Filmmaker: What did you and Silver talk about when the film was being developed, and what was her input into the material? I’ve heard it was six drafts over the course of a couple of years.
Sandler: I think Joan exaggerated a little. She came to see the play, loved it and we started meeting and chatting about how it could grow. With anything from theater to film, the idea is opening up the world, more constellations of characters. Joan observed that anything I wanted to do to grow that world, in terms of Izzy’s constellation and Bubbe’s constellation and the dynamic of downtown/uptown, [would be welcome]. The process was populating that world and using, very specifically, people and events that I observed in my own life—my single mom friend’s bris, my gym life and what I observed in the sauna, all the characters who grew in the bookstore. Each of the settings promised more and more. In Sam’s world, everything that could grow around him, the regulars at the pickle stand; in Bubbe’s world, the benchnicks. So, [we were] figuring out how all these characters could find complications that would grow the story.
I brought pages, we went to screenings and chatted and had meals—it was a very organic, social process. The notes that I got were really encouraging. I didn’t receive notes from Joan that were in any way, “Don’t go there.” It was very much, “Can I make you another cup of tea?” It felt more like, I would say, four and a half drafts. There are scenes I wish had survived, one that my dad was in. We cast these butchers around my dad, which was kind of wonderful. I’ve got that footage, which I love, but sadly that didn’t make it into the film.
A deleted scene from the Crossing Delancey screenplay, courtesy of Susan Sandler.
Filmmaker: It feels very stenographic, like a metropolitan diary of everything that was accumulating around you over the years.
Sandler: Joan was an East Sider, did not know the West Side and didn’t really know the Lower East Side. I took the entire tour with everyone who was looking at potential locations. I really did the scout. We went to my Bubbe’s building. Amy met my uncle, who lived with my bubbe. Reizl lived right across the street, in one of those tenements that were not tenements, but [were] created for the garment union workers to leave the tenements for. All of those buildings right along the river have become a little chic now.
Filmmaker: It says on IMDb that the interior location for Bubbe’s apartment is 154 Broome, which is a New York City Housing Authority tower, but the entrance in an exterior shot is 413 Grand, which is in the Seward Park development, one of the limited-equity co-ops built by the garment workers’ union. Can you speak at all to the decision of shooting in public housing at that time?
Sandler: I think Joan was after that view of the Williamsburg Bridge. The interiors of the hallways were kind of grim, actually.
Filmmaker: Yeah, Bubbe would live in Seward Park, not public housing.
Sandler: My Bubbe lived [in the Seward Park buildings] with my uncle, who brought her there—he was a garment worker, and I remember him saying how remarkable it was to go into this building and into a bathroom where they were the first people to use it, the freshness and beauty of it. A lot of union people were in that building. It wasn’t fancy, just very clean and modern.
Filmmaker: To return to the world of the bookstore, I’m curious if the public-access television host who has a day job in the bookstore—played by Claudia Silver, the director’s daughter—is based on your experience.
Sandler: Yeah, I had lots of jobs. I was a store detective at Bloomingdale’s so that I could leave to go to meetings. It was really good to be able to slip out and do that. I was a failed cocktail waitress. I wasn’t successful at day jobs. I didn’t have a bookstore day job, but the bookstore was inspired by the New Yorker bookstore, which was in my neighborhood, started by a friend who had started City Lights with Ferlinghetti. It had a really cool practice room with jazz musicians practicing upstairs. I was very committed to the authenticity of the locations. Because of the logistics, the bookstore was recreated in Hoboken, but the inspiration was the New Yorker. It was very, very cool. I didn’t work there, but I practically lived there.
Filmmaker: I love the scene at the bookstore where the older author, played by Rosemary Harris, comes in for the sort of party that’s arranged for her so that she can meet young people. That’s the thing about being a great artist: you get too famous to know anybody anymore, and then it turns out that you’re lonely.
Sandler: That scene has a lot of layers. The original idea was [to cast] Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Steven Spielberg stepped up to say he would pay whatever was necessary to get Singer there, so Joan asked me to write him. I still have that letter that I wrote to Singer, who was in Switzerland at the time. That didn’t happen, so there was idea after idea for writers I was trying to seduce to be themselves in that scene. Finally, amazing Rosemary Harris was able to deliver that wonderful performance of someone holding court in that setting, and I pulled out some of my old poetry for her to read. But Singer was the dream.
Filmmaker: I like the moment that remains of that, when Izzy is trying to convince her bubbe that she’s doing well at work, and name-drops Singer because he’s the one author whose name will impress her. In thinking a little bit about Izzy and her work—she doesn’t seem to aspire to be a writer, which is interesting, and something I really respond to. She seems excited by being in the milieu but maybe hasn’t maybe figured out where she fits in it, and that’s an interesting element that speaks to ideas about assimilation and art-making and class.
Sandler: Izzy thinks of herself in that world as being a mover and shaker. She’s making stuff happen; that salon she feels is her baby. Maybe the next step would be a magazine that she would develop. I think that’s where she lives: putting people together, making stuff happen.
