John Cassavetes

Cassavetes on Cassavetes Ray Carney is Professor of Film and American Studies and Director of the undergraduate and graduate Film Studies programs at Boston Uni- versity. He is the author or editor of more than ten books, including the critically acclaimed John Cassavetes: The Adventure of Insecurity; The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World; The Films of John Cas- savetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies; American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra; Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer; American Dreaming; and the BFI monograph on Cas- savetes’ Shadows. He is an acknowledged expert on William James and pragmatic philosophy, having contributed major essays on pragmatist aesthetics to Morris Dickstein’s The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture and Townsend Ludington’s A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States. He co- curated the Beat Culture and the New America show for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, is General Editor of the Cam- bridge Film Classics series, and is a frequent speaker at film festivals around the world. He is regarded as one of the world’s leading authori- ties on independent film and American art and culture, and has a web site with more information at www.Cassavetes.com. in the same series woody allen on woody allen edited by Stig Björkman almodóvar on almodóvar edited by Frédéric Strauss burton on burton edited by Mark Salisbury cronenberg on cronenberg edited by Chris Rodley de toth on de toth edited by Anthony Slide fellini on fellini edited by Costanzo Costantini gilliam on gilliam edited by Ian Christie hawks on hawks edited by Joseph McBride hitchcock on hitchcock edited by Sidney Gottlieb kies´lowski on kies´lowski edited by Danusia Stok levinson on levinson edited by David Thompson loach on loach edited by Graham Fuller lynch on lynch edited by Chris Rodley malle on malle edited by Philip French potter on potter edited by Graham Fuller sayles on sayles edited by Gavin Smith schrader on schrader edited by Kevin Jackson scorsese on scorsese edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie sirk on sirk conversations with Jon Halliday Cassavetes on Cassavetes edited by Ray Carney First published in 2001 by Faber and Faber Limited 3 Queen Square London wc1n 3au Published in the United States by Faber and Faber Inc. an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC, New York Photoset by Faber and Faber Ltd Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc All rights reserved © Ray Carney, 2001 Ray Carney is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a sim- ilar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 0–571–20157–1 24681097531 Contents Introduction: A Life in Art page ix 1 Beginnings (1929–56) 1 2 Shadows and Johnny Staccato (1957–9) 48 3 Too Late Blues and A Child Is Waiting (1960–62) 102 4 Faces (1963–8) 129 5 Husbands (1969–70) 202 6 Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) 269 7 A Woman Under the Influence (1972–4) 306 8 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1975) 379 9 Opening Night (1976–7) 406 10 Gloria (1978–80) 439 11 Love Streams (1981–4) 455 12 The Final Years (1985–9) 501 Acknowledgments 515 I have such admiration for people who can recount their lives in autobiography, because the connections are so complicated. I would never be able to straighten it out. John Cassavetes Introduction: A Life in Art This is the autobiography John Cassavetes never lived to write. In his own words Cassavetes tells the story of his life as he lived it, day by day, year by year. He begins with his family and childhood experiences, talks about being a high-school student, college dropout and drama-school student. He describes the years he spent pounding the pavement in New York as a young, unemployed actor unable to get a job – or even an agent. Then he takes us behind the scenes to let us sit in on the planning, rehearsing, shooting and editing of each of his films – from Shadows, Faces and Husbands to Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night, Gloria and Love Streams. He describes the struggle to get them made, and the even greater battle to get many of them into movie theaters. He talks about the reaction of audiences and reviewers to his work, and responds to criticisms of it. The tale is a personal, passionate one: of dreams, struggles, triumphs, setbacks and frustrations; of hair-raising financial gambles, crazy artistic risk-taking and midnight visions of glory. But it is also the story of an artistic movement that extended beyond Cassavetes and defined an era in film history. Between the lines, as it were, these pages chronicle the history of one of the most important artistic movements of the past fifty years – the birth and development of American independent film- making, and the response to it by critics and reviewers. Cassavetes pioneered a new conception of what film can be and do. His vision was of film as a personal exploration of the meaning of his life and the lives of the people around him. It was a way of asking deep, probing questions about the world in which he lived, and of asking others to question and explore their own experiences. The pages that follow trace the cultural trajectory of that idea, and the wildly opposed responses it elicited: the incredible energy and excitement it engendered among certain artists, critics and viewers; and the fierce resistance it met ix with from uncomprehending studio heads, producers, distributors, reviewers and audiences fighting to hold on to their notion of the movies as ‘story-telling’ or ‘entertainment’. In fact, the battle is far from over; it continues today. Since this is the first time Cassavetes’ life story has been told, very few of the following facts have been known outside of the circle of his inti- mate friends and family. Many facets of the story (from Cassavetes playing ‘chicken’ on the Port Washington sand-pit cliffs during his teens, to his feelings of oppression at the narrowness and conformity of American culture when he was in high school, to his playwriting and repertory theater work in the final decade of his life) will be unfamiliar even to someone who has read all of the standard journalistic biogra- phies. Most of the events are appearing in print for the first time. To verify the facts, I tracked down the actual participants to the events whenever I possibly could. I conducted scores of interviews – with Cas- savetes in the final years of his life and with dozens of actors, crew members and friends who worked with him over the years, including Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, Elaine May, Lelia Goldoni, Sam Shaw, Larry Shaw, Hugh Hurd, George O’Halloran, Al Ruban, Maurice McEndree, Ted Allan, Lynn Carlin, Tim Carey, Erich Kollmar, Michael Ferris, Meta Shaw, Jonas Mekas, Amos Vogel, and many others. (Many of the interviews took the form of panel discussions or post-screening question-and-answer sessions I organized and moderated at film festivals.) Over the time it took to complete the project, the original interviews were supplemented with hundreds of hours of follow-up telephone conversations, e-mails and handwritten notes, memoirs and recollections provided by these figures and others, which were incorpo- rated into the narrative. My hope is that this will be a book with surprises and discoveries on nearly every page, even for someone who may already be a Cassavetes ‘buff’. I have written four books and dozens of essays and program notes about the films, and yet was astonished to discover something new about Cassavetes’ life or work almost every single day I worked on this project. Many of the facts I uncovered turned the common wisdom about his life, the accepted truths about how the movies were made, upside down and inside out. One of the most striking things that emerged for me personally was the realization of the degree to which Cassavetes’ films were quarried from his most private feelings and experiences – far beyond what I had imagined when I began. Cassavetes is in his films, and his feelings about life are in characters like Shadows’ Ben, Faces’ Richard, Minnie and x Moskowitz’s Seymour, A Woman Under the Influence’s Mabel, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie’s Cosmo and Love Streams’ Robert – to an extent that stunned me when I ultimately grasped it. I hope that one of the functions of this book will be to help us understand Cassavetes’ work, and the work of artistic creation in general, in new ways. We need to rethink the films in the light of the secrets Cassavetes reveals in these pages. Cassavetes was a legendary talker. He talked about his work to virtu- ally anyone who would listen: in conversations with actors and crew members on the sets of the films; in introductions preceding screenings and question-and-answer sessions following them; in discussions of his work with friends and with me; in formal interviews with journalists.

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