He and Evie didn’t arrive in Los Angeles for the filming until just a few days before shooting was to begin. We invited them for dinner to our first home, a modest rental out in the smoggy San Fernando Valley, the night after their plane landed. During the meal, Boris all of a sudden said to me, “You know, you have written the truest line I’ve ever read in a script. I was reminded of it as we landed yesterday and drove about.” I was amazed and asked what line that could possibly be. Boris answered, “The one when I’m looking out the car window at the city streets and I say, ‘God, what an ugly town this has become.’ My Lord, it’s never been truer.”
Boris had several old friends in L.A. but never stayed any longer than he absolutely had to, anxious to return to his country home in Sussex. He was every bit as self-effacing as I had written, but without the bitterness, or rancor. Unlike Orlok, Karloff had no intention of retiring.
We shot his five days’ work first—all in one long week. Every day he would go uncomplaining into heavy overtime, never charging Corman—though he made a point of saying he did this only for me. Almost every day began around seven-thirty a.m. and ended well past midnight. One time the scene we were doing required us to get drunk together (I was playing the role of a young director) and for us both to pass out on top of a bed beside each other. The next time we would be seen, the script said my character woke up, sat up, rubbed his eyes, glanced down, saw Karloff, was startled and then began to laugh. Laughing on cue I found to be one of the tougher things to do, so I screwed up a couple of takes. Finally, Boris said, “You don’t have to laugh, you know. Just because you wrote that in the script doesn’t mean you have to do it.” It was pretty difficult, I said, and he replied with a touch of exasperation, “Then by all means don’t do it!” I followed his direction and we got the shot on the next take.
In a hotel room set, where the characters get to drinking too much, we watch on TV a scene from Karloff’s “first really important part,” as he called it, in Howard Hawks’ version of a successful play, The Criminal Code. Boris repeated a memorable small role he had done on the Broadway stage. I wrote a line for my character about Hawks: “He really knows how to tell a story,” and Boris ad-libbed, “Indeed he does,” so we kept it in.
The night we filmed his scenes on location at a drive-in theater went very late and it was, as usual, chilly at night in L.A. Boris never complained once. The final day with him started at eight a.m. and went until two-thirty in the morning at a little studio on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. Evie Karloff stayed the whole time and helped Polly with various set decorations, hanging curtains, moving props. Among his last scenes was a two-minute fable he would relate—a great many words to learn—and I told him I would like to try doing it without cutting, which meant he would have to say all of it straight through. There were three others in the scene with him (besides me) and when I was first explaining the shot to him, I said I thought perhaps we could start on his face, then slowly pan the camera across everybody listening and end on him again. I could tell from his expression that he wasn’t very keen on that plan, but he didn’t say anything.
The little story he told was taken from a play by Somerset Maugham (quoted as an epigraph to John O’Hara’s novel Appointment in Samarra) and told of a merchant from Baghdad who sees Death in the marketplace make a “threatening gesture” at him and so rides off to Samarra to escape his fate. When Death is asked why the threatening gesture had been made, Death replies that it wasn’t a threatening gesture at all but a “start of surprise.” Death explains: “I was astonished to see him here in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight—in Samarra.” The reason the fable had been inserted—a late addition—was because I had seen on television How the Grinch Stole Christmas narrated so eloquently by Boris that I decided I could not make a film with Karloff and not have him tell some sort of extended tale. Then why, his expression seemed to say, was I panning the room while he was speaking? So I said, “Or maybe we could just start way back, holding all five of us, and then slowly, as you’re talking, dolly into a big close-up of you.” Boris nodded. “That sounds better,” he said.
While the camera and the lighting were being set up, I asked Boris if he perhaps wanted some cue cards set up off camera so that he could read the speech. “You mean, Idiot Cards?” he asked, using the trade term. I nodded. “No,” he said confidently, “that’s all right. I have the lyrics.” He always called his dialogue either “the lyrics” or “the jokes.” When we were ready, I called action and Boris started, but we had to stop after a few lines because the crew had messed up floating a table out of the path of the oncoming camera. We began again. Everyone was tired—it was around one in the morning—yet this time, the table was moved without a hitch and Boris did the speech beautifully all the way through. Just before we rolled, I had whispered to him that after he finished the fable—and by then we would be well into his close-up—he should give me a moment in which the character silently thinks about his own death. Boris just nodded, and then did this superbly, too. I called out, very enthusiastically, “Cut. Print! Great!” Suddenly the crew broke out in spontaneous applause—something crews very rarely do—and I could see that Boris was touched by their most genuine reaction. I thanked him profusely and he seemed pleased. A moment later, I walked over to Evie, who was wiping her eyes and still looking a bit teary. “Do you know how long it’s been,” she said quietly, “since a crew has applauded for Boris?”
Boris Karloff (age seventy-nine) rehearsing a scene with me for Targets (1968), my first film, which Karloff and his wife always referred to as his last. He lived less than two more years after we shot this.
The last time I saw Karloff was when we had a special screening of the picture for him and Evie. Afterward, I could see they both had been moved by the inherent tribute to him, and they thanked me very graciously and warmly. I thanked them. They were heading back to their beloved home in Sussex, where a few months later, Boris died. I will always be grateful to him: he showed me the finest example of true professionalism and grace I have seen to this day, now thirty-seven years later. As actor or man, Karloff was a tough act to follow.
Born William Henry Pratt, November 23, 1887, Dulwich, England; died February 2, 1969, Sussex, England.
Selected sound features (with director):
1931: The Criminal Code (Howard Hawks); Five Star Final (Mervyn LeRoy); The Yellow Ticket (Raoul Walsh); Frankenstein (James Whale)
1932: Scarface (Hawks); The Old Dark House (Whale); The Mask of Fu Manchu (Charles Brabin); The Mummy (Karl Freund); Night World (Hobart Henley)
1933: The Ghoul (T. Hayes Hunter)
1934: The Lost Patrol (John Ford); The House of Rothschild (Alfred Werker); The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer)
1935: The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale); The Black Room (Roy William Neill); The Raven (Lew Landers)
1936: The Invisible Ray (Lambert Hillyer); The Walking Dead (Michael Curtiz); The Man Who Changed His Mind (Robert Stevenson); Charlie Chan at the Opera (H. Bruce Humberstone)
1938: The Invisible Menace (John Farrow); Mr. Wong, Detective (William Nigh)
1939: Son of Frankenstein (Rowland V. Lee); The Man They Could Not Hang (Nick Grinde); Tower of London (Lee)
1940: The Ape (Nigh); Before I Hang (Grinde)
1941: The Devil Commands (Edward Dmytryk)
1942: The Boogie Man Will Get You (Landers)
1944: House of Frankenstein (Erle C. Kenton)
1945: The Body Snatcher (Robert Wise); Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson)
1946: Bedlam (Robson)
1947: Lured (Douglas Sirk); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Norman Z. McLeod); Unconquered (Cecil B. DeMille)
1953: Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Charles Lamont)
1958: The Haunted Strangler (Robert Day)
1962: Corridors of Blood (Day)
1963: The Raven (Roger Corman); Black Sabbath (Mario Bava); The Comedy of Terrors (Jacques Tourneur)
1967: T
he Sorcerers (Michael Reeves)
1968: Targets (P.B.)
15
JOHN CASSAVETES
Although I’m not quite sure where John Cassavetes and I met—probably it happened with a brief encounter in director Don Siegel’s office at Universal Studios in the late sixties—he would over the next two decades evolve into one of my closest friends, especially during the last few years of his tragically short life. He died at age fifty-nine, in February 1989, and I have missed him terribly ever since. In most cineaste circles, John would more properly belong in a book about directors, but I have included him here because he was not only among his generation’s most intelligent and individualistic actors, but because as a filmmaker, his work was really all about the actors’ performances. Cassavetes’ last name in Greek means “old house” (or “old home”), and though nobody was more profoundly modern in his approach to making pictures, John in life was a very old soul.
The first time I became aware of him was in 1955, seeing a taut little thriller called The Night Holds Terror—his first movie lead—in which he played a psychotic who holds a family hostage in their own home. To me then, he looked like a murderous Jerry Lewis, and I was riveted by the intensity and subterranean wit of the portrayal. The second time I saw him was in Edge of the City (1957), and I was even more impressed by his terrific work opposite Sidney Poitier, with whom he became lifelong friends. (He was always trying to get Sidney to do Hamlet onstage.) Then, three years later, suddenly he was the director-producer of a supposedly improvised (it wasn’t entirely), decidedly offbeat independent film, Shadows, which became quite controversial in New York. Some loved it, some denounced it, no one seemed to be impartial. It was the second American feature to be self-financed, only Orson Welles’ Othello (1952) having preceded it; both Welles and Cassavetes used their acting salaries to finance their films. But Shadows—in which John did not act—is officially considered the start of the independent film movement in the United States. As it turned out, Cassavetes would become one of the most exciting and influential of filmmakers, and the only one of his generation who could really be called a poet.
John Cassavetes lines up a shot for Husbands (1970), the first film he directed, produced, wrote and also acted in. The first great film of the seventies, it was generally either dismissed or misunderstood on its initial release.
As the sixties rolled on, my interest in him as an actor kept increasing: I caught up with Don Siegel’s modest juvenile-delinquent drama Crime in the Streets (1956), and then saw Siegel’s disturbing The Killers (1964) when it came out, with its reverberating moment of Cassavetes socking Ronald Reagan (in his last film). Unfortunately, by this time, John had in real life socked producer Stanley Kramer for his re-cutting of Cassavetes’ third directorial effort, the uneven but poignant A Child Is Waiting (1963), and had become quietly blacklisted in Hollywood circles. Both of John’s studio movies (the other was 1962’s forgettable Too Late Blues) had been deeply unpleasant experiences for him and he never really went back. For three years, he didn’t work, and his wife, the beautiful and brilliant Gena Rowlands, brought home the bread for their burgeoning family of three children (“Don’t let them outnumber you,” John once warned me). Another Hollywood maverick, Robert Aldrich, broke the blacklist by hiring Cassavetes as one of The Dirty Dozen (1967), a huge box-office success which got John an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor, his only acting nomination. The role had started with only a few lines but Aldrich gladly allowed Cassavetes to improvise and expand his speeches, and when it was done, John pretty much stole the picture. Today his performance still seems remarkably fresh and unexpected at every moment, existing on a level of reality no one else quite gets near.
The following year, 1968, saw the release of the most popular movie John ever acted in—Roman Polanski’s version of the best-selling horror novel Rosemary’s Baby—as well as Cassavetes’ own fourth film as director-writer-producer, his first mature work, and an extremely successful one too, again self-financed. Faces was not only his breakthrough picture, it had enormous impact and in effect started what came to be called the New Hollywood. An independent, grainy black-and-white (16mm blown up to 35mm), decidedly offbeat movie about middle-class people and their quietly desperate relationships, the work received three Oscar nominations, including one for his original screenplay. Though Cassavetes did not get along with Polanski (whose extremely hands-on direction of actors went totally against John’s grain), he now could easily have had a lucrative career as a leading man in studio pictures. Instead, Cassavetes did not act in any other director’s movie for eight years, devoting his time solely to his own films.
Before Faces, he had formed a production company with director Robert Altman for the two of them to make independent movies. Not long before he died, Cassavetes himself told me why this had fallen apart. It seems that Altman’s secretary, despondent over an affair that went badly, had tried to commit suicide, and Altman had subsequently fired her. John said this so disturbed him that he essentially ended the business relationship, and then hired the young woman as an actress for Faces. This was Lynn Carlin and she received an Academy Award (Best Supporting Actress) nomination for her performance. And Faces today remains an electrifying experience.
It wasn’t until Husbands (1970), Cassavetes’ next film, that he combined all his talents, directing, writing and acting, in one picture—about three middle-class Americans’ extreme reaction to the death of a buddy—and the result is one of his best, co-starring Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk, two equally quirky, gifted and essentially underrated actors with whom he would work memorably more than once. The interaction between them is exhilarating, each so vividly different from the other; also, revealingly, Cassavetes as an actor is always in peak form in his own work. Husbands, financed and distributed by Columbia, was not a box-office success, and neither was 1971’s Minnie and Moskowitz, which Cassavetes wrote and directed for Universal, co-starring Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel (who had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor in Faces), and John in the small, brutal role of an ex-boyfriend of Gena’s. Both Husbands and Minnie and Moskowitz only get better as the years go by.
Playing Minnie, Gena has a monologue in a drinking scene with an older woman friend (in reality Seymour Cassel’s mother-in-law) which obliquely underlies a lot of what Cassavetes was doing in his pictures, and why. After the two women have discussed lovemaking and their continued desire for it, and men who crave to possess rather than love, Minnie comments that “the movies are never like that.” She goes on:
You know, I think that movies are a conspiracy … because they set you up…. They set you up from the time you’re a little kid. They set you up to believe in everything … in ideals and strength and good guys and romance—and, of course, love … So … you go out, you start looking. Doesn’t happen, you keep looking. You get a job … and you spend a lot of time fixing up things—your apartment and jazz. And you learn how to be feminine—you know, quotes: “feminine”? You learn how to cook … But there’s no Charles Boyer in my life … I never even met a Charles Boyer. I never met Clark Gable. I never met Humphrey Bogart … I mean, they don’t exist—that’s the truth. But the movies set you up and no matter how bright you are, you believe it.
In essence, then, John was making movies that did not “set you up,” that were attempting to be honest about the way people behave, that purposely tried not to be like all other movies in terms of construction, subject matter or execution. Cassavetes used to talk fondly about Frank Capra’s pictures—he said, “Maybe there never was an America, maybe it was all Capra”—yet his own work could be called most decidedly anti-Capra.
It was around this time that I began to get to know John and Gena. They were at an early running in New York of What’s Up, Doc? and Cassavetes gave me my favorite one-line review of the film, but a lot of the impact had to do with exactly where and how he said it. There were a few celebrities in the audience, including Shirley MacLaine, I recall—a sl
ightly hard-to-please group. Less than a half-hour into the picture, when it became clear that we had made a flat-out, unashamed, totally unredeemed slapstick farce, John’s laughter rose boisterously above everyone and he said, quite loudly, choking slightly on the words, and with considerable affection: “I can’t believe he’s doing this!” Everyone heard him, and laughed. I thought the remark made the screening.
Cassavetes (with Lee Marvin) as a member of The Dirty Dozen (1967), an international success directed by Robert Aldrich, who encouraged Cassavetes to improvise his own stuff, which got John his single Oscar nomination (in acting) for Best Supporting Actor.
A couple of years later, John invited Cybill Shepherd and me to one of the first showings of A Woman Under the Influence (1974), when it was still a work in progress and the running time over four hours (final release version was 2 hours and 27 minutes). I always told John I liked all four hours and never felt it was too long. The film was the most emotionally devastating experience I’d had since seeing the original Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s harrowing Long Day’s Journey into Night in the late fifties. I remember coming out of the screening room at what was then the American Film Institute (they had loaned John the room), having been terribly moved—both Cybill and I—and feeling the real world was somehow not nearly as real as what we’d just seen; squinting from the lights in the lobby, fighting to get some sense of equilibrium after an event that had rocked us in some very fundamental way. And there were John and Gena, both smiling expectantly. I couldn’t understand why they were smiling. It was everything I could do not to burst into tears. I embraced John for a long moment, not able to speak; I think all I said was, “Oh, John—Jesus Christ …” And John said, brightly, “Did you like it?”
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