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Cassavetes created an American form of cinema verite with his innovative camera use, bleak outlook, and emphasis on improvisation. Film critic Ray Carney called him "the father of American independent film".
Cassavetes was born in New York City to Greek immigrants. He grew up in Long Island and attended Colgate University before moving to the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts . On graduation in 1950, he continued acting in the theater. By 1953, he was doing small parts in films; he continued to play a James Dean-like "juvenile delinquent" throughout the 1950s. Cassavetes also acted on television, which was still finding its feet as a medium. His experience working within television's budgetary and schedule limits influenced his later film production style.
During this time he met and married actress Gena RowlandsGena Rowlands (born June 19, circa 1930) is an American actress. Born Virginia Cathryn Rowlands in Cambria, Wisconsin, she attended the University of Wisconsin. Her father was a state Assemblyman. Rowlands appeared in Broadway in the late 1950s, and made, a fellow television actor. By 1956 Cassavetes had begun teaching method actingMethod acting is the endeavour to apply natural rules and laws to the theatre and film acting which can aid an actor with the process of playing a role. This approach, characterized by lack of any specific or technical approach to acting, is usually the a in workshops in New York City. An improvisation exercise in one workshop inspired the idea for his writing and directorial debut, ShadowsThis article is about the 1959 film. For other meanings, see shadow (disambiguation). Shadows is a 1959 improvisational film about interracial relations during the Beat Era. It stars Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, Hugh Hurd and Anthony Ray. It was written (1960). Cassavetes raised the funds for production from friends and family, as well as listeners to a late-night radio talk show.
Cassavetes was unable to get American distributors to carry Shadows, so he took it to Europe, where it won the Critics Award at the Venice Film FestivalThe Venice Film Festival Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica takes place every year in late August/early September on the Lido di Venezia in the historic Palazzo del Cinema on the Lungomare Marconi, in Venice, Italy. Its main award is the "Leone. European distributors later released the movie in the United States as an import.
Although the viewership of Shadows in the United States was slight, it did gain attention from the Hollywood studios. Cassavetes directed two movies for Hollywood in the early 1960s — Too Late Blues and A Pair of Boots — but the experience was exasperating. The intervention of the studios, the lack of creative control, and the over-all dumbing down of his work was unbearable. Cassavetes refused to go through the process again.
His strategy, brought on by necessity, was to work as an actor in mainstream movies, and channel the funds he made there into his work as a director. He didn't just clockwatch as an actor, though; he did masterly work in blockbuster hits of the late 1960s, including World War II epic The Dirty Dozen (1967) — for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting ActorThe Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor is one of the awards given to people working in the motion picture industry by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; nominations are made by Academy members who are actors and actresses. The winners a — and Roman PolanskiRoman Polanski (born August 18, 1933) is a Polish film director and actor. Early Life Roman Polanski was born in Paris as Raimund Liebling to Ryszard Polanski (aka Ryszard Liebling), a Jew, and Bula Polanski (nee Katz), a Roman Catholic. In 1937 his famil's Rosemary's Baby (1968).
His next independent film was FacesFaces was a 1968 movie by John Cassavetes, starring Gena Rowlands. The movie, shot in cinema verite style, concerned the gradual implosion of a marriage, and the emotional neediness of the husband, his wife, and their lovers. The film was nominated for tw, which lay down new themes for later work. Starring Cassavetes's wife Rowlands, Faces depicted a contemporary suburban marriage in the process of slow disintegration, with the accompanying desperate and degrading sexual improprieties. Cassavetes held an unflinching camera on the pettiness and emotional greed of the distancing husband and wife and their lovers, but in the end the pathos of their story gives them an unexpected dignity. Faces was a critical and financial success, nominated for two Academy AwardBob Hope received two honorary Oscars for his contributions to cinema. The Academy Awards (often better known as Oscars) are the most prominent film award in the United States. The Awards are granted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a ps ( Best Supporting Actor and Actress).
After Faces Cassavetes could concentrate more fully on his directorial work. He had enough leverage at this point that he could make movies in the studio system, yet retain full creative control. Husbands (1970) starred Cassavetes himself, with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. They play a trio of men escaping their marriages for minor peccadillos. Another in the 1970s include Minnie and Moskovitz , about a misdirected young woman seeking love, and starring Rowlands again with a small part for Cassavetes's mother, Katherine.
His two masterpieces of the 1970s, however, were made independently. A Woman Under the Influence (1974) stars Rowlands as an increasingly eccentric housewife trying to keep her hold on reality. Peter Falk played her husband, who tries to keep up a facade of normality, but ultimately makes the difficult decision of committing her to a mental institution. The characters were nuanced, and the ethical situations were measured in shades of gray. The wife's behavior, while disturbing and disconcerting for those around her, is not obviously dangerous or unstable. Rowlands is an expert collaborator in the story, playing Mabel with subtlety and energy; she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, while Cassavetes was nominated for Best Director.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) was a movie about the experience of men as much as Influence was about women. Ben Gazzara plays Cosmo Vitelli, a small-time strip-club owner with an out-of-control gambling habit, who is convinced by mobsters to commit a murder to pay off his debt. Driven by fear and uncertainty, Vitelli deceives friend and foe alike. Author Christos Tsiolkas said of Bookie that it showed "being a man means knowing gutlessness better than knowing courage, that failure stays with you long after success."
Cassavetes continued to work through the 1980s, although personal troubles with alcohol were beginning to take their toll. Gloria (1980) is a more conventional thriller starring Rowlands as a mob moll who runs off with a young boy orphaned by the mob and soon to be next. Love Streams (1984) starred Cassavetes as an aging lothario who suffers the overbearing affection of his recently divorced sister. Sadly, Cassavetes's last movie, Big Trouble (1986), was a last-minute project picked up as a favor when a younger director friend peremptorily quit the project. The movie, racked by incompatible studio and director edits, was, in Cassavetes's words, "a disaster". Already ill, he was heartbroken that it would be the last film he would do.
Cassavetes's personality was overpowering and driven. He lived to make film, and sacrificed his colleagues and himself to the process. The intense effort took its toll; an alcoholic , Cassavetes died from cirrhosis of the liver in 1989 at the age of only 59. He was survived by Rowlands, who continued to act, and three children. His son, Nick Cassavetes , followed in his father's footsteps, and made 1997's She's So Lovely from the elder Cassavetes's screenplay, and directed 2004's The Notebook.