'cassavetes on cassavetes.'
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Prom_Queen_Carrie — 9 years ago(September 03, 2016 08:28 AM)
i guess the most revealing of these is the story about how he actually smacked gena around in that scene in minnie & moskowitz.
Whoa. I thought the story was that Gena pretended to be really smacked around and hurt to get back at him for not telling her that he would be playing that part.
"Oh I went there, bought a house, moved in b*tch, and now I'm remodeling the kitchen." -
hushsara — 9 years ago(September 22, 2016 07:17 AM)
I was listening to the Minnie and Moskowitz audio commentary the other day and Gena actually remarks how much of a "fun time" that scene was because he didn't actually hit her yet everyone on set thought he had, rushing to her to check if she was okay? So what's the truth here
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TermlnatriX — 11 years ago(August 23, 2014 08:02 PM)
Halfway into the book and a lot of his behavior is shocking. I think it came from deep insecurity though. There's a point, or multiple points when the author outlined how his lack of "proper" education was the culprit to how he acted around most people. Despite this though, he was truly a forward thinking filmmaker at the time that paved the way for how a lot of "indie" films tackled stories. The raw, honest portrayal of LIFE in general. Something I'm able to forgive for the sake of art and cinema.
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filmschoolthrucommentaries
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rorygunn — 9 years ago(September 01, 2016 04:13 PM)
I've read this book and i loved itit helps me deal with the artificial Hollywood myth his family who all have gone Hollywood and are totally immersed in the Hollywood way have spun for the mediain a strange way I kind of identify with him because when you're making an independent movie on your own dime you have to do whatever it takes from the good to the bad to the downright ugly
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Prom_Queen_Carrie — 9 years ago(October 03, 2016 06:55 AM)
He did say something to the effect of you having to cheat, lie, steal, do whatever to make a film, so I guess that was his mentality when getting his films made. He seemed like a difficult man.
"Oh I went there, bought a house, moved in b*tch, and now I'm remodeling the kitchen." -
MortSahlFan — 4 years ago(September 18, 2021 06:52 PM)
I have such admiration for people who can recount their lives in auto-biography, because the connections are so complicated. I would never be able to straighten it out.
John Cassavetes
Introduction: A Life in Art
This is the autobiography John Cassavetes never lived to write. In his own words Cassavetes tells the story of his life as he lived it, day by day, year by year. He begins with his family and childhood experiences, talks about being a high-school student, college dropout and drama-school student. He describes the years he spent pounding the pavement in New York as a young, unemployed actor unable to get a job – or even an agent. Then he takes us behind the scenes to let us sit in on the planning, rehearsing, shooting and editing of each of his films – from Shadows, Faces and Husbands to Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night, Gloria and Love Streams. He describes the struggle to get them made, and the even greater battle to get many of them into movie theaters. He talks about the reaction of audiences and reviewers to his work, and responds to criticisms of it.
The tale is a personal, passionate one: of dreams, struggles, triumphs, setbacks and frustrations; of hair-raising financial gambles, crazy artis-tic risk-taking and midnight visions of glory. But it is also the story of an artistic movement that extended beyond Cassavetes and defined an era in film history. Between the lines, as it were, these pages chronicle the history of one of the most important artistic movements of the past fifty years – the birth and development of American independent film-making, and the response to it by critics and reviewers.
Cassavetes pioneered a new conception of what film can be and do. His vision was of film as a personal exploration of the meaning of his life and the lives of the people around him. It was a way of asking deep, probing questions about the world in which he lived, and of asking oth-ers to question and explore their own experiences. The pages that fol-low trace the cultural trajectory of that idea, and the wildly opposed responses it elicited: the incredible energy and excitement it engendered among certain artists, critics and viewers; and the fierce resistance it met
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with from uncomprehending studio heads, producers, distributors, reviewers and audiences fighting to hold on to their notion of the movies as ‘story-telling’ or ‘entertainment’. In fact, the battle is far from over; it continues today.
Since this is the first time Cassavetes’ life story has been told, very few of the following facts have been known outside of the circle of his inti-mate friends and family. Many facets of the story (from Cassavetes playing ‘chicken’ on the Port Washington sand-pit cliffs during his teens, to his feelings of oppression at the narrowness and conformity of American culture when he was in high school, to his playwriting and repertory theater work in the final decade of his life) will be unfamiliar even to someone who has read all of the standard journalistic biogra-phies. Most of the events are appearing in print for the first time.
To verify the facts, I tracked down the actual participants to the events whenever I possibly could. I conducted scores of interviews – with Cas-savetes in the final years of his life and with dozens of actors, crew mem-bers and friends who worked with him over the years, including Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, Elaine May, Lelia Goldoni, Sam Shaw, Larry Shaw, Hugh Hurd, George O’Halloran, Al Ruban, Maurice McEndree, Ted Allan, Lynn Carlin, Tim Carey, Erich Kollmar, Michael Ferris, Meta Shaw, Jonas Mekas, Amos Vogel, and many others. (Many of the interviews took the form of panel discussions or post-screening question-and-answer sessions I organized and moderated at film festi-vals.) Over the time it took to complete the project, the original inter-views were supplemented with hundreds of hours of follow-up telephone conversations, e-mails and handwritten notes, memoirs and recollections provided by these figures and others, which were incorpo-rated into the narrative.
My hope is that this will be a book with surprises and discoveries on nearly every page, even for someone who may already be a Cassavetes ‘buff’. I have written four books and dozens of essays and program notes about the films, and yet was astonished to discover something new about Cassavetes’ life or work almost every single day I worked on this project. Many of the facts I uncovered turned the common wisdom about his life, the accepted truths about how the movies were made, upside down and inside out.
One of the most striking things that emerged for me personally was the realization of the degree to which Cassavetes’ films were quarried from his most private feelings and experiences – far beyond what I had imagined when I began. Cassavetes is in his films, and his feelings about life are in characters like Shadows’ Ben, Faces’ Richard -
MortSahlFan — 3 years ago(April 17, 2022 10:37 PM)
I highly recommend it. I think some non-movie lovers would love reading some of the crazy **** JC would do, especially on public transit
https://www.patreon.com/LoyalOpposition