Desperately Seeking Susan | 1985

Screwball romantic comedy with bored Roberta Glass (Rosanna Arquette) chasing up the cryptic personal ads of Susan (Madonna).

New Jersey coastal resort Atlantic City is the site of the hotel where Susan takes polaroids of herself.

Arriving in New York, she deposits her luggage at the world’s largest and busiest bus terminal, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, 8th Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets.

Glass lives over the Hudson River in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where her pricy-looking apartment overlooks the George Washington Bridge.

She reads Susan’s ad while at the hairdressers, Nubest Salon and Spa, 1482 Northern Boulevard, Manhasset on Long Island; spies on Susan’s tryst at Gangway 1, Battery Park on Manhattan’s southernmost tip, and subsequently follows her to the East Village.

The lively hippy-punk shopping street where Glass upsets the street stall is St Mark's Place, the stretch of 8th Street between Third Avenue and Tomkins Park Square, and buys Susan’s jacket at funky second-hand store Love Saves The Day, 119 2nd Avenue at East 7th Street. Opened on 7th Street in 1966, the store was at the 2nd Avenue location for over 20 years, until rising rents finally forced it out, to be replaced by Japanese restaurant Ramen & Robatayaki.

Gone for many more years is the old Bleecker Street Cinema, where Dez (Aidan Quinn) worked as a projectionist. It stood at 144 Bleecker Street between Thompson Street and La Guardia Place, Greenwich Village. Featured also in Woody Allen’s Crimes And Misdemeanors, it's now a video store.

Gone too is the dance club where Roberta’s husband gets to meet up with the real Susan, which was Danceteria, at 30 West 21st Street in the heart of Chelsea.

The New Jersey locations include Tenafly and Edgewater, northern New Jersey, north of New York, west of the Hudson; and Lakehurst, between New York and Atlantic City. There was more filming at Roslyn Heights, Nassau County, on Long Island.

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