{"id":83990,"date":"2014-05-17T07:22:54","date_gmt":"2014-05-17T11:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=83990"},"modified":"2015-10-29T15:58:30","modified_gmt":"2015-10-29T19:58:30","slug":"john-and-gena","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=83990","title":{"rendered":"John and Gena"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nIn 1992, Gena Rowlands gave an interview to Gary Indiana for Interview<\/i> 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<\/i>. Cassavetes’ films were always a family affair. <\/p>\n

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<\/i><\/a> \u2026 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. <\/p>\n

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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 \u2026 of having a like-minded community of artists \u2026. 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<\/i> because the money ran out \u2026 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<\/i> (1959) was like a bomb going off. Many people date the birth of independent cinema in America to Shadows<\/i> and to Cassavetes. Faces<\/i> 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<\/i> 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<\/i> and Love Streams<\/i> were not so fortunate. Cassavetes tried to distribute Opening Night<\/i> himself (a financially ruinous choice), and it didn’t go over well, and Love Streams<\/i> 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<\/i> and Shadows<\/i> and Woman Under the Influence<\/i>. <\/p>\n

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Around the time I ripped out the photo of John and Gena, there was a Cassavetes retrospective at Facets, in Chicago. I saw Husbands<\/i> and Opening Night<\/i>. I had never seen any Cassavetes film “on the big screen”. I found Opening Night<\/i> to be actually overwhelming. It’s hard to describe without sounding dramatic. All I know is, I felt completely trapped<\/i> 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<\/i> 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<\/i> harrowing<\/a>, and I look back on my reaction to Opening Night<\/i> as an almost prescient understanding that \u2026 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.<\/p>\n

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\nI am so obsessed with Opening Night<\/i> that I chose it as my “deep focus” film for when Peter Labuza interviewed me for his Cinephiliacs podcast<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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<\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n

He said to me later, “I should have proposed to you immediately when I saw that poster.” <\/p>\n

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.” <\/p>\n

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 \u2026” 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<\/i> about each other. We recognized<\/i> each other.<\/p>\n

Boiled down, his reaction to my news was: “!!!!!!!!”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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><\/a>.) I won’t tell you where to start. Some are more accessible than others. Accessibility is over-rated anyway. All are unforgettable. <\/p>\n

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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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,24,4,3],"tags":[195,550,2293,1259],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83990"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83990"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109477,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83990\/revisions\/109477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}