Article by Mark Asch for Filmmaker Magazine 4/8/2025
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, Silver worked 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.”)
Interview with Marya E. Gates for Roger Ebert
Adapted by Susan Sandler from her play, the film centers on independent bookstore manager Izzy (Amy Irving) who is happy in her carefree life, filled with many vibrant friendships, a situationship with a married man named Nick (John Bedford Lloyd), and a newfound crush on a self-centered novelist Anton Maes (Jeroen Krabbé). That is until, on one fateful trip downtown to visit her Bubbie Ida (Reizl Bozyk), she discovers her Bubbie has hired a matchmaker (Sylvia Miles), who subsequently sets her up with a successful pickle man named Sam (Peter Riegert). Initially hesitant to give into such an old-fashioned tradition, Izzy soon begins to question her own needs and desires as her attraction to Sam grows despite herself.
Susan, what was the most rewarding aspect of transforming your stage play into a screenplay?
Susan Sandler: I teach an adaptation course at NYU, and it’s about the difference between dramatic writing, where you’re dealing with all of the constraints of the theater and everything is about compression, and in film, which is so much about stepping outside and letting your characters walk out into the world. So I thought about every possible place I could bring each of these five central characters from the original play, grow their friend circles, grow their experiences in New York, and grow the sense of how the genre can support it most authentically. The key for me was thinking about everything authentic and true and not forcing rom-com genre tropes into the work, but looking around at the worlds—the literary world and the Lower East Side world—and then Izzy’s journey from Uptown to Downtown.
