74 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • JUNE 2020
REAR VIEW
JOHN CASSAVETES
THE FATHER OF INDIE FILMS
BY ANNIE WILKINSON
Every class has one, that kid who’s full
of quick, attention-getting wit. In 1947,
Port Washington High School’s senior
class had its own, immortalized in the
yearbook as the “class wit,” who was
“always ready with a wisecrack.”
John Cassavetes got away with the brash
behavior because of his talent. Ever the
daredevil, he played “chicken” on Port
Washington’s sand-pit cliffs and turned
over cars. He also starred in school
plays and earned top honors in the Red
Domino drama tournament. He played
sports and wrote for the school paper,
The Port Weekly (later called the Schreiber
Times), and the school yearbook.
Fueled by lone-wolf energy, as an adult
the maverick actor-director-screenwriter
acted in more than 80 projects,
directed nine episodes of television and
12 feature films, and was nominated
for three Academy Awards for acting,
writing, and directing. The New Yorker
Magazine called him “maybe the most
influential American director of the last
half century.”
Cassavetes said others saw him as a rebel
and something of a rowdy. Where did
all that passionate independence come
from?
QUINTESSENTIAL OUTSIDER
The son of Greek immigrants, John
Nicholas Cassavetes was born in New
York City in December 1929 and was
raised in Brooklyn and Queens. The
family moved often before settling on
Oakland Avenue, Port Washington,
on Long Island’s North Shore. Struggling
through the Depression era,
they minimized their poverty. As Ray
Carney wrote in his 2001 biography,
Cassavetes on Cassavetes, it was a
“household swimming with exalted and
passionately held historical and political
ideals.” At age 5, Cassavetes recited
poetry and performed, and at 9, he shot
8-millimeter films with a Bolex camera,
foreshadowing his destiny.
Cassavetes the teenager was nagged
by “feelings of oppression at the narrowness
and conformity of American
John Cassavetes graduated from Port Washington High School.
culture,” wrote Carney. Disinterested,
feeling out of place in his upper-middle
class neighborhood, Cassavetes
later said, “I was free to…express myself
the way I wanted to, while the other kids
were what their families wanted them
to be.”
After graduating, he drifted, caroused
with women, and was kicked out of college.
By the time he was 19, the self-described
dilettante said he feared work
because “All I’d ever done was play
basketball and run out with girls.” Then
he heard that the American Academy
of Dramatic Arts at Carnegie Hall was
packed with girls. His father reacted to
his plan to study acting saying, “You
are going to be representing the lives
of human beings. You will speak for all
the people who have no voice.”
After graduating in 1950, he went door
to door, hitting 50 places a day, seeking
work or an agent. He chained himself
to a radiator at CBS television begging
for a walk-on in You Are There; one
theater manager called him “very
intelligent but a full-of-energy wacko.”
After landing his first film role in 1953
(Taxi), he acted in live TV productions
and taught Method Acting. He also met
and married actress Gena Rowlands.
But he yearned to direct — without
selling “himself and his art to that Satan
known as Hollywood,” wrote The New
York Times’ Manohla Dargis.
EARLY KICKSTARTER
In 1959, he released Shadows, his
low-budget directorial debut, shot on
weekends for nearly three years. He
had appeared on Jean Shepherd’s Night
People radio program, which celebrated
guerrilla (or street) theater, to peddle an
unheard-of concept in a pre-Kickstarter
era. Cassavetes asked, “Wouldn’t it be
terrific if ordinary people could make
movies, instead of all these Hollywood
bigwigs who are only interested in
business and how much the picture was
going to gross and everything?”
Money poured in; though he accepted
only $5 per listener, the contributions
financed the shoestring production,
and the American independent film
movement was born. Shot on rented
and borrowed equipment with a handheld
camera and natural lighting, the
semi-improvised 16-millimeter cinema
verité film dug into the aimlessness and
wandering of the beat generation. It cost
around $40,000, funded by Cassavetes’
acting earnings and radio listeners.
Continuing to rail against the constraints
of Hollywood and the television
networks, he made more low-budget
indie films, often starring Rowlands,
including 1968’s Oscar-nominated
Faces. He allowed a young, uncredited
production assistant, Steven Spielberg,
the opportunity to direct for a day on
Faces.
In the 1970s Cassavetes revisited
Port landmarks and his childhood
street to shoot Husbands, starring
Rowlands and friends Peter Falk and
Ben Gazzara. Cassavetes acted in
studio films, including blockbuster
Rosemary’s Baby, mainly to fund his
creations, casting family members as
leads and using friends’ homes for
locations.
The outsider who is still remembered as
the father of independent cinema died
at age 59 in Los Angeles of cirrhosis of
the liver in 1989.
“Wouldn’t it be terrific if ordinary people could
make movies, instead of all these Hollywood
bigwigs who are only interested in business and
how much the picture was going to gross and
everything?” Director John Cassavetes asked.
/LONGISLANDPRESS.COM
