When Madonna, then just barely famous, auditioned for the title role of 1985’s “Desperately Seeking Susan,” she made it clear to the film’s studio executive, Barbara Boyle, how badly she wanted the part.
“Madonna walked into Barbara’s office, fell on her knees, and said, ‘I’ll do anything to get this part,” the film’s director, Susan Seidelman, writes in her new memoir, “Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir about Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls,” (St. Martin’s Press, out June 18).
“Barbara responded: ‘Sorry, I’m heterosexual.’ And Madonna replied: ‘How do you know unless you try?’”
The role of Susan, the wild child foil to Rosanna Arquette’s buttoned-up housewife Roberta, was almost a fictionalized version of Madonna herself, then hitting the peak of her early popularity.
“Both Madonna and Susan used their powers of persuasion to get friends and lovers to do what they wanted,” Seidelman writes. “Both were charming con artists who didn’t let you know you were being conned. There was an art to seduction, and Madonna had mastered it.”
After Madonna was cast, she showed her mastery of this art throughout the film’s production, including while auditioning actors for the role of Susan’s punk musician boyfriend, Jim.
“Some of the auditions got pretty steamy,” Seidelman writes. “There was a dialogue scene that called for a kiss, and the next thing I knew the actors were down on the floor, making out. The casting directors and I watched with dropped jaws.”
During the eight-week shoot for “Desperately Seeking Susan,” Madonna jumped from aspiring singer to global sensation thanks to the impending release of her album “Like a Virgin,” and the film was a critical and commercial success.
But while Seidelman had a great experience working with the soon-to-be-superstar, she also understood the potential pitfalls of that relationship.
Offered the chance to direct the star’s flop follow-up, 1986’s “Shanghai Surprise,” a film that found Madonna co-starring with then-husband Sean Penn, she wisely turned it down.
“Both had strong personalities,” writes Seidelman, who went on to help movies such as “She-Devil” and “Making Mr. Right”, “and as a newlywed power duo, they would probably make their director quiver.”
