Smithereens: Breakfast at the Peppermint Lounge

Smithereens is “about a woman who is trying to reinvent herself,” Seidelman said when I spoke to her before a revival of the film in 2016. “She makes mistakes, she has some bad judgment in men, but she always bounces back.” Wren has the captivating ferocity of Baptiste in Jacques Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord, the near-delusional ambition of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She’s scrappy—streetwise and resilient. When shooting the final scene, Seidelman was consciously thinking of The 400 Blows: “I liked the ambiguity of, Does she get in the car? If she does get in the car, is it going to be bad or not?” she said. “But she has always been resilient . . . So I think if it was bad, she’d figure out a way to get out of it.” Reviewing Smithereens in the New York Times in 1982, Janet Maslin compared Wren and her fellow “punk screen heroines”—she might have been referring to Linda Manz’s Elvis-loving Cebe in Out of the Blue; Trini Alvarado and Robin Johnson’s teen runaways from Times Square; Diane Lane’s punk-band front woman in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains—to the “French movie waifs of yesteryear”: “They seem to wake, sleep, live, and breathe with an utter spontaneity bordering on recklessness, and to enjoy their freedom inordinately while it lasts.” When Seidelman cast Berman, she instructed her to watch Nights of Cabiria, the Fellini film about a prostitute in search of true love. 

What Wren seems to unconsciously desire more than love, though, is a kind of recognition mixed with a sense of belonging. Though she has friends scattered here and there, she is ultimately alone, and never more so than after she is locked out of her apartment and we see her walking endless blocks in the city with two shopping bags of the belongings her landlady tossed onto the street, trying to work up the nerve to call home to New Jersey for money. Love for her is transformed into a means of simple survival. “You wanna live here, you wanna move in, you wanna fuck me?” Eric demands of Wren when he comes home to find her waiting on his bed.

Early on in the filming, Berman broke her leg while rehearsing a scene on a fire escape, and Seidelman used the hiatus time to rework the story with screenwriter Ron Nyswaner. Eric, with whom Wren has an on-off relationship, was a downtown artist in the working script, but Seidelman decided he needed to be a musician. She’d heard of Hell and the Voidoids, who’d been the first band to play CBGB and whose best-known song, “Blank Generation,” was an anti-anthem of punk downtown New York. (That song, and several other Hell songs, are included on the film’s stellar soundtrack, alongside the Feelies and ESG.) Hell had come to New York from Kentucky in his own Wren-like way in 1966, still Richard Meyers: a poet and punk guitarist who safety-pinned his shirts before you could buy them that way. The rent for his first apartment, at Irving Place and Fourteenth Street, was twenty dollars a month, which he split with a roommate. “He was kind of arrogant and sexy and maybe a little scary—he just had all those qualities. That coyness,” Seidelman told me. His character in the film shares many of those qualities. Eric spritzes beer into his hair in lieu of cologne. He’s charming but blunt, callous but tender. Even after he kicks Wren out of the apartment where he’s crashing, he has a change of heart and chases her down the street to convince her to come back.

That fashion sensibility of Seidelman’s extends to the entire look of the film, which serves up the gritty romance of the idea of underground New York: the mini-televisions and mattresses and cereal boxes on the floor, the Feelies’ gloriously relentless guitar solos thrumming through the streets—but minus the true danger and darkness of that bankruptcy-crisis and high-crime era. “No matter how long you live here, if you originally came from somewhere else, there’s always this sense of living in a theatrical set,” Seidelman said. “So everything was kicked up a notch, everything was pushed a little bit, to make it a little more playful.” The West Side Highway lot where Paul parks his van, forlorn and covered in the rubble of the buildings that once stood nearby, has a slightly stagy, campy feel. Even the prostitutes who frequent it are sweethearts—gossipy guardian angels. (There’s a particularly wonderful cameo by Chris Noth—Mr. Big of Sex and the City—in drag.) One of them slides into the front seat of Paul’s van and shares her chicken-salad sandwich. “I got a scar. I’ll show it to you for five dollars,” she says, pleading for a chance to stay in the van to keep warm. “It’s in a real interesting place.” But he sends her back into the night, teetering on the rubble in her high-heeled boots.

Smithereens captures the strange wilderness feeling of the city at that time—having the run of those briefly deserted lots. “When I look at New York City now, that’s the part that no longer exists,” Seidelman said. Even Paul seems to sense the ephemerality of the situation; he decides to leave town just as Eric is angling for Los Angeles. Wren’s too broke to follow either of them, and it’s equally difficult to imagine her in LA and New Hampshire. “I can’t stand trees!” she tells Paul. Even if she could afford to leave New York, she’s tied to the city—and the possibility of self-reinvention it continually offers.

Smithereens, shot on 16 mm film for forty thousand dollars, surprised its director by earning a theatrical release. It was the first American independent film to be selected for competition at the Cannes Film Festival. “At that time, it was different,” Seidelman remembered. “There wasn’t a lot out there at the time to counter what Hollywood was doing.” She and her crew were so indie, in fact, that they hadn’t bothered to get permits for shooting. “I didn’t know you had to!” she said. “The good thing about being naive was that I had no filters. I had no idea until afterward what the movie business was like. There was a kind of purity to the experience that I never felt again.”