Hester Street breaks many of the rules of low-budget filmmaking. It’s a period piece. It’s shot in black and white. And half the dialogue is in Yiddish.
However, as we know, rules are made to be broken. The late Joan Micklin Silver’s passion for the story Yekl, from Abrahma Cahan's novella, is evident in every frame of Hester Street, and her genius at casting (which would surface again in her next feature, Between The Lines), brought Carol Kane to national attention – and garnered her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
At what point were you in your career before Hester Street came along?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I had made some short films for an educational film company and had written a screenplay which was -- although much changed -- made in Hollywood. And I was looking for an opportunity to direct. I found that in that particular time -- we're talking about the early 70s -- the opportunities for women to direct were just nil, and while I could get work writing, I really wanted to be able to direct the work that I did.
How did you find Abraham Cahan’s novella and what attracted you to it?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: One of the films that I made for the educational film company was on immigration. I read just about everything I could find on immigration and one of the things that I read was the novella by Abraham Cahan called Yekl.
I was really floundering around and wanting very much to make my own films. My husband, Ray, who was a real estate developer, told me that if I could do a film that would not cost very much, that he would try to raise money from some of the investors that he'd been going to for real estate deals. And that was how we did it.
Frankly I didn't think I'd ever get to make another film. I was pretty discouraged about it all. My family were immigrants and I wanted to make a movie that would count for them.
Was the story in the public domain at that point?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Yes. And that was one of its attractions.
What challenges did you face in the adaptation?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Well, the story itself is more the husband's story. I think what grabbed me about it was what happened to the wife. So it was really just telling the story from the point of view that interested me. The challenge of it, of course, was to try to make it authentic.
I felt that because my father had told me so many stories about his life as an immigrant boy from Russia, I knew that language was a huge factor in getting along or not getting along. He told me stories of not quite knowing English and once leaving some money on a bus; he was a paperboy and he had made some collections and left the money by accident on the bus. He thinks people were trying to tell him and he didn't understand what they were saying. He got off the bus and then realized it -- things like that. Knowing the English language was extremely difficult.
And also both my parents were Yiddish speaking and I can remember dinners at our house with all sorts of relatives and wonderful stories being told and then punch lines coming out in Yiddish and my mother turning to us and saying, "You know, it doesn't quite translate." She would try to translate it, but never could quite do it. And I associated that language with something very rich and interesting and enjoyable.
Were you worried about breaking some of the cardinal rules of low-budget filmmaking: You don't do period pieces, you don't do something that's half in English and half in Yiddish?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I didn't know enough to know that I was breaking cardinal rules and that's the truth. I had to tell this story and I had to do what I could to tell it.
Was there anything in the adaptation that you really wished you could have included, but budget prevented it?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: There were many, many things. For example, just after we had made the movie, Godfather II came out. And in Godfather II there's a very long scene in Ellis Island in which there's an overhead traveling shot. The boy who will grow up to be Robert DeNiro is sitting on the bench and you see him in isolation, all by himself. It's just a stunning shot, and I remember that Ray and I saw it and were just pinching each other's arms in jealously.
When it came time to do Ellis Island, I had to do what I think just about all low-budget filmmakers do and that is that you make a part work for the whole. You have to ask yourself, "What’s the most important thing about this?" And I decided that it was the separation between the ones who were already there and the ones who had just arrived. Therefore, I thought if I could do some sort of a fence or something that would keep the two groups apart, that would help to say what I wanted to say.
I remember that the fence cost about $800, which was a huge portion of our budget. I think it worked -- it isn't re-creating Ellis Island, which if I'd had a chance, of course I would have done. Those were the sorts of things that we did all the time.
What was your process for making the adaptation?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I think I just read it more than a few times and then just thought about it. I like to do research and I was also looking though lots and lots of material. For instance, I went to the public library and there were a lot of files available about immigrant life in New York, with pictures. I went to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which had a lot of oral histories of immigrants.
There also happened to be an exhibition of Roman Vishniac photographs around that time and although his photographs were not of the period -- they were about Polish immigrants between the wars -- still the Shtel life I'm sure was pretty similar.
Did you use any of your family's immigrant experiences in writing the script?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Immigrants fall into two groups: the kind that want to talk about it all the time and the kind that never talk about it because it was traumatic and they really want to make the adjustment and be Americans.
My family was definitely the kind that talked about it all the time. I had heard so many stories about it all. I'd heard stories about people who came and people who left and people who went back and people who went crazy. I had a head full of all these sorts of stories, so I'm sure they fit into writing this screenplay.
Did the fact that you knew you wouldn't have much money to shoot this movie have any impact on you while you were writing the script?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Constantly. I was constantly thinking, for example, about how I could do Ellis Island, things like that. It was one thing after another, just constantly trying to figure out how I could tell the story without having a budget that would have allowed me to tell the full story, where you could recreate the Lower East Side, like they did in Godfather II.
We used one street, Morton Street, and we could only shoot in one direction, because that direction faced Bleecker, where the streets formed a "T," so that you only had to create the look on Morton up toward Bleecker.
If we faced the other way, it was Seventh Avenue and obviously we couldn't close Seventh Avenue, we didn't have that ability. In Godfather II, they had street after street, traveling shots that were gorgeous. So we just did what we could and everything was written and organized with that in mind.
My own experience in writing low-budget films is that you often have to do a part of something; a part has to stand for something larger.
Did you always plan to shoot in black and white?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: No, I don't think I thought about it at all. But when I started doing the research and saw these pictures, particularly the photos by Louis Hine and Jacob Reis and some of the anonymous pictures I found in the Jewish file at the public library, it just seemed to me that it might be a wonderful way to tell it. And I happen to like black and white.
Were you worried about the balance of English and Yiddish in the script?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I don't think I was thinking in those terms. I guess my own experience had been that actors have very good ears. I knew that even if the actors had to learn the Yiddish phonetically, they would do it.
I was writing this screenplay for me to direct and I didn't think that I would be hiring too many actors who already knew Yiddish. I thought I'd be lucky if I hired some, but I didn't think all of them would. In the end, I did have a few that did, but many didn't.
But that wasn't something that worried me, because my own experience with actors had been that they really have very good ears, they're terrific mimics. Actors can hear someone and mimic them the next moment.
What resources do you use to get feedback while you're writing?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: The feedback that I got was primarily from my husband. Usually you have to send the script to whoever the financial group is, but this was a group of investors that didn’t really need to see the screenplay. They were making small investments and it was not the sort of thing where they were going to be reading it.
I know I got lots of ideas when I started working with the actors. For instance, I think that two of my favorite lines in the script came from Doris Roberts, who plays the neighbor, Mrs. Kavarsky. These were expressions that her grandfather had said and she said to me, "Do you think these are good lines?" And I said, "Doris, they're fabulous. They're going right into the script."
One of them is, "You can't pee up my back and make me think it's rain," and the other one was, "With one tuchis you can't dance at two weddings." Old Yiddish expressions and they were wonderful and just perfect -- and, of course, she delivered them wonderfully.
Besides the addition of those lines, did the script change much once you started working with the actors?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I was quite open to changing it, but it didn't change as much as I thought it would, mainly because, with the Yiddish and the English and the period, the actors didn't feel really comfortable doing improvisations.
It did change somewhat when I was cutting it -- it followed the original story more closely. There was a longer section of the husband's life in New York before the wife came. When we did the rough cut, it was just clear that the real story started when the wife came and that the life of the husband could be established in fewer scenes.
Two scenes really stand out for me and I'm not sure how you would have described them when you wrote them. The first is when Jacob finds out that his father has died and he goes home and tries to pray. You really get a sense that this is a guy who hasn't done this in a while.
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Well, he hadn’t done it, so that part wasn't hard. The actor wasn't trying to unlearn something or trying to show that he didn't know how to do something that he really knew how to do. He didn't know how to do the prayers.
And then there's a scene with Gitl and the boarder, Bernstein. We're not sure where the relationship is headed and as they sit at the table he reaches over and touches her garment.
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: That came from the actor. She was talking about her husband and not knowing where to turn. She sat down at the table across from Bernstein and he tried to reassure her and cover for her husband, although you could tell that he felt very sorry for her.
We shot it a few times, and I just didn't feel like we had it; it needed something. It wasn't quite there. And I was sitting there, trying to think about what it was that would bring the scene more to life. At that moment the actor playing Bernstein reached over and touched her shawl. And I said, "That's it."
It needed something to show that he had feelings for her, and it came from him -- it was not in the script but came from the actor.
It just proves that you don't always need dialogue to show the relationship between characters.
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: That's very true. If you can get it that way, you've really got it. You get so many clues of people's behavior by watching them; we all do that, all the time. We do it with our politicians; it isn't just what they say, it’s how they are.
Did you have actors in mind while you were writing the screenplay?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: No. As a matter of fact, I was expecting to find someone who is like the Gitl in the story. She was described as dark and a little plump. So I thought I would find someone like that and that will be fine.
After I finished the script while Ray was raising the money for it, I saw a film with Carol Kane in it, a Canadian film called Wedding in White. I was just entranced by her, I just thought she had such a wonderful film presence. She had a certain Old World quality to her.
We had a casting director and I told him I'd seen this young woman, but she seemed to be Canadian, and obviously with our low budget we couldn't afford to bring anybody in and put them up. And he said that as a matter of fact she lived across Central Park and she was a New Yorker and there wouldn't be any problem. She was the first one that we hired.
Was it difficult to put aside, as a writer, your vision of Gitl when, as the director, you found someone completely different than you had imagined?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I think every writer/director does the same thing. You write to give yourself a blueprint for the film that you're going to make. Then you see what comes up and you try to leave yourself open to what the actors bring to it and what the weather brings and what the locations brings. You're happy because it isn't just you; everybody's taking this thing and adding to it, bringing more to it. And that was just fantastic.
In casting the Jacob character, I felt that I understood his problem and I understood what he was going through and I really like this character. But a number of the people who came and tried out wanted him to be more heroic and a little less harsh with her and a little less confused about his life. I had to reject those actors, because they didn't want to do the character as written, they wanted to do something else.
For Bernstein, the actor who was cast dropped out at the very last minute and I was quite stuck. It was one of the most devastating moments in the making of the film.
Ken Van Sickle, our cinematographer, said to me, "Well, what about Mel Howard?" And I said, "Mel Howard? Mel Howard came here for a crew job, he's not an actor." And Ken said, "Yes, but when he came you told me you liked the way he looked and you liked his eyes for Mr. Bernstein."
I didn't even remember that I'd even said that. So I said, "Bring him in," and he came in, and of course he'd grown up in a Jewish family and spoke perfect Yiddish. He took direction wonderfully and gave a wonderful performance.
How did you get the scenes that needed to be in Yiddish translated into Yiddish?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Michael Gorrin recorded the Yiddish for the actors and he did all the translations, except in those instances when the actor already knew Yiddish. The Rabbi, the guy who played the peddler, the man who played the scribe, they all spoke Yiddish and did their own translations.
What movies inspired you?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I loved so many movies. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and in Omaha at the time I was growing up there wasn't any television. It didn't come until I was in high school. So the amusement of the day was to get on the streetcar and go downtown and pay thirty-five cents and see a double feature. You paid thirty-five cents until you were twelve, but everybody was twelve until they were about fifteen.
I still have a wealth of movie images in my mind from that, but there are a couple of movies that I remember very distinctly from seeing them as a kid. One was Shadow of a Doubt. I can see why I was so attracted to it: It's about a girl whose trusted uncle turns out to be a killer. This was not a threat from outside; this is a threat from within the family circle.
I was very profoundly affected by that. I can remember in the scene where Joseph Cotton tries to push Teresa Wright out of the moving train, I can honestly remember still to this day how I felt: which theater it was, where I was sitting, where my mother was sitting, where my father was sitting. It was quite a strong childhood experience. I think I was only about seven or eight, but I really remember it to this day.
That has a certain power over you and makes you desire to re-create something like that.
What's the best advice that you've ever received about writing?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I don't think it's so much advice from another person. I think it's just the experience of looking at films.
When I first started working in film -- this was pre-video -- we used to go to the Museum of Modern Art and sit in the basement and see films. I would say that was the thing that taught me the most, to see the great films and then to try to study the screenplays. Oftentimes those screenplays were available and I could buy them and study them and try to figure out why they worked. I think that was the kind of advice that was the best for me.
Did you learn anything while writing Hester Street that you took to future projects?
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: You know, I think each one is so different. Certain things become a little bit easier, perhaps, but each one is so different and each one has such different requirements.
I don't know how much one really teaches you for the next. Maybe it gives you confidence to think, "I did it before, maybe I can do it again." But I think each time you're walking off a cliff.
Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!
"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control."
Roger Corman, Producer
★★★★★
It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!
Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos
John Sayles: Writing to your resources
Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes
John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots
Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals
George Romero: Casting
Kevin Smith: Skipping film school
Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection
Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity
David Lynch: Kill your darlings
Ron Howard: Pre-production planning
John Carpenter: Going low-tech
Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking
And more!
Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!
It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!
Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.
"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond
John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.
The book covers (among other topics):
Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories
Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature
Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period
George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget
Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories
Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations
Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive
Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous
Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget
Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget
Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror
Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget
Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting
L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting
Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing
Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres
This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced!