In 1992, Gena Rowlands gave an interview to Gary Indiana for Interview magazine. It was a generous interview, with a gorgeous spread of photographs, many of them taken by the legendary Sam Shaw (who took so many famous photos of Marilyn Monroe, among others). Shaw was a family friend, deeply involved in their films (sometimes as producer), and his son, Jakob Shaw, played the son of Robert Harmon (played by Cassavetes) in Love Streams. Cassavetes’ films were always a family affair.
There was something about this one particular image, of John and Gena with their dog, that spoke to me. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I also loved the placement of the Ben Gazzara quote in the lower right-hand corner. I was living in Chicago at the time. It was a million years ago. A crazy and idealistic time. I ripped the pages of the magazine out, trying to keep it intact, and then took the two pages to a photocopy place and they Xeroxed it for me. You can still see the rip down the center. I had it framed. That image has been on my wall ever since. I have lived all over the place. It has been everywhere with me. Even if I ever found an original of the image, sans rip, and sans Ben Gazzara quote, I wouldn’t want to replace it. Because so much of who I am, who I wanted to be, what I dream about, is wrapped up in that particular copy, and the rip is part of it, the quote is part of it. This is why, when I received an email from a producer at Criterion, asking me to write an essay about Gena Rowlands’ acting for the upcoming release of Love Streams … well. It felt right, it felt meant to be. I’ve written about a lot of actors. The producer could have seen my writing on Dean Stockwell and asked me to write something about him, or about Howard Hawks, or about Jean Arthur, or any number of people I have written about on my site. I haven’t written all that much about Gena Rowlands. It’s too intense. Too personal.
I had discovered the films of John Cassavetes in high school (thanks to Roger Ebert’s reviews), and the thought of them, the very IDEA of them, were a guiding force in the choices I made in my life. I know I am not alone. The ideal … of having a like-minded community of artists …. actually existed in the two of them. It was not an easy choice for either of them to make, and they went through the wringer multiple times, mortgaging their home, scrapping together every last dollar, stopping filming of Opening Night because the money ran out … and after all of that, to still not find distribution for their films. Many of them never got theatrical runs. Of course they had successes. Shadows (1959) was like a bomb going off. Many people date the birth of independent cinema in America to Shadows and to Cassavetes. Faces was another hit (Cassavetes’ screenplay was nominated for an Oscar). Cassavetes did all the advertising himself, designing the posters (with Sam Shaw) – and, in many cases, going around town and hanging up the posters himself. A Woman Under the Influence was enough of a hit that Gena Rowlands was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar and he was nominated as Best Director. Those were the happy stories. But superb films like Opening Night and Love Streams were not so fortunate. Cassavetes tried to distribute Opening Night himself (a financially ruinous choice), and it didn’t go over well, and Love Streams barely saw the inside of a theater at all. These two films are masterpieces. With the advent of home video, and a VCR in every home, people could actually SEE many of these films, sometimes for the first time. That’s how I saw Faces and Shadows and Woman Under the Influence.
Around the time I ripped out the photo of John and Gena, there was a Cassavetes retrospective at Facets, in Chicago. I saw Husbands and Opening Night. I had never seen any Cassavetes film “on the big screen”. I found Opening Night to be actually overwhelming. It’s hard to describe without sounding dramatic. All I know is, I felt completely trapped by that movie, and felt a dawning dread that I wasn’t going to sleep that night. It tapped into something, some deep mother-lode of anxiety that I couldn’t even look at yet, I couldn’t even acknowledge. I was a young woman then. Opening Night is about being middle-aged. And you know what? I was right to feel dread. My experience in the last 5 years has been fucking harrowing, like Snake Pit harrowing, and I look back on my reaction to Opening Night as an almost prescient understanding that … I would not have an easy time of it, let’s say. That movie was a glimpse of what was to come. I felt it approaching.
I am so obsessed with Opening Night that I chose it as my “deep focus” film for when Peter Labuza interviewed me for his Cinephiliacs podcast.
Back around the same time in Chicago when I ripped the photo out and framed it, I dated Michael for a bit. It was a short relationship, but powerful and intimate, and remains an example to me of what a relationship should be, and that I (who has had a crazy and painful love life) could actually have that kind of relationship. It wasn’t particularly earth-shattering. We were good good friends who also just happened to make out a lot. We were in sync on many important things: the kinds of lives we wanted to live, the things that mattered to us, what made us laugh, our values. We also looked like Grunge-Era Poster Kids about to go on a killing spree, but that’s a side issue. In the beginning stages, we talked about movies all the time. I don’t remember Cassavetes coming up. It was a Tarantino moment in the culture, his earliest films, and we were mainly focused on that. One afternoon Michael came over to my apartment for the first time, and we walked into my room. He saw that image above of John and Gena hanging on the wall and stopped dead in his tracks. He didn’t say anything at the time. He kept his counsel. But he stopped as though he had been stabbed.
He said to me later, “I should have proposed to you immediately when I saw that poster.”
Perhaps only a true John Cassavetes fan would understand why proposing to someone based on a poster on her wall makes perfect sense. (Michael eventually did propose to me, and again, that came out of something Cassavetes-related – he was attending a Cassavetes retrospective by himself in Los Angeles and called me during it to propose. We hadn’t seen each other in 3 years. I said Yes. Listen, when you click you click. No reason to belabor the thing or talk it to death. Obviously, we did not end up getting married, but to date, that’s the closest I’ve come. I’ve had a bunch of proposals. That’s the only one I said Yes to, without hesitation, and we weren’t even in a relationship anymore at that point. That then led to a comedy of errors involving the two of us flying to the middle of the country to meet up in a diner, eat pancakes, and talk it out.) The proposal made perfect sense to me. It would have made sense to John Cassavetes. “You want to get married because you dig her poster of me and my wife? Go for it. You have as much of a shot as any other bozo getting hitched. Maybe even MORE of a shot.”
When I got the gig at Criterion, Michael was one of the few people I told before I wrote about it here and everyone knew. “Michael, you’re not gonna believe what just happened …” And his reaction was what you would imagine, what I counted on. Years later, it’s still the same. We were young when we met, but we knew about each other. We recognized each other.
Boiled down, his reaction to my news was: “!!!!!!!!”
Lee Strasberg once said that “Sometimes you look down at your shoes, and you see your whole life.” That’s what looking at that “poster”, with the rip down the middle, is like for me. My whole life is in it.
If you haven’t seen any of Cassavetes’ films, all I can say is, don’t wait any longer. (You’ll have to wait until August to check out Love Streams.) I won’t tell you where to start. Some are more accessible than others. Accessibility is over-rated anyway. All are unforgettable.
Thank you for this wonderful article. I really wanted to see your essay on Gena Rowlands but unfortunately, I’m living in France so it’s impossible to buy Love Streams’ DVD.
I’m studying cinema in Paris and I’m doing an essay on Gena Rowlands too, in Opening Night and Gloria. If I could translate it into english, I’d be very proud to send you it.
I’m sure you made a great work on that wonderful actress and hope to read it one day !
Have a nice day,
Paola, 21 years old.
PS: you can contact me if you want to talk about her, at my mail adress ! And sorry for my bad english !!
Paola – Thank you so much!!
My essay is actually going to be turned into a little video/documentary – included in the special features of Love Streams. Love Streams isn’t going on sale yet – I’m not sure when that will happen.
It’s been so nice to hear from so many fans from all over who love Gena as much as I do.
Good luck with your essay! I would love to read it if you cared to share. You could email it to me at gibsongirl AT sheilaomalley.com.
Thank you for your sweet reply! I sent you an email, I hope you received it!
Good luck for everything, too.
Paola
I first encountered Gena Rowlands on late-night TV in Minnie and Moscowitz. Immediate fan. Then, soon after that, I saw that Gloria was going to be playing at a small local theater. That was the first time I ever took date-planning out of a guy’s hands. He was waffling around about what we should do that night, and I said, “I’m going to go see Gloria. It starts at 7. That’s what I’m going to be doing. You’re invited along.” To his credit, he fell right in line.
About the magazine — there was something in those days about being fascinated with someone and you can’t talk to anyone in your circle because they would just be all blank and “who’s that?”…then a magazine comes to your house and you open it and there’s an article about that person, and then you know you’re not the only person in the world who is fascinated. It’s like a…I don’t know if talisman is the right word. I kept a magazine feature about Sandra Cisneros for years until it was in tatters.
// “I’m going to go see Gloria. It starts at 7. That’s what I’m going to be doing. You’re invited along.” //
Bybee – that is awesome! I would totally go along on such a great date-invite!
Minnie & Moskowitz is so great. I re-watched it a couple of times as I was researching this essay. Her drunk fall down the stairs is still, after so many times seeing it, simply incredible to me. It is clearly her doing it. I love Gena Rowlands drunk. I mean, the whole final section of Opening Night is her TRASHED and going onstage to do the play that way. Incredible!!
And yes, you’re right about the magazine thing! Interview used to be so good that way – I was a subscriber for years and finally stopped when … well, the magazine went down the tubes. It just wasn’t the hip and weird thing that it used to be. It became like any other magazine. But back in the day – it would do giant interviews with someone like Gena Rowlands just because.
I remember some of the interview almost word for word – it’s not online, but the producer at Criterion tracked it down through eBay, I think – so I finally got to read it again and refer to it! I quote it in my piece! So it’s all connected.
// the producer at Criterion tracked it down through eBay, //
They did this. Another reason why Criterion is awesome.
Helena – I know, right? And she had done so much research already – I was proud that I actually knew of an article that she didn’t!!
Here’s one of the quotes I remember from the interview – and I really wanted to use it in my piece, but couldn’t remember it word for word: Gena said at one point that on nights when she was lonely (“white nights” I remember her calling them) – she would think about her characters, the ones she had played, and wonder “how they were doing”.
It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. That’s how real these people are to her. Its like, if she COULD drop them a postcard and find out how they were doing, she WOULD.
I also remembered that she said she thought that “Mabel and Nick” from Woman Under the Influence were probably doing really well and having a lot of fun together, that they made it as a couple and things turned out well for them. If you’ve seen Woman then you know that that is a VERY optimistic point of view – but it sort of encapsulates Gena’s very very positive humanist approach.
So those were my vague memories from that original interview – which I haven’t read since 1992 – and I wanted to use both of those quotes in whatever piece I wrote – and the producer, bless her, found it on iBay, scanned the whole thing, and sent it to me – so I got to read it again! And there they were, the exact quotes I needed. Just as I remembered them.
So so awesome.
Ha! Just amazing.
Pre-internet … it’s a cliche, but you had to hunt down and literally hold on to something important to you if it appeared in print like this. It got seared into your brain.
Sheila,
What are your thoughts about that famous/infamous scene between Peter Falk and Delores Delmar in Husbands? I ask, because I was just thinking about it, about how it horrified me so much when I saw it (when I was young) that I stopped watching the movie and never watched another Cassavetes movie, which I realize was an extreme and no doubt unwise reaction. I just chased it down on Youtube and watched it again, and it had exactly the same effect on me. When I watch it, I’m not thinking about the characters–I’m thinking about the actress. It just seems so wrong. Where’s my mistake?
Yeah, that’s a pretty brutal scene. I just watched it again. I think, though, that seen in another light – the calmness of the woman wins in the end. He ditches her, basically flees into the night, and her reaction is almost blasé, whatever, back to the craps table. He didn’t hurt her, or destroy her. He wanted to because he’s being a douchebag, and he’s a Boy out on the Town – but she’s got her own complicated shit going on, and is actually up for playing around – and he recoils. It says something terrible about HIM, not her.
That movie is not one of his most successful – in my opinion – although I love all three of those guys.
You should definitely see more. Cassavetes loved old people, old women especially – and has many interesting scenes with them in other films. There’s an incredible scene in Faces where Seymour Cassel, a hot and sexy party-boy dances around with an older woman who basically doesn’t want to accept that just because she is a certain age she should be invisible, and not want sex anymore. She is drunk and in many ways “pathetic” – but Seymour Cassel is delighted by her – because she wants to have fun as much as he does. She’s really OUT there, unlike the more “cool” younger ladies sitting around, eyeing him, trying to hedge their bets.
See Woman Under the Influence. That’s probably the one to see, that’s probably the one he is most remembered for – and it’s mainly because of Gena. Peter Falk is unbelIEVable as her husband, trying to deal with her descent into psychosis, and not knowing what to do. Both of them are magnificent.
So I’m not sure. I think in Husbands Cassavetes was interested in showing men letting off steam without the calming effect of women – it’s a precursor to all the Dudebro films going on right now – all of them owe a huge debt to Husbands – and Cassavetes was always more drawn to the company of women. He thought men, on the whole, were morons.
hahaha
But it’s true!
I know what you mean though about that scene. it’s pretty devastating. But I think she comes off looking fine, as eccentric and weird as she is – he comes off looking like the dick.
There’s a great moment in Love Streams that reminds me of that moment in Husbands, although it’s the KIND side of it:
John Cassavetes plays Robert Harmon – an insomniac writer who basically hires young women to live in his house, sleep with him, and entertain him. He is bored out of his mind with everything. He is cynical, over-it, jaded. All of the girls are 19, 20 years old – and he tape records their banal observations, and stands watching two of them shower with a totally bored expression on his face. He haunts night clubs. He’s writing a book about night life in LA. He sees a night club singer, played by young and ravishing Diahann Abbott. The two talk. He tells her she’s beautiful. She’s heard it before. He is a good 20 years older than she is. He gets too drunk. He crashes her car. He insists on coming home with her. He falls down her steps and smashes his face open. She has to basically drag him inside. She is annoyed.
He wakes up the next morning on the couch and is being hovered over by her mother, a delightfully loopy old broad in a kimono who doesn’t seem disturbed by this bloody man in a tuxedo lying on her couch. She bustles about getting him coffee.
Robert Harmon connects, somehow, with the mother. He stares at her. She’s so IN her face, so IN her own life – so different from the blank-eyed young things he sleeps with – that he tells her she’s beautiful, she says, “oh come on now”, and he ends up hugging her tightly, saying, “God, I love you” before heading off into the day. It makes total sense somehow.
Meanwhile, the daughter – Diahann Abbott- looks on at this interaction with this crazy tender expression on her face.
Later, he ends up going over to her house again – ostensibly to keep “courting” the daughter – but it’s REALLY because he just wants to keep hanging out with the mother. And that’s what they do. They put on salsa music, and dance around, and she puts on a crazy costume for him with big flowers in her hair, they get drunk, and laugh uproariously. He appreciates her, he loves it when she dances around. She, an older woman, 50s, 60s, is so free. What is going on between them is not exactly sexual. It’s something else.
Diahann Abbott is like, “Why the hell are you hanging out with my mother? Don’t you want to see ME anymore?”
And he says to her, gently scolding her, “Your mother doesn’t get to go out and show off anymore. Come on.”
He (the director) doesn’t JUDGE the mother for putting on lipstick and flirting with her daughter’s potential beau – he doesn’t shame her for it – He revels in her. He feels bad that once women reach a certain age they’re supposed to “calm down” and put those feelings away. Fuck THAT seems to be his attitude.
Some of these scenes- well, I can see how someone could watch those scenes and think that Cassavetes was making fun of the mother character. But I don’t see it that way at all. I see it as one of the only true connections that his character is able to make in the entirety of the film.
I hope that wasn’t too many words.
Thanks so much–I’m definitely going to check out this one (Love Streams) and eventually the others.
Sheila,
Congratulations on the Criterion project! That is truly awesome for you.
I do love Cassavetes and Rowlands, and have enjoyed reading about them here. My favorite Cassavetes film is Gloria, simply because it was my first exposure to them both. I caught it on cable tv way back in the day … I couldn’t take my eyes off of it, despite the lousy picture and the “edited for television” aspect, and the fact that at the age of 11? 12? it was way over my head, and I probably had no business watching it. I had no idea what to make of Gloria, no idea what was going on or where it was going, and had no understanding of why I was so drawn in by it all. She was — is — the most awe-inspiring tough cookie.
But full confession: I am also crazy about Cassavetes’s tv series, Johnny Staccato. I guess for him it was just a way to pay the bills, but I really enjoyed it. :-) The episode with Gena Rowlands is such fun. The affection between them, on the screen, is palpable.
Thanks so much, Jane!
God, Gloria is just so great. That’s another one that is very hard to find – a quick search on Amazon shows that a used DVD is going for $111. I mean, really.
Gena was the best Tough Cookie ever!!
I know Cassavetes didn’t care for Gloria, mainly because it starts with a family being killed. He did not like violence, there is no violence in his films, and family was so sacred to him that it disturbed him. But yes, Gloria was that rare thing for him – a movie that made money – and that helped make Love Streams possible. So there’s THAT. But I love Gloria. I love the scene when she pops into a bar to have a drink, and is surreptitiously trying to figure out if the little boy is still following her. She’s such a DAME.
Johnny Staccato was awesome!