Joan Micklin Silver Filmography

Born:: May 24, 1935 in Omaha, NE
Occupation:: Director, Screenwriter
Biography:: American director Joan Micklin Silver was educated at Sarah Lawrence College, then moved to New York for a job directing schoolroom films for the Learning Corporation of America and the Encyclopedia Brittanica. In 1972, she attained her first important screenplay credit with one of the earliest...Read More

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Hunger Point

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Obsessed with the belief that a slender figure is the most important thing on earth, domineering mother Marsha Hunter (Barbara Hershey) forces her two daughters Frannie (Christina Hendricks) and Shelly (Susan May Pratt) to adhere to rigid diets and exercise regimens. Any extra poundage is subject Read More

2003
Charms for the Easy Life

Crew: Director

Actors: Gena Rowlands, Mimi Rogers, Susan May Pratt, Geordie Johnson, Kenneth Mitchell

Synopsis: Charlie Kate Birch (Gena Rowlands) is a peculiarly powerful Southern matriarch, an anachronism in the early 20th century. She's a self-educated woman who makes a good living as a midwife and holistic healer. One day, she saves a black man who's been lynched, and he thanks her by giving her a Read More

2002
A Fish in the Bathtub

Crew: Director

Actors: Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, Mark Ruffalo

Synopsis: After four decades in show business, the husband and wife comedy team of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara finally make their big-screen debut together in this story about a marriage on its last legs. Sam (Stiller) and Molly (Meara) have been married for over 40 years. Their children are grown and Read More

1999
Invisible Child

Crew: Director

Actors: Rita Wilson

Synopsis: Writer Ron Bass and director Joan Micklin Silver combine their melodramatic tendencies for the Lifetime movie Invisible Child. The story involves a woman, Annie Beeman (Rita Wilson), who has somehow developed a mental condition where she believes she has an imaginary daughter named Maggie. Read More

1999
In the Presence of Mine Enemies

Crew: Director

Actors: Armin Mueller-Stahl, Elina Löwensohn, Don McKellar, Charles Dance, Chad Lowe

Synopsis: Rod Serling's sobering drama, originally shown on Playhouse 90, is re-made in this made-for-cable movie. The setting is the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, where Jews are either carted off to Nazi death camps or left to die in the disease-ridden squalor of the streets. Armin Mueller-Stahl stars as Rabbi Read More

1997
Big Girls Don't Cry... They Get Even

Crew: Director

Actors: Hillary Wolf, David Strathairn, Margaret Whitton, Griffin Dunne, Patricia Kalember

Synopsis: Joan Micklin Silver tries her mighty best to wring something substantial out of Frank Mugavero's banal sit-com screenplay concerning the effect of divorce on the divorced parents' off-spring. Hillary Wolf stars as Laura Chartoff, a lonely thirteen-year-old girl who is the victim of multiple Read More

5/8/92
A Private Matter

Crew: Director

Actors: Sissy Spacek, Aidan Quinn, Estelle Parsons, Sheila McCarthy, Leon Russom

Synopsis: When Sherri Finkbine (Sissy Spacek), the host of the Sixties children's television program Romper Room, learns that her unborn child has been damaged by her use of the drug thalidomide, she and her husband decide to abort the fetus, setting in motion the media controversy that is the subject of Joan Micklin Silver Read More

1992
Prison Stories: Women on the Inside

Crew: Director

Actors: Rae Dawn Chong, Lolita Davidovich, Talisa Soto

Synopsis: This made-for-cable women-in-prison film is an anthology collecting three short subjects. In the first, a pregnant inmate (Rae Dawn Chong) must seek protection from a gang; in the middle film, a prisoner tries to keep her family from following her lead into a life of crime; and in the closer, a Read More

1991
Loverboy

Crew: Director

Actors: Patrick Dempsey, Kate Jackson, Robert Ginty, Nancy Valen, Barbara Carrera, Kirstie Alley, Carrie Fisher

Synopsis: Joan Micklin Silver's farce stars Patrick Dempsey as a pizza delivery boy who begins satisfying the romantic needs of a group of bored Beverly Hills housewives. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide Read More

4/28/89
Crossing Delancey

Crew: Director

Actors: Amy Irving, Reizl Bozyk, Peter Riegert, Jeroen Krabbé, Sylvia Miles

Synopsis: Can an independent, contemporary woman find happiness with a guy who sells pickles? Isabelle Grossman (Amy Irving) is an attractive, intelligent Jewish woman in her early 30s. She has a good job and a nice apartment on the Upper West Side, and she values her independence; she often visits her Read More

8/24/88
50 Years of Action!

Actors: Stanley Ackerman, Woody Allen, John A. Alonzo, Warren Beatty

Synopsis: One of the few documentaries to shine a spotlight on directors in Hollywood, this informative film sketches out the 50-year history of the Directors Guild of America. Formed at a time when people were still fighting for unions in the United States, the guild also had its problems when the studios Read More

1986
Finnegan Begin Again

Crew: Director

Actors: Mary Tyler Moore, Robert Preston, Sylvia Sidney

Synopsis: Written by Walter Lockwood and directed by Joan Micklin Silver, Finnegan Begin Again is a whimsical comedy drama about a late-blooming romance. Robert Preston plays a Mike Finnegan, 65-year-old newspaperman resigned to wasting his time on a lonely hearts column and caring for his ailing Read More

1984
How to Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days

Crew: Director

Synopsis: A bravura performance from Wallace Shawn highlights the made-for-TV children's comedy How to Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days. Ilan Mitchell-Smith plays a woebegone grade schooler who can't seem to do anything right. Under the tutelage of wigged-out Dr. Silverfish (Shawn), Ilan takes a Read More

1984
Head Over Heels

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: John Heard, Mary Beth Hurt, Peter Riegert, Kenneth McMillan, Gloria Grahame

Synopsis: Joan Micklin Silver's writing and direction are at the heart of this wistful recollection of a romance, based on Ann Beattie's novel Chilly Scenes of Winter. The film concerns Charles (John Heard), who recalls his love affair with Laura (Mary Beth Hurt). It has been a year since Laura has left him Read More

1979
On the Yard

Crew: Producer

Actors: John Heard, Thomas G. Waites, Mike Kellin, Richard Bright, Joe Grifasi

Synopsis: In this melodramatic prison flick a convicted killer makes a bad impression on his fellow inmates after he causes trouble with the leader of the prisoners. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide Read More

1979
Between the Lines

Crew: Director

Actors: John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum, Jill Eikenberry, Bruno Kirby

Synopsis: Director Joan Micklin Silver's follow-up to her acclaimed debut, Hester Street, is a more ambitious film that manages to be both an entertaining comedy and a pointed look at the corrupting power of money on an idealistic enterprise. Writer Fred Barron's characters are all associated with a weekly Read More

1977
Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Crew: Director

Actors: Shelley Duvall, Henry Fonda, Polly Holliday, Gary Springer, Bud Cort, Lane Binkley, Veronica Cartwright, Dennis Christopher, Patrick Reynolds

Synopsis: Many observers consider the 60-minute Bernice Bobs Her Hair to be the best-ever filmed adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bernice (Shelley Duvall), a shy retiring girl of the Roaring 20s, yearns to be popular. On the advice of her flapper cousin Marjorie (Veronica Cartwright), Bernice cuts her Read More

1976
Hester Street

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Steven Keats, Carol Kane, Mel Howard, Dorrie Kavanaugh, Doris Roberts

Synopsis: Among the first releases in the new wave of independent films of the 1970s, writer/director Joan Micklin Silver's portrait of turn-of-the-century New York is also important for its unflinching portrait of women's issues. Russian Jewish immigrant Gitl (Carol Kane) joins her husband Jake (Steven Read More

1975
Limbo

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Michael Bersell, Ken Kornbluh, Laura Kornbluh, Kate Jackson, Katherine Justice, Stuart Margolin, Hazel Medina, Kathleen Nolan

Synopsis: Limbo was one of Hollywood's first big-studio films to concentrate on how Vietnam affected the families of the combatants. Kathleen Nolan, Kate Jackson and Katherine Justice play three service wives living at a Florida Air Force Base. Their husbands have all been called to active duty in Vietnam Read More

1972
Immigrant Experience: The Long, Long Journey

Crew: Director

1972