At a Saturday afternoon screening of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, part of the Museum of Modern Art's John Cassavetes retrospective last summer, there wasn't a seat left in the museum's large theater. It was a surprise, even a delight, to see such a turnout for a rarely screened film by Cassavetes, one of the first American independent filmmakers, always considered a "difficult" director by general audiences. In the course of the two-hour film, however, even the air conditioning couldn't hold the large percentage of audience members who seemed to have come simply to escape the fierce heat outside, or those who had come for entertainment, a concept Cassavetes despised. By the end, a third of the audience had left, many uttering groans as they exited. Even as tributes to him mount in the year following his death, it may still be a while before Cassavetes' personal, emotionally demanding work develops a broad following in this country.
Cassavetes, who died last February at the age of 59, was not the kind of director for whom press agents toured around the country prepping reviewers and audiences for his newest release. Even if he had had the money to promote his films, Cassavetes was not inclined to make watching those films easy for audiences. He didn't talk publicly about his work very much, and even his friends and acquaintances say he generally resisted interpreting them. But, according to Raymond Carney, author of the only comprehensive English language study of Cassavetes as a director, Cassavetes wanted his movies to cover the vast human territories that he thought Hollywood had left unexplored.
Agonizing Interaction
"For him, human interaction was what life was about," says Carney. "Life wasn't pretty pictures, life wasn't postcard shots of the bay. Life was that tussle, that anguished, agonizing interaction of one soul with another. He often said: 'What were the most beautifully photographed things in the world?--television commercials.' He wasn't interested in making anything that looked like a television commercial. Pretty photography was not where it was at for John Cassavetes. Human emotions, raw performance on screen, people interacting with each other was what he cared about."
It is hard to detach the intensity of Cassavetes' work from his uncompromising personality, and it was both his personality and its extension into moviemaking that kept him on the margins of Hollywood. Cassavetes' father had emigrated from Piraeus, Greece when he was eleven; throughout his life, he credited his parents for having always encouraged him to be independent. "My parents allowed their two sons to be individuals," he said. "My family was a wild and wonderful place with lots of friends and neighbors talking loud and eating loud and nobody telling the children to be quiet or putting them down. When we had money, we went to the movies. When we didn't, we sat around the kitchen table and told stories."
Explosive Rivalries
Cassavetes' first critical success came in New York in 1960 with the emotionally raw, largely improvised independent film Shadows. By that time he had already abandoned his acting studies at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and begun teaching acting privately. Using friends as actors, shooting in New York streets, parks, and apartments, Cassavetes explored the relationship of a young black woman with
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