John and I talked for over an hour that initial time, and he kept saying, “Just write it down, for Christ’s sake, will ya? Will you write it down as you told me?” Which I did eventually, though he had to prompt me two or three more times. We would speak of this comedy-drama-fantasy—there were ghosts involved—until he died. Long after it was apparent that he could no longer play the part, he read a couple of poor early drafts, and made a key suggestion: I should find a way to remove as much of the responsibility for exposition from the actors (and there was quite a lot of it necessary). “Take the heat off the actors,” John wisely advised; there’s nothing duller for an actor to play than expositional dialogue. One of the last things John said to me before he died was that I had “better make that picture” because, alluding to the ghosts in the story, “I’m going to be there!”
John and I started talking more often after the call in Philadelphia, but we didn’t see each other because I rarely went out, and he was shooting a lot. As the film production of Love Streams geared up at a low budget—again to star Gena Rowlands and Jon Voight as sister and brother—I went through his frustrations with Voight, who suddenly had become difficult after being, as John put it, “a pussycat” during the play’s production. The final straw came, John would tell me, when Voight told Cassavetes he would do the picture only if he, Voight, could direct it. Very reluctantly and unhappily, then, John had to let Voight go and, at this late stage, play the part himself. He does give, however, one of his subtlest, most brilliantly lucid and layered performances; and he and Gena as brother and sister are magical. When they dance together in long-shot to the tune of “Where Are You” (one of John’s favorite popular songs), it is an indelibly heartbreaking image of filial affection, and of the two actors’ transcendent, ardent love for each other.
While he was filming Love Streams, John called late one afternoon to ask if I could come in the next day and help him with a scene he was going to shoot with himself as an actor. I said, with obvious disbelief, that he certainly didn’t need my help in directing himself. No, John said, it was a difficult dialogue scene between him and Diahnne Abbott, and he really wanted me to please come over tomorrow to help him with it. I protested yet again, and his voice dropped several degrees as he said, “You mean to tell me, you, as a friend, are not going to come down here and help me out tomorrow?” There was disappointment, discouragement, and incredulity in his tone. OK, OK, I said, I’ll come down, but you don’t need me, or words to that effect. I was so confused by the request, both flattered on the one hand and still disbelieving that he had any real problem with the scene, but thinking maybe he was just feeling insecure, or God knows what; yet when he put it the way he did, I simply couldn’t refuse. I realized driving over that it was going to be the first time I had been on a movie set since Dorothy’s death, a month after we finished shooting They All Laughed in July 1980. It was now 1983.
The next morning, arriving at his home on Woodrow Wilson Drive, I was immediately confronted with a small, bustling film crew getting ready to shoot in John’s driveway. I had to be parked out of the shot, which was supposed to bring Diahnne Abbott in her car up to the front of the house, where she would stop, get out, walk to the front door and ring the bell. Al Ruban saw me first and yelled out, “Jesus, now we can finally get some work done quickly around here!” Cassavetes and the rest of the crew gave a warm greeting—John introducing Diahnne as he handed me the two or three pages for the scene at the door, when John’s character opens it in answer to her ringing. They stand there and talk for a couple of pages—a good, clear scene, obviously with a lot of subtext and innuendo, which I, of course, couldn’t grasp entirely because I hadn’t read the script. John asked me to set up the shots necessary for Diahnne’s arrival while she and he started rehearsing inside. Having looked over the area, I told Al I thought we could do it all in one panning shot. He was happy about that, and set up the camera and lighting while I joined John and Diahnne in his living room. The three of us rehearsed for a while, but they seemed to have it down perfectly, as far as I could see. I can’t remember suggesting much of anything, but gave out some praise, saying the scene played for me. John asked how many angles I thought we could do it in, and I said it seemed to me like four—two different sizes of John at the door and two of Diahnne.
John nodded. “See, that’s why I needed you—I’d have said we needed seven or eight or something.” He was very affable and sweet, if slightly preoccupied by the scene he had to play. I noticed his stomach seemed a bit bloated, though the rest of him wasn’t fat at all. For a long while, John would tell people this was some kind of hernia, but actually it was an early indication of the cirrhosis. Eventually, while the rest of him shrank, his belly would balloon out to the size of a nine-months’-pregnant woman. On this lovely day of Love Streams, though, we didn’t think of such things; or maybe John already knew, I don’t know. Personally, I was feeling a trifle tentative directing his material, but when I suggested Diahnne pick a flower for him as she walked to the door, John leapt on it and endorsed the idea. After doing a couple of takes of the pull-up, both good, we moved to the doorway and shot first Diahnne’s side, then John’s. They were both excellent, of course, the crew was swift; it was over before I knew it, and painless. Much as I had felt slightly superfluous, everyone was very sweet to me as I departed. I embraced John and he thanked me. I thanked him for getting me out of the house.
Only later did I realize that this was exactly why he had done the whole thing—to get me out of my house. We had been talking quite a bit over the last couple of years while I wrote a painful memoir about Dorothy. Not until I saw the completed movie, about a year after he finished it (I had meanwhile been shooting Mask), did I realize fully what John had done for me. He had brought me back to the world of the living that I understood—a movie set is a kind of second home to a directing veteran.
From the last part of 1985 to February of 1989 when Cassavetes died, we saw a great deal of each other. We almost made a picture together. I had first heard he was ill while prepping Mask, which led me to remember that his son Nick was now a good actor and would be right to play a biker, so we hired him; he had a few scenes opposite Cher, and was awfully good, and easy to work with, too. Unfortunately, I had a lot of problems with my picture in post-production, and at the same time John did Peter Falk a favor and came in to finish Big Trouble (1985) when the original director had to be fired. The film was a follow-up in the same vein as the hit comedy The In-Laws (1979), both co-starring Falk and Alan Arkin; the studio wasn’t happy with the result and re-cut it. John regretted doing the movie at all, though he got much-needed bucks. Later, he would say the film shouldn’t be listed among his works. Still, I thought parts of it were hilariously funny, and somehow felt a lot of John’s dark yet exuberant humor, despite the screenplay and the poor re-editing, like some strange mix of Martin and Lewis and Molière. In fact, John loved silly humor, slapstick, and low comedy, and admitted to be a sucker for Jerry Lewis, with whom he hung out a few times in John’s early days at Paramount. Jerry would recall, fondly, “John was a pushover for a laugh—one of the great laughers.”
Over the phone, John told of getting his routine checkup for insurance on the picture. For many years, it was the same doctor at every studio, and he had examined Cassavetes often. “When he saw me,” John said, “the doctor broke down!” He imitated the man’s anguished, tearful tone: “Oh, no; oh, no, John, not you! Oh, God!” John broke up laughing. “This is what the doctor says to me: ‘Oh, God, John, not you!’” He laughed even louder. I did, too, but then said, “That’s not funny, John.” Though I’d heard he was ill, I didn’t know the seriousness of it; this was John’s way of telling me. “I don’t know,” John insisted, “it’s pretty funny,” and laughed infectiously again. Supposedly, the doctor covered for John, and didn’t report the gravity of his condition. The rigors of shooting didn’t help, though he had conclusively stopped drinking and smoking.
Toward the end
of 1985, after I’d had a rough time—for a number of physical, professional and personal reasons—I went for a while on a strict diet of raw fruits and vegetables, and drinking only distilled water. So the next time John and I saw each other was lunch at his place when I brought over two honeydew melons for myself to eat and my own water in a halfgallon glass bottle. Gena and John teased me about that from then on (and we had lunch several times): “Bogdo came over with two melons and water!” Bogdo was John’s and Gena’s nickname for me. Only they and their children have ever called me that.
We would sit out on his covered porch or in the living room and talk up a storm. John looked terrible—emaciated body, bloated stomach—but was always fun to speak with; the conversation was forever real and never bullshit. We were like a couple of underground conspirators in a war that had been going on for decades out there, a war of which we both were veterans by then. So our talks invariably picked up in the middle, as if we had just left off speaking minutes before. There was such unlabored spontaneity with John that although the exact substance of our conversations may fade, what remains is a sense of having gone through life with him those last three years, and of the time being full and enriching.
John was always planning several pictures at once and writing scripts to the end. He would excitedly tell me the plots. One or two he almost made. There was the play Begin the Beguine (he loved that song and the title), about a couple of guys—to be played by Gazzara and Falk—who spend most of their time in a hotel room ordering up hookers over the phone. The girls come in, one after the other, but the only thing the guys want to do with them is talk. That was the play (and maybe a movie): two guys and various hookers speaking about all their lives. They read it a couple of times, went to New York, but things didn’t work out.
Soon after, I had dinner with the three of them, and Gena, and Ben’s wife, Elke, and my then-wife, Louise Stratten, at an Italian restaurant in Hollywood which John used to love. We went there together a number of times, Cassavetes totally unperturbed walking around with his stomach glaringly distended. What a riotous, lovely meal it was, with the stars of Husbands together again, all three picking on each other in traditional ways, always a trifle edgy, the humor sardonic or just silly for a second. John kidded them on the square about not “being available” to start Begin the Beguine as a picture till next winter or something. The implication that he didn’t really have all that long to wait around hung in the air unspoken, but Peter and Ben both took it in with sheepish looks. Yet, of course, John understood: they had to earn a living.
The really sad experience was on She’s DeLovely, another Cassavetes script. John had Sean Penn ready to play the lead role of a pretty violent young man who loves the girl far too much and she him—a kind of street-wise tragic romance which led to trouble, and a passionate redemption. One afternoon, John called to ask a favor. He was prepping this picture with Sean Penn, but knew he couldn’t get insurance as director, unless another director was there as backup in case of emergency. Would I be that guy? Certainly, I said. John thanked me profusely, while I told him it would be an honor and I was confident I wouldn’t be needed. We made a date for him to pick me up in his car and drive over to where Penn was rehearsing a play so the two of us could meet. A day or so later, he drove himself over in his long, old Lincoln convertible, his belly touching the steering wheel, the rest of him now gaunt; he had allowed his hair to go completely gray for years. (John used to color his hair black for pictures and let it go gray in-between. When I asked him about this once, he said, “Of course I do, I’m an actor!”) He insisted on driving, and took us way downtown as we spoke enthusiastically about his movie. Sean Penn acted a bit suspicious of me, and was less than communicative. John did most of the talking. Rehearsals had to go on, so we didn’t stay very long. Driving back, the talk was mainly about how he was going to get the money for the picture.
Further meetings ensued—with agents, and a couple of production outfits, especially Norman Lear’s, which expressed a lot of interest. But everything fell apart when Sean decided he was going to do Casualties of War (1989) first, because it was big money, and off he went. It was a long shoot and by the time he’d get back, it was unlikely Cassavetes would be fit enough. To me, John was just disappointed with Sean. What I didn’t know at the time, and didn’t discover until long after John’s death, was that Penn’s decision to take Casualties was at least partially because John wouldn’t consider anyone else but me as his backup. Evidently, Penn wasn’t thrilled with my being the one to take over a Cassavetes picture, John got angry and told him it was me or nobody, and Sean preferred nobody. So John never made the film. After he died, Nick Cassavetes eventually concluded a deal with Penn and directed him in John’s script, re-titled She’s So Lovely (because of exorbitant costs to the Cole Porter Estate on the use of the word “DeLovely,” which Porter had coined for his song, “It’s DeLovely,” another of John’s favorites). Sean had wanted to direct the movie himself but Gena and Nick owned the rights to the script. Reportedly, Nick and Sean had a rocky time of it during the shooting and all through post-production. Perhaps the result didn’t please either of them, I don’t know, but I never could bring myself to see it. I remember a reading of another Cassavetes script, with Richard Dreyfuss, that was funny and promising, Richard being brilliantly skillful in his rendition of the lead. But nothing ever came of that, either, and John didn’t make another film. Except in his head and on paper.
Cassavetes was amusingly stoic about his terminal illness. One time, commenting on this in relation to his drinking, he said, with aggressive ambiguity, “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!” And then he laughed, mischievously as ever.
Sometimes we would talk for a long time over the phone, especially while Gena was away in New York doing Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988), an obvious reference to A Woman Under the Influence. The shooting schedule kept lengthening, and both John and Gena were miserable apart, counting the days, and then, repeatedly, having to re-count them. They spoke for hours at a time. John would tell me how miserable they both were about the delays and postponements. One time, after she finally got back, I went over for lunch again. While John was washing up, Gena took me on a tour of her vegetable and flower garden. I’d never seen Gena thinner, or more anxious, though she was covering it well by proudly showing me her plants and how well they were doing. She smiled quite often but there was a sad desperation in her eyes. Walking around the side of the hill on which the garden lay, she moved quickly, like a teenager; glad to be out of the house a moment, yet wanting to go back soon.
Except about Gena’s absence, John never once complained to me or in any way expressed suffering. He was always feisty, and his voice never sounded any different. On a visit to the dentist, he had a bad reaction to the treatment and, because of his condition, almost died. He told me about it the next day as though it had sort of happened to him but more to another guy. “That was a close one,” he said with a mixture of awe and astonishment at the danger he had passed.
Less than a year before his death, I invited him to an early screening of my worst film, a comedy starring Rob Lowe, mangled on top of everything else by the producers; with Gena and others from the family, John came. I could tell he was trying to like it—they all were—but the film just didn’t really play. Afterward, John walked over, hugged me and said it wasn’t my “best work,” but not to worry. I appreciated his candor, and behind that John knew I’d agreed to the picture only for the money, and that it had been pure hell to make. Shortly after, there was a writers’ strike and Cassavetes encouraged me in my decision to quit a picture because of the producer, and focus on doing a screenplay based on Larry McMurtry’s 1987 novel Texasville, a sequel to The Last Picture Show, book and movie. He was the first to read the initial draft and the next revision, very encouraging and enthusiastic about each pass. What a rare pal he was, always honest, without even a hint of envy, jealousy, self-pity, competitiveness, judgment—or any of the other
things that ruin friendships.
Early in 1989, John called to say that Opening Night had been invited to open Holland’s popular and prestigious Rotterdam Film Festival in the first week of February. They had offered all expenses for John or Gena or both, but he couldn’t go and she wouldn’t leave him. Might I fly there for him, and represent him after the screening, explain why he wasn’t there, and thank them? Of course, I’d go. John said the festival would pay for Louise to go along. We had just got married, having caused quite a stir in the press.
We spoke a few more times before Louise and I went to Rotterdam. The night before we left he asked me to give his regards to both Rotterdam and Amsterdam—where he had suggested we go after the festival and take a long weekend at a hotel, also on the festival. John had arranged this little vacation for us, he said, because festivals themselves are usually work for someone representing a picture, with so many interviews to give. This was especially so for a new Cassavetes film, John being generally very highly regarded as a filmmaker all over Europe (far more than in America), certainly among the Dutch. We said so-long, we’d see each other as soon as we got back.
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