Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  Slowly, I tried to say that there were no words to describe what an extraordinary work it was. Gena and John both looked pleased. Cybill tried to say something about Gena’s transfixing, annihilating performance. Words were inadequate. They both smiled even more. Since it was among the most heartbreaking stories I’d ever seen, without it being depressing, I somehow felt their smiles inappropriate. But then, of course, they had made it. For the artists, the work could never be the wrenching emotional torrent it would be to viewers. Naturally, they had had to experience it in order to make it, but then couldn’t possibly feel it as a movie the way an audience would. That’s one of the ironies of being a picture-maker, and it was borne in on me that night in a way I had never quite understood before. When I could finally say something coherent, it was the same thing I would say after most of Cassavetes’ movies: “I don’t know how you do it, John. I just don’t know how.”

  When he couldn’t get a distributor interested, Cassavetes went out on a dangerous limb and self-distributed A Woman Under the Influence, laboring as passionately on that aspect as he had on the picture itself, designing ads, booking theaters all across the country, talking percentages. The film became one of the more successful art-house pictures in history, grossing an unheard-of $11 million. Perhaps his finest movie, it was nominated by the Academy for two major awards, Best Director and Best Actress, though they did not win. In the nineties, the film was correctly designated a “national treasure” by the Library of Congress.

  Contrary to the common perception that Cassavetes improvised all his scripts with the actors, he actually did that just once, on Shadows, and then only partially. All the other films he directed were written (or, in two cases, co-written) by him. When asked once about the matter of improvising, Peter Falk—Gena’s superb co-star in Woman—answered: “Who the hell can improvise lines that are that good!?” Actually, John elicited performances which seemed to be caught in improvisation because the lines were remarkably well written—in fact, Cassavetes dictated the first drafts of most of his scripts, to capture the cadence of regular people talking—and because he inspired amazing kinds of naked truth from his actors.

  Another of the reasons why the improvisation myth has clung to Cassavetes is because of the deceptively haphazard construction of the pictures themselves. They seem not to be constructed at all, but rather to have grown out of a kind of daily free-floating inspiration. Yet this, too, is part of his remarkable ability to catch an uninhibited freshness; his unique genius at making what might be called life studies—personal, moving, necessary, strangely poetic, and among the finest achievements of the American screen—virtually alone in their insistence on artlessness as antidote and restorative.

  The title character of A Woman Under the Influence is a perfect embodiment of the kind of person Gena’s character was describing in Minnie and Moskowitz, one who had been “set up” by movies—who has, in fact, been driven to insanity by expectations—her own, and others’ of her. There has never been an American film that more devastatingly reveals the terrible underside of a middle-class housewife-mother’s existence.

  After Woman, Cybill and I invited John and Gena over to our house for dinner a number of times, and they had us over to theirs. We met John’s exuberant, outspoken mother, whom he adored (she acted awfully well in a number of her son’s movies), and his quiet, self-effacing father (who died not long after), and Gena’s witty, laid-back mother Lady Rowlands (who also was a player in a few of John’s films). And their three rambunctious children—Nick (now a successful writer-director, and dedicated father), Xan (short for Alexandra, a feisty writer-director and devoted mother), and Zoe (an insightful writer and actress). Also, a number of close regulars, like actor Seymour Cassel, and Al Ruban, who photographed or co-produced, or both, most of John’s films. Cassavetes often used his own home in his pictures—a rambling, comfortable, two-story New England–style old house off Mulholland Drive near Laurel Canyon. Often, he mortgaged it to pay for his movies; afterward, it was usually a cliffhanger if he’d ever pay off the mortgage. He always managed to. Like most real artists, money to John was not the goal in life, it was the means to certain ends, mostly his own work.

  In the mid-seventies, while Orson Welles was staying at our house in Bel Air, I invited John and Gena over for an intimate dinner with him. Cassavetes later admitted to being totally intimidated by Welles, but you certainly never would have known: John completely monopolized the conversation, a good deal of the time telling Orson in great detail the plot of his next picture, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976; starring Ben Gazzara). The two of them had a lot in common, but their styles and approaches were so different that somehow the combination didn’t quite take. They liked each other but neither seemed in a hurry to meet again; I don’t think they ever did.

  John Cassavetes directs Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk during the shooting of probably Cassavetes’ greatest film, A Woman Under the Influence (1974), for which both he and Gena were nominated for Oscars they didn’t win, but should have.

  Unfortunately, Bookie was as big a flop in his self-distribution manner as Woman had been a hit. So much so that John blew all his reserves and went into heavy debt to make the next one: Opening Night, which he then could not quite afford to open. The picture languished on the shelf until after John’s death when it eventually came out on home video, in a few festivals, and in theaters for special runnings.

  Early in 1977, John had called me to say he was shooting Opening Night in some legitimate theater down on Wilshire Boulevard. It was supposed to be a Broadway opening, and he needed a few celebrity faces, so Peter Falk was going to come down as an extra—could I? “Anything for you, John,” I said. The picture, he told me, was about theater people bringing a new play to New York, again starring Gena Rowlands—as the play’s star on the verge of a nervous breakdown—and Ben Gazzara as the director, Joan Blondell as the playwright, Paul Stewart as the producer, Zohra Lampert as the director’s wife, and Cassavetes himself as an entirely self-absorbed actor playing opposite Gena.

  A Broadway opening probably meant fall or winter in New York, so I brought an overcoat. When Peter Falk spotted it, he said, “Where’d you get the coat?” I told him my thinking. Peter immediately called John over to say that I had a coat, and so he needed one. John whirled away, calling to an assistant to get Peter a coat. For my big shot backstage behind the curtain, all Cassavetes told me was to go on over to Gena, give her a kiss on the cheek and “tell her how great she was in the play.” Then he did a little yelling to get everyone on their toes, pointing out that every single screwup was costing him personally. There was no rehearsal. Once he called out, “Action!” everything went quickly, in a kind of blur, a slew of people moving and talking at once. While I was having my intimate moment of praise for Gena, suddenly—without anyone having prepared me—Gazzara’s character was introducing Zohra Lampert’s character to me. “You know Peter Bogdanovich …?” The joke was that Zohra is so stoked by Gena’s opening-night performance that she’s totally uninterested in meeting me; she just ignores the introduction and only gushes at Gena. And that’s how the picture ends, though I didn’t know when we shot it. (It was during the shooting of this sequence that I first met Ben Gazzara and, as a result, cast him in my next two films.)

  Later, knowing John’s financial situation with the movie, I offered him the use of my projection room at home so that he could screen dailies for himself and his crew and any actors he felt like bringing. He took me up on this and for a while they all came over; I sat in once or twice and it was fun. Then I called and asked if there was any second-unit work I could direct for him, and he said, yes, it’d be great if I could shoot a couple of shots of Gena and Joan Blondell in a car pulling into a garage. We knocked off three little setups in an hour or two at a garage in downtown L.A., and John used to praise me by wildly exaggerating and saying it would have taken him half a day.

  Cassavetes has said, “I won’t make shorthand films, bec
ause I don’t want to manipulate audiences into assuming quick, manufactured truths.” Opening Night, which is still one of his least-known pictures, is a perfect example of this credo. There are certainly neither quick nor manipulated truths, and what dominates is the mystery of personality, and the often unfathomably complex motivations of artists. The struggle to open the play depends on these intangibles. This could be called Cassavetes’ anti–All About Eve. The adoring fan who becomes a threat in that picture, shrewdly calculating her way to stardom, here turns into a weirdly troubling, clearly disturbed fanatic accidentally killed in an auto accident on a rainy night while trying to maintain contact with Gena’s character.

  This tragic encounter haunts her throughout the rest of the movie, the young woman’s troubled ghost even appearing to her, fighting with her—only one of numerous obstacles Gena’s star has to overcome to make it through opening night. Others include her fear of aging, discomfort with the role, even active dislike of the playwright’s creation, conflicts with the director and especially with her co-star (played by John). The terrible whirlpool of emotions that swirl around a theatrical production are beautifully evoked. The main obstacle, of course, is a paralyzing fear, and the picture eloquently dramatizes John’s comment: “You can defeat fear through humor, through pain, through honesty, bravery, intuition, and through love in the truest sense.”

  Again, all the performances are not so much acted as caught. Everyone feels absolutely real, and Gena is magnificent in an extremely challenging role, her characterization as naked and memorable as her amazing work in every one of Cassavetes’ masterpieces. If any other director and actress have together repeatedly achieved such emotional depths, I don’t know about them. That John cast himself as the least understanding or sensitive character in the picture—and that he plays it so convincingly—is probably the slyest inside joke in this singular, distinctive look at show business people. One of the biggest kicks is the extended sequence of Gena and John acting together brilliantly onstage, supposedly improvising on the opening night, altering the play and making it work better than the written text: a Pirandello-like box within a box—the actor as author.

  A year or two later, John called and asked me to come over for the reading of a script he’d written called One Winter Night, in which an entire Spanish-American family, except for one little boy, is wiped out in a mob hit, and an ex–gun moll reluctantly finds herself saving the kid as the killers go after him. But Cassavetes felt the basically melodramatic thriller material wasn’t really his thing, that he had written the script to make some money by selling it, not to make it himself. So he tried to persuade me to direct it. He said I knew how to do this sort of thing. Besides being flattered, I replied that actually he was the only one who could make its complicated dualities work. He still tried for some time to convince me I was better for it and then, eventually, not very happily, he gave in and agreed (when Columbia bought it) to shoot the picture himself if he could use Gena in the lead. The studio said he could, but only if Barbra Streisand wouldn’t do it. She didn’t, so Gena was cast and, fortunately, John made one of his most financially successful and expressively subversive works, finally titled Gloria.

  Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes as actors who can’t stand each other, during one of their extraordinary stage sequences in Opening Night (1977), the last of John’s own productions, finished but unreleased for more than a decade.

  Long after John died, Gena would tell me that the main reason he hadn’t wanted to do the movie was because of the terrible massacre of that whole family which sets the picture’s story in motion. But one of the things that makes the final film so effective is precisely this tension between Cassavetes’ poetic temperament and the devastatingly violent material he was treating. Ultimately, the picture is one of a kind in the way it turns upside down everything the normal gangster shoot-’em-up does. That an attractive woman is the strongest yet most deeply compassionate figure in the whole piece—a kind of feminine variation on John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney combined—is also what gives the work its unusual distinctiveness and resonance. It might well have been adopted as a centerpiece for feminism: in a cold and out-of-control universe—an increasingly urban jungle without rules or honor—the woman as a kind of prehistoric archetype of both destruction and salvation is certainly a vivid statement.

  And nobody could have portrayed this better than Gena Rowlands. Her “Gloria” and her “Woman” (… Under the Influence) are the quintessential two sides—strong and broken—of the modern female psyche. In Gloria, John presented a New York City never seen quite in this way: ominous, dangerous, unpredictable, a microcosm of the world at large. From the six-year-old boy, played by John Adames, he elicited a striking performance. Director-actor Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thief, Shoe Shine) once said you’re not a director until you’ve directed a child. Well, without doubt, Cassavetes was a director like no other.

  As it happened, John was shooting Gloria in New York as I was preparing to shoot They All Laughed there with Ben Gazzara and Audrey Hepburn. I came to one of their last cast and crew dinners, which was rollicking, and also met John one night for a few minutes while he was still shooting and before I had begun. His driver invited me out of a restaurant and into John’s waiting limousine for a few intense minutes. Mainly, he complained viciously about his “lousy” crew, called them all the names in the book, cursed them a number of times, and then laughed his most diabolical Cassavetes laugh, and said, “Fuck ’em!,” that he would prevail over them all in the end, “the bastards!” Of course, he did.

  Not long before this, John and I had almost made a picture together, another one he’d written called Dancing, about two sailors on the town in Las Vegas with two showgirls; the sailors were going to be John and Peter Falk, the showgirls, John proposed, would be Cybill and Raquel Welch. For some probably obscure reason, I didn’t feel that I should direct this, and suggested producing it instead, with Ivan Passer directing (he’d recently done a film with Cybill called Silver Bears, and she had liked him a lot). John, Ivan and I had a couple of script meetings at my place, discussing sometimes heatedly the various permutations of the story, but we didn’t agree, any of us, on a couple of central issues, and, finally, I could tell that John and Ivan were not a good mix. Looking back, it’s one of my major regrets that I didn’t just direct the film myself; with that cast alone, it could’ve been awfully interesting and probably a lot of fun.

  It was during a long script conference for Dancing that I noticed John finish off by himself a fifth of whiskey. Never having been a drinker, I had no idea what this indicated, but the key thing I remember is that John never even slightly slurred his words as the evening progressed into the small hours, nor in any other way seemed inebriated. He would tell me a few years later that this was one of his biggest problems with booze—he couldn’t get drunk—which is why he drank too much; and eventually developed the cirrhosis of the liver which would kill him.

  John Cassavetes himself photographs a scene with Ben Gazzara for his production of Husbands (1970), among his best and most personal works, co-starring Peter Falk.

  In 1981, Cassavetes took his first turn at directing for the stage. He mounted three productions in repertory at a small ninety-seat, odd-shaped theater in Hollywood, starring Peter Falk in a kind of courtroom drama John had written called Knives; Gena in a drama, The Third Day Comes; and Jon Voight and Gena as brother and sister in a lovely play by John’s close friend Ted Allan, Love Streams, rewritten with numerous suggestions by Cassavetes. Because of a tragedy in our family—my fiancée, Dorothy Stratten, had been murdered in August 1980—seeing two of these productions were the first times I’d ventured out of my house in months, and they were quite astonishing. And strangely beautiful. John’s direction in this medium was every bit as unorthodox and original as his work in the movies. Gena, Peter and Voight were all superb. Knives was mesmerizing, with Peter never off, and you can never get tired of Peter Falk. I missed Thir
d Day, but Love Streams was one of the most exciting productions I’ve ever seen in the theater: a powerfully moving dramatic piece but with an enormous amount of laughter—even a large furry dog played by an actor in an animal suit. Instead of being ridiculous (the dog player was exceptional), this worked within the highly stylized, yet also somehow realistic, conception John spread brilliantly across a Cinema-Scope-shaped stage. Voight acted with more than a touch of characteristically neurotic Cassavetes intensity, which I had never seen him quite do before, and it increased both his charm and his danger. A few years later, when Cassavetes was already very sick, he directed his last work of any kind, another stage piece he had written, A Woman of Distinction, starring Gena Rowlands, more amazing than ever as a bag lady. John had to direct most of it lying down on a cot; nevertheless, the production was uniquely moving.

  During the early eighties, John did a lot of acting in other people’s movies so as to earn back what he’d lost on Bookie, Opening Night, and the first three plays. A number of artlessly fascinating performances ensued in more mainstream, though still offbeat, pictures like Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981; John Badham), based on a Broadway success; Tempest (1982; Paul Mazursky), loosely based on Shakespeare; and Marvin and Tige (1983; Eric Weston), perhaps his most touching portrayal until his acting swan song in the movie version of Love Streams (1984). I remember phoning him while he was on location in Philadelphia for Marvin and Tige and he admitted feeling kind of lonely, watching TV in his motel room. I had called to tell him the basic plot for the first movie idea I’d had since Dorothy’s death. Because I trusted him as an artist and friend, and wanted him to play the lead role, John was the first person I tried the idea on, and he was enormously encouraging. The central part is a self-involved, somewhat self-destructive, but talented filmmaker-actor who has been married a number of times, has several daughters, and has been brought low because of the sudden death by plane accident of his current, and favorite, wife.