Joan Micklin Silver, the director of Hester Street, Crossing Delancey, and Big Girls Don’t Cry … They Get Even, died on Thursday, New Year’s Eve, at her home in New York City, according to reports. She was 85.
Silver, born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Omaha, Nebraska, started her career directing theater in Cleveland. In 1967, she and her husband, real estate developer Raphael (Ray) Silver, moved to New York City. She began collaborating with future Sesame Street creator Joan Ganz Cooney, and worked on documentaries and short subjects. A film called The Immigrant Experience eventually led to the unlikely success of her first feature, Hester Street.
Financed by her husband after other investors turned her down (and after she had already had rough experiences with studio interference on previously screenplays), Hester Street, released in 1975, was relentless in its independence. Based on Abraham Cahan’s novella “Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto,” it was shot in black and white, had no known stars, and was partially in Yiddish. And yet the tenement-set film was a resounding success, earning 14 times its budget and, perhaps more surprisingly, a best actress Oscar nomination for its star, Carol Kane, who was just 21 at the time of filming. (They had an advocate for the project in a former studio publicity head, Max Perkins, who personally drove film cans to celeb screenings held by Rosalind Russell and Frank Sinatra.)
Silver’s next project was a 45-minute television film, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, which starred Shelley Duvall, Veronica Cartwright, and Bud Cort. In 1977 she released Between The Lines, an ensemble film set at a Boston alt weekly newspaper in the final throes of its underground origins. Its powerhouse cast included John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum, Stephen Collins, Bruno Kirby, Marilu Henner, Michael J. Pollard, and Joe Morton, plus an appearance by Southside Johnny. As “death of the ’60s movies” go, it predates both The Big Chill and The Return of the Secaucus Seven. It is a fascinating movie with no hard plot or villains, yet focuses brilliantly on details, and never lets its male characters off easy (even the “good” ones) for their casual, oftentimes unaware sexism.
Her third feature, Head Over Heels (originally called Chilly Scenes of Winter) co-starring Heard, Mary Beth Hurt and Peter Riegert was recut by the studios with the focus of making it more lighthearted. Silver then made two television films, including the early HBO feature Finnegan Begin Again starring Mary Tyler Moore, Robert Preston, Sylvia Sidney, and Sam Waterston. Those who had cable as far back as 1985 can attest that this played on what felt like a constant loop.
Then, in 1988, and after a great deal of development struggle, came her triumph: Crossing Delancey.