Seidelman Spices Mafia Comedy ‘Cookie’ With New York Reality

Maybe if she’d been shooting a war picture out there among the abandoned waterfront warehouses of Brooklyn, Susan Seidelman might have actually welcomed the commotion. But since “Cookie,” the Lorimar film she’d been directing almost entirely on location since the beginning of the year, is supposed to be a gangster comedy, the helicopter that was buzzing her set that afternoon wasn’t exactly appreciated.

Neither, for that matter, was the constant roar of jets taking off and landing at JFK airport or the two tugboats that earlier in the morning had drifted lethargically down the still, murky waters of the nearby Gowanus Canal and into the frame of her camera.

As any film maker who has ever worked in the city can attest, those are the kinds of annoyances you’ve got to expect when you turn your back on the sound stage and opt instead for the barely constrained anarchy of the streets of New York City. Even so, Seidelman, whose past work has included “Making Mr. Right” and “Desperately Seeking Susan,” looked strangely content--you might even say in her element--one recent afternoon as she stood on that desolate, rubble-strewn lot in the borough’s blue-collar Red Hook district.

Eyeing first a heap of crushed autos to her left, then a rusty, half-rotted dumpster to her right, Seidelman smiled. “You can’t art direct this kind of stuff,” she said proudly.

Write it off to a predilection for realism or simply to what she describes as her “affinity for junk,” but, by the time filming on “Cookie” wound up recently, Seidelman had schlepped her cast and crew to 50 similarly seedy sites in and around the city. Locations ran the gamut from a cell block at Sing Sing to a Little Italy “social club” supposedly frequented by genuine underworld figures to Coney Island, Chinatown and Atlantic City.

It’s all part of the peripatetic director’s efforts to bring to the screen a script penned by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, who were responsible for “Silkwood.” Set in and around New York, the film will tell the story of Cookie, the teen-aged illegitimate daughter of a recently paroled mobster, and the scheme she hatches to help him outwit his underworld adversaries.

Emily Lloyd, the 17-year-old British actress who won acclaim last year for her role in “Wish You Were Here,” plays the title character; Peter Falk is Cookie’s ex-con father, Dino, and Diane Wiest is her mother. Also appearing in the film are Brenda Vaccaro, Michael Gazzo, Adrian Pasdar and, in a brief role, Jerry Lewis as Dino’s old gangland pal.

But Seidelman seems well aware that if she doesn’t treat the material properly, her film could deteriorate into the kind of trite gangster romp that the director says has been “done a million times on TV.”

“The movie is a Mafia comedy, and that’s all it is if it’s just done in any kind of ordinary fashion,” agreed her producer, Laurence Mark. But what Seidelman has been able to bring to the project, he said, is “a certain flair and a certain theatricality that sort of sets it above the genre.”

That, apparently, is where the location shooting--keeping it “real,” as Seidelman put it--comes in.

“There’s something about New York,” Seidelman said that day while waiting to allow shooting to resume as the helicopter circled noisily overhead. “There’s just something you get that you can’t re-create on a stage or in Toronto or anyplace else that’s just in the air when you work here. The things that you find in the environment, the texture of the city, come through on the film.”

It’s not just locations that Seidelman is counting on to set her film apart from your garden-variety mobster flick. There’s also, among other things, the casting gamble she took in selecting Lloyd for the title role from among hundreds of other young girls who had tried out for the part. And this despite the fact that the British actress has only a single film role under her belt and a thick London accent that she had to trade in for an American one.

“Emily was for us, no question, the most exciting actress for the role,” said producer Mark. “The only concern was an obvious concern, and that is she’s British. It’s all well and good to say, ‘Sure I can do that.’ It’s quite another thing to actually pull it off.”

But on this day, amid the rubble of the Brooklyn warehouse set, Lloyd was doing just that as she sailed through one of the movie’s more dialogue-heavy scenes, in an accent that may be best described as “nondescript American.” Standing nearby and making sure it remained that way was Lloyd’s dialect coach, Timothy Monich, who has been on the set each day since shooting began, monitoring the young actress’s every word through a headset and suggesting subtle adjustments between takes.

“She’s doing incredibly well,” Monich said, moments after listening to Lloyd run through her lines in a scene opposite Falk and Pasdar.

Seidelman said it was the role currently being played by Lloyd, as well as the way in which the character gave the “gangster milieu” a female perspective, that intrigued her about the Arlen-Ephron script. “I probably wouldn’t have been interested,” she said, “if it had been told from Dino’s point of view.”

Given Seidelman’s interest in playing with a traditionally male-oriented genre and the fact that women have been so principally involved in the making of “Cookie,” it would seem that the film might easily qualify as a “woman’s movie.”

Seidelman, however, will hear none of that. “That’s sort of saying a movie like ‘Hope and Glory’ is a children’s movie,” she said, “simply because it involves young characters.”

In fact, what the director finds remarkable isn’t the amount of female involvement in her film but the fact that she has never worked with so many men before, nor with so many characters who are older than she.

“The fact that these aren’t characters I’m used to doing is probably giving (“Cookie”) a slightly offbeat perspective,” she said. “These aren’t stock characters for me.”

Seidelman pointed to a scene shot a few days earlier in Little Italy that involved the staging of an argument between gangster rivals played by Falk and Gazzo. “I thought, ‘I hope this isn’t going to come out like a bad TV show,’ ” she said. “But I was really surprised at how, when you look at each of the characters as full characters and you try to give them as much life as possible, it was actually interesting for me to stage that scene. I was real pleased with the way it turned out.”

She was looking equally satisfied that afternoon in Brooklyn as the cast and crew labored over a shot that, to an onlooker, anyway, looked simple enough. The camera, mounted on a V-shaped track in the center of the dirt lot, first followed Falk as he stalked out of the rear of the crumbling, two-story garage serving as Dino’s hide-out and then tracked Lloyd and Pasdar as they tried to wheedle Dino into entering a witness-protection program.

But as Seidelman would recall later, the shot, with its relatively sophisticated camera movement, wasn’t something the New York University film-school grad would have been able to pull off just six years before while shooting her first major feature, “Smithereens.”

“We didn’t have the facility to move the camera a lot,” she said, indicating that a tight $80,000 budget had prevented her from acquiring the proper equipment. “We didn’t even have a dolly.”

But will working with a larger production budget--one source placed the figure between $10 million and $15 million--mean that Seidelman’s trademark quirkiness and originality will eventually go the way of dolly-less film making?

“I can’t pretend this is independent film making,” she said. “It’s not. But I’d hate to find myself working in a movie where it feels like a factory, or suddenly you don’t know everybody’s name.”

From the way it looks, though, Seidelman is giving herself plenty of opportunities to learn those names. Late that afternoon, with dark gray storm clouds gathering over the set and heavy rains seemingly only minutes away, the crew had stopped the action momentarily to shove a rotted trailer a few feet to the right.

Seidelman snatched the headset from her ears and bounded across the lot to lend her shoulder to the effort.

Somehow, it couldn’t have seemed more natural.