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Cassavetes, John Carney 7 A Woman Under the Influence (1972–4) One of the distant sources of A Woman Under the Influence was Cas- savetes’ experience of ‘staying home with the baby’ for a couple years after the Stanley Kramer imbroglio. I know when I was not working, and Gena was working for me, I was a pretty good housewife and everything else. But I didn’t have really the same reactions as a woman would have. Mainly because I didn’t have to be a housewife the rest of my life. I didn’t have to think into the future of when I’d get older or when my attractiveness would fade, or when the kids would grow up or when the baby would cease to cling to you, and you’re not really a mother then, and you have to think, well, should I be the friend or should I be the mother? Another was his off-camera relationship with Gena Rowlands and questions he had about maintaining love in the face of differences of personality, temperament and background. Gena and I were speaking about the pictures we were going to make, how the roles are so thin and everything is made so a narrative can work. We were talking about how difficult love was and how tough it could be to make a love story about two people who were totally different cul- turally, coming from two different family groups that were diametrically opposed and yet still regarded each other very highly. I kept thinking about that. Gena and I are absolutely dissimilar in everything we think, do and feel. Beyond that, men and women are totally different. When I started writing the scripts, I kept these things in mind and didn’t want the love story easy. I made a lot of discoveries about my own life. As with Faces and Love Streams, A Woman Under the Influence began life as a stage-work, to feature Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara. Row- lands had requested a starring-vehicle, and Cassavetes accommodated 306 her by writing three interrelated plays to be performed on successive nights. The first was written in the summer of 1971, while he was still engaged with post-production on Minnie and Moskowitz; the second was written in September; the third was written in the winter; and all three were revised in the spring of 1972. In retelling the events, Cassavetes plays a little free and loose with the facts: first, by suggesting that the idea of doing three plays was merely a response to Rowlands’ objections, when in fact the three-part narrative was part of his initial vision of the work (with each play presenting the story from a different character’s point of view); second, by implying that he succeeded in obtaining financing for a Broadway production, when in fact, he was not able to. I absolutely wrote A Woman Under the Influence to try to write a ter- rific part for my wife. Gena wanted to do a play. She was always com- plaining we’re living in California, she loves the theater and everything. Gena really wanted to do a play on Broadway. And I had always fan- cied that I could write a play. She wanted something big. She said, ‘Now look, deal with it from a woman’s point of view. I mean deal with it so that I have a part in this thing!’ And I said, ‘OK,’ and I went off and had been thinking about it for a year anyway. And I had taken seven or eight tries at bad plays and came up with this play, which was not the play that the movie was, but it was based on the same characters. And Gena read it and said, no, she wouldn’t do it. And I’m very stubborn so I didn’t realize that she liked the part but that on the stage, to play that every night, would kill her. I had no concept of that because we’re all obsessed, everyone’s obsessed, that is, in this stupid thing. And so I wrote another play on the same subject with the same characters, deepening the characters and making it even more difficult to play. And I gave it to Gena and she said, ‘I like that tremendously. I like the first one too, but I don’t think I could do that on Broadway.’ So I wrote another play, and so now there were three plays! And I took them to New York and I got a producer to produce the plays on Broad- way and I thought it was a terrific idea to do these three plays on con- secutive nights with matinees, see? [Laughs.] And Gena’s not a particularly ambitious woman in the trade, as it goes. Although, if she sees a good part, she’ll kill herself for it, but I mean kill herself per- forming it, but not getting it. I mean, it’s either given to her, or she’ll play with the kids or do something else or go out. When Gena read the plays she said, ‘No one could do this every night!’ She feared they would take her to a sanitarium if she became that keyed up over a long 307 period of time! So then I said, well, all right, let’s try to make it a movie. Although narratively connected works have been presented on Broad- way a few times subsequently, at the time Cassavetes proposed it, his idea was rejected out of hand by every backer he approached as being commercially untenable. In March, he began thinking of recasting the three full-length plays as three one-acters to be performed in a single evening but was unable to get financial backing for that idea either. If the plays were to be made at all, they would have to be recast as a single film. In late July 1972, Cassavetes took ‘Play #1’ and added eleven pages of new material at the start and twenty-one pages at the end to create the first draft of the filmscript. (The manuscript shows its double origins: the bulk of the material in the middle is clearly written as a play, but the additions, with revision dates between 26 and 28 July 1972, have camera directions indicated on them.) The hybrid text begins quite similarly to the film but ends with Nick committing Mabel, taking the kids to the beach and returning home alone with them afterwards. In August, Cassavetes added material from ‘Play #2’ and ‘Play #3’ which presents Mabel’s return from the hospital and the events that comprise the final third of the film. This draft, which is very close to the final text of the film, is dated 23 August 1972. The decision to make a film didn’t solve Cassavetes’ financial prob- lems; it simply shifted them to a new arena. Though he later denied it in interviews, he did approach several studios for financing, but none would touch the project. Cassavetes was told not only that the narrative seemed too ‘down-beat’ and the confinement of the characters to a sin- gle set was ‘uncinematic’, but that his refusal to use a studio-approved union crew (not only for financial reasons but because of his experi- ences on Husbands and Minnie and Moskowitz) made support absolutely impossible. I can’t just go out and make what I want. I have to go through a whole big process of crap, talking to people and talking to people, proving to them that whatever we are going to do is going to make money. If I can prove it to them that my intentions are to make money, then they will let me make any film I want. But it becomes increasingly more difficult to tell them that since I’m not concerned with making money. You con people and you lie to them. You try to keep a little part of yourself when somebody says to you, ‘You figure it’s the greatest picture ever made?’ You try to keep a little part of yourself alive. So I went through all the 308 processes of calling people in Wisconsin and Idaho and, you know, big industrialists, and trying to find out how to raise the money. And we couldn’t raise anything, not anything! What made the situation even more difficult was that in the year Cas- savetes had devoted to attempting to get the plays financed, Ben Gaz- zara had become involved with another project and Cassavetes was now without a ‘bankable’ male lead. But it was his personality to forge full- speed ahead – even if he didn’t know exactly where he was headed. By early fall 1972, he had assembled a crew and told them the production would start on 1 November, though he had neither the money to make the film nor an actor for the lead at that point. (Cassavetes briefly con- sidered casting Val Avery in the Nick role, Elaine May in the Mama Longhetti part and Nick Dennis in a supporting role.) Peter Falk said he never knew whether what followed was an accident or a carefully calculated strategy on Cassavetes’ part. The two men had become close friends as a result of the Husbands publicity tour, and only a few months prior to this meeting Cassavetes had acted in the ‘Etude in Black’ episode of Columbo – turning in a superb performance which, in the final five minutes, transformed a routine ‘whodunit’ into a deep psychological study of a man undone by his embarrassment at being humiliated in front of his wife.
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