John Cassavetes - Five Films Criterion Box

Chicago Reader, 2004?

Few people forget their first Cassavetes film. They confuse, they confound, they take viewers to the brink of patience and then ten paces beyond, but even those who don’t like the films one bit can find their effects difficult to shake off. Oftentimes innovations are so thoroughly absorbed into the common language of an art that their contributions become invisible, relegating the original work that first presented them to the level of novelty, but Cassavetes’ body of work has achieved near-mythic status for both viewers and aspiring movie makers. Recently the Criterion Collection released a lavish eight-disc boxed set of DVDs entitled “John Cassavetes: Five Films,” and these self-financed features - Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under The Influence, and Opening Night - produced between 1959 and 1977 without studio backing or distribution, represent something of a Rosetta Stone of “Independent” filmmaking.

Lately the term has been abused beyond recognition, neutered from opportunistic use as a marketing concept by fake Indie boutique distributors like “Warner Independent Pictures” (an oxymoron if these ever was one) who cynically trade on the term as a signifier of “integrity.” Though it should go without saying, true independence means doing it yourself, and in Cassavetes’ case that meant not only writing and shooting himself but also financing and distributing with significant sums of his own money. Nowadays that may be commonplace, but Cassavetes made a practice of it when it was virtually unheard of, especially for an established TV and movie star.

He didn’t set out to make a career of being a maverick. He got his start as an actor, making his name first in the TV show Johnny Staccato, about a jazz musician moonlighting as a detective (or was that the other way around?). That eventually led to high-profile roles in mainstream films, but the work wasn’t satisfying. Years earlier, upon learning that his son wanted to become an actor, Cassavetes’ father informed him that acting was a serious responsibility: “That’s a very noble thing to do. You are going to be representing the lives of human beings. You will speak for all the people who have no voice.”

Cassavetes took the admonition to heart, becoming interested in a kind of drama that did anything but flatter an audience’s existing beliefs and preconceptions. He was frustrated by the artistic restrictions of television, so in 1956 he and Fred Lane formed the Cassavetes-Lane Drama Workshop, a studio created to provide an outlet for edgy work by actors unable to find expression elsewhere. Shadows originally grew out of a series of improvisations based on the workshop members’ actual experiences, and over a period of months a story evolved centering around an interracial relationship within intersecting groups of Lower East Side artists, musicians and slackers.

The emotionally-charged work had a blunt honesty and youthful directness that Cassavetes was anxious to capture on film, and he used every opportunity to scare up funds for the project. In February of 1957 the actor appeared on Jean Shepherd’s “Night People” radio program during a promotional tour for his role in the movie Edge of the City, and in a fit of hubris talked up the nascent film, proclaiming that “If people really want to see a movie about people, they should just contribute money.” The plea worked, and over the next few days over $2500 flooded in, some of it delivered by hand.

After an arduous production process, the first version of “Shadows” finally premiered in November of 1958 and by nearly all accounts was a technical, artistic, and popular disaster. Despite a dissenting opinion by avant-garde maven Jonas Mekas, who gave the film the first “Independent Film Award” on behalf of Film Culture magazine, Cassavetes disowned the cut saying: “It was a totally intellectual film – and therefore less than human.” The director felt he’d over-emphasized technique and “experimentation for its own sake,” re-shooting much of the film to put the focus back on the raw emotion that would become his trademark.

Despite the absurd claim on the actual package of Five Films that Cassavetes was “an audience’s director,” he wanted to challenge and provoke emotional responses he felt were being socially conditioned out of people, proclaiming that most Americans become emotionally dead by the time they reach twenty-one. In its final form Shadows is a perfect example of form following function, the explosive, unvarnished emotions of its callow characters and their clumsy stabs at adult relationships mirrored by the filmmakers’ inexperience at their craft. In less focused hands the results could have been strident or preachy, but even in his first effort Cassavetes demonstrated a deep compassion that imbued even the most unsympathetic characters with dignity and humanity. Today the story’s plot elements of miscegenation are as shocking as a story about busing, but the emotional truths expressed underneath are as contemporary and timeless as they are awkward and uncomfortable. Take for example young lovers Lelia and Tony’s first sobering attempts at lovemaking. A stereotypical pillow talk scene might be all kisses and cuddling; in Shadows, Lelia’s first words after her inaugural sexual experience are “I didn’t know it could be so awful.”

Though it was hardly a commercial smash, Shadows garnered enough positive critical attention that Cassavetes was offered first of two brief stints with major studios, but in each case he found the restrictions too confining. His next feature, Too Late Blues was an attempt to dramatize his feelings about the perils of “selling out” artistically, but he still understood too little about both the art and the business of filmmaking to make a coherent statement. By the time he directed 1962’s A Child Is Waiting Cassavetes felt he’d learned his lessons about taking a stand on both counts; but even if he was right, the result was a bitter battle with producer Stanley Kramer that ended in fisticuffs, resulting in Cassavetes essentially being blackballed from Hollywood. Both he and the system had found they didn’t particularly want each other.

It’s unlikely that any real love was lost. Not long into his career Cassavetes became disillusioned with the standard way of making pictures, decreeing that Hollywood had failed to produce work of real depth that tackled, as he called it, “the human problem.” So in retreat and licking his wounds, Cassavetes took the opportunity of being unemployable to spend a couple years working on the script for Faces. Expanding on the emotional palette created for Shadows, Faces dug into his characters’ inner lives with freshly sharpened teeth. Though in the published screenplay he declared that the film was an indictment of the empty middle-class values he encountered working with business executives, the film can also be seen as a thinly veiled examination of his and his peers’ own immaturity and growing pains.

The plot of Faces is almost non-existent – 24 hours in the life of a disintegrating marriage – but in its emotional range it’s an epic, as both spouses take to infidelity to feed sucking wounds of naked desperation and aching need. Social encounters have a vicious edge, where even interactions between friends are laced with merciless competition and one-upsmanship, and kindness can turn to savagery in an instant – then back again. And occasionally, there are oases of elusive, almost supernatural calm as people miraculously find ways to reach one another, if only for tragically fleeting moments. And yet, under it all, is the bedrock of Cassavetes’ empathy and compassion. No matter how ugly the behavior becomes, it is never subjected to judgment or the heavy hand of criticism, and no character, not even the smallest supporting actor with a one-shot cameo, is ever treated with scorn, derision, or condescension.

With the apparatus of studio production behind him, Cassavetes financed Faces by using his own money saved from previous acting jobs. He begged, borrowed or scammed whatever equipment he could scare up, in the process also gathering around him a group of friends including Seymour Cassel and wife Gena Rowlands, and producer and cinematographer Al Ruban, who formed the core of a sort of repertory company. He used his own home as a production studio, shooting scenes in one room, editing them in another, and repeatedly mortgaging the place when funds got tight. He often cast family members in supporting roles, and stepped in front of camera when he couldn’t find or afford the leads he wanted.

The result was complete artistic freedom, but that didn’t come without a hefty price tag. Nowadays we’ve seen that movies like The Blair Witch Project can be shot with cameras purchased from Best Buy, be distributed by a major motion picture studio and shown in mall theaters, and rake in millions of dollars. Those blockbuster instances may be somewhat anomalous, but the phenomena of a breakthrough film financed on the filmmaker’s credit cards (as was Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It) ceased to be a novelty long ago.

In his time however, Cassavetes’ methods were savaged as “sloppy” and “self-indulgent” by uncomprehending critics, who helped ruin the films’ commercial chances. Though Faces received Academy Award nominations, almost as many people are credited with the production of this set as reportedly paid to see Opening Night in its original week-long run in New York City. Moreover, he suffered the scorn of his peers; in more than a couple of instances, teamsters disrupted shooting by picketing the sets, or resorting to acts of sabotage because the crew had the audacity to film without the aid of union talent. And more classically trained actors who were cast alongside the regulars often found themselves at wit’s end by the lack of traditional blocking and direction.

Five Films is packed with the standard assortment of DVD bonus features: background information, behind-the-scenes featurettes, interviews with principals and collaborators, etc. Though illuminating and well-chosen, they are noteworthy here not so much for their content, but for the fact that his work never previously engendered such respect in the mainstream marketplace in the form of such a coffee table fetish object. Perhaps the most revelatory bonus is a marvelous 48-minute French TV program on the making of Faces, half of which was shot during the film’s three-year-long production.

A walking tour of the Cassavetes household (which not incidentally served as a location for Faces but also Minnie & Moskowitz and Love Streams) ends at a back porch editing suite where the movie is being cut as the filmmaker speaks. During his lifetime his films were sometimes referred to dismissively as “home movies,” the demeaning implication being that professionals don’t work this way, and certainly not in Hollywood. With the benefit of hindsight his sort of kitchen sink production studio looks positively prescient, and every budding DV auteur should be required to watch this clip and keep it in mind before shopping for their iMac preloaded with free editing software.

Ask a filmmaker what he or she knows about Cassavetes’ films, and the first thing most will likely say, if they even think they know anything at all, is something about “improvisation,” the understanding being that the stories were made up extemporaneously as the cameras rolled. On first glance it’s an easy enough mistake to make; Cassavetes captured behavior with a documentarian’s eye, recording the raw, eccentric, and often contradictory qualities of speech and behavior that most screenwriters take pains to smooth out or eliminate. After all, why would a director let someone deliberately begin a sentence (or for that matter an entire scene) one way only to finish it somewhere else entirely, or bless supporting players with their own digressive subplots and seemingly pointless soliloquies?

The idea was fostered by a title card at the end of Shadows reading “The Film You Have Just Seen Was An Improvisation,” and it should be noted that Cassavetes disingenuously perpetuated this fiction for years before coming to regret it. In actuality, his films were tightly scripted and structured, based on improvisations that took place in rehearsals weeks before shooting commenced. As the director himself said, “The emotions are improvised. The words are written.”

That approach reaches pinnacle in A Woman Under The Influence, a examination of a couple at the breaking point. It was based on three separate plays that Cassavetes had already written and staged Los Angeles, but is shot and performed with such inflinching intensity that one could be forgiven for thinking it was neither written nor acted at all. The majority of the film takes place on one set, giving it both extraordinary intimacy as well as expressing the sometimes suffocating claustrophobia that comes from families that are a little too close. As Mabel, the housewife portrayed by Gena Rowlands, slips ever deeper into her own personal madness, one can’t help but wonder at times how much of her behavior is Rowlands’ performance, and how much much is the actor herself being driven over the edge by the uncompromising methods of her director husband. As viewers we feel as caught in as much of an emotional maelstrom as the characters, where the only viable option is to surrender to the storm and bend like a willow, or snap. And in all of it there is never a moment where we are told what or how to feel. Behavior is character, and to stop and think about, much less try to articulate an action, means you’re already lost.

Cassavetes relished confounding audiences with “a new experience,” and the inclusion here of two different versions of his follow-up to Woman, the atypically genre-steeped The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, is a rare side-by-side example of how a director’s choices can alter the shape, tone and meaning of a work. Bookie was released in two different versions, first in a 135-minute cut in 1976, then two years later at 108-minutes. But the two versions don’t simply differ in duration. Cassavetes made significant changes in structure, plotting, and characterization through differing sound mixes and even shot selection. He was probably the first director who recut his films to make them less entertaining if he found the audience was passively enjoying them too much. Pertinent plot elements are obscured in the second cut, making the meanings more slippery and elusive, emphasizing the confusions of the protagonist, nightclub owner Cosmo Vitelli. The character was an autobiographical one for Cassavetes, filled with blatant allusions to the sacrifices he made for his art. In making the meanings less specific and emphasizing his characters’ ambiguities, Cassavetes used Vitelli’s character to show that improvisation is less an actor’s technique than a philosophy of life.

The earlier cut of “Shadows” also still exists, but is unfortunately absent from the set, as is any trace of the contributions made by Cassavetes scholar, prosthelytizer and self-appointed world expert Ray Carney. The author and Boston University professor was originally slated to provide audio commentary on the films, contribute liner notes, and most significantly donate his print of the first version of “Shadows.” Though that cut had long been considered lost, Carney turned up the only known copy after literally decades of detective work, dogged persistence, and sheer dumb luck.

Unfortunately, long-simmering conflicts with Ruban and Cassavetes’ widow Gena Rowlands boiled over in an argument about whether or not to include the earlier “Shadows” in the set. According to Carney, Rowlands wanted the earlier print handed over to her for destruction, allegedly in honor of her late husband’s wishes. As happens in close-knit families, ranks were closed and Carney was ousted, leaving nothing in the set of the work he’d already contributed save a small thanks in the credits, and a backhanded dig in the form of one of the essays in the accompanying booklet being cheekily entitled “Cassavetes on Cassavetes,” which is also the name of Carney’s 500-page biography that was ten years in the making.

Carney also alleges that a few outtakes from Opening Night exist and were also vetoed. One explanation why there are few other outtakes and “deleted scenes” in general that would even be available for inclusion here is that the director, confronted with massive storage fees, trashed most of the clips in the bitter belief that no one would ever care to see them. A more salient reason is that Cassavetes spent years editing these films, rejecting countless iterations until he achieved final cuts that suited his theses on love. Though many filmmakers try to ape his accomplishments, most fall far short of the mark because they focus on the effects, the style, the surface, and assume they can wing it and come up with similar results. But his films were anything but random; in a classic formalist parallel, they were sharply focused ruminations on love that transcend the limitations of their expression, just as love itself constantly defies definition. Now, that the world has caught up with him, and his single-minded devotion to examining “the human problem” is above all else what makes these films more relevant than ever.