John Cassavetes Film Retrospective (2001)
‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective’ (Bregman Films)
“You Must Be Willing To Risk Everything To Really Express It All.”
John Cassavetes
John Cassavetes Film Retrospective (2001)
‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective’ (Bregman Films)
Throughout the 1980s John Cassavetes’ Films and Film Retrospectives of his directing work played on TV in my home country the Netherlands, where John Cassavetes has quite a bit of a following, but I was still too young to really consciously appreciate him before he died at age 59 in 1989, after appearing in many films over the course of three decades and leaving 9 directing works behind.
In my young opinion in those days anyone with their hands on a 16mm camera was pretty cool, James Dean, Dennis Hopper, Jim Morrison, Jack Kerouac, and John Cassavetes. I didn’t know a thing about filmmaking then but they seemed of a different generation than the guys with the heavy 35 mm cameras sitting on their directing chairs or descending on cranes, like I’d seen in a few pictures and in films like ‘Sunset Blvd.’ These younger guys, even though not of my generation at all, just seemed cool somehow and as a teenager I was intrigued.
I was in my senior year in High School when John Cassavetes died, and Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival was put on the map that same year of 1989 with the direct sale of Stephen Soderbergh’s ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’ for distribution right there at the Festival, suddenly giving every young, aspiring filmmaker from there on in their independent film dream, Sundance.
Despite not knowing anything about the craft, and having no way of knowing really in those days, I had already made up my mind about becoming a filmmaker when I was still in High School in Leiden and 3 years after graduation in 1989, in 1992, at age 19, and by myself and not knowing anyone in the US, I left the Netherlands on a 5-year International Student Visa to study Film in Los Angeles, after legal enrollment at Los Angeles City College.
I attended from 1992 through 1994 and always intended to transfer to UCLA to get an MFA in Film, and get into Sundance. But life took very different turns, and in 1993 I got hired at the Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex. In 1994 I came out as lesbian, and in 1996 my sexual orientation complication my immigration status under the Defense Of Marriage Act, which eventually got struck down in 2015.
All throughout the 1990s I worked at art house movie theater chain The Laemmle Theatres where I witnessed the whole new independent film movement of the 90s happening right in front of me, attending Film School in the meantime and catching John Cassavetes’ films every chance I got at Sherman Torgan’s New Beverly Cinema.
In 2001 there was a sudden renewed interest in John Cassavetes, after several small film retrospectives, usually partial ones and far and few in between, with the publishing of three new books about him, ‘John Cassavetes: Life Works’ by Tom Charity and Ray Carney’s ‘Shadows’ in the BFI Classics Series and his definitive biography ‘Cassavetes on Cassavetes.’
The latter also became the blueprint for the equally definitive 3-hour long John Cassavetes documentary ‘A Constant Forge’ by Charles Kiselyak, for inclusion in a brand-new Criterion Collection ‘John Cassavetes: 5 Films’ DVD Box Set.
Knowing of the publishing dates of the books, having preordered them directly from John Cassavetes author Ray Carney, and the plans for the Criterion Box-Set, I decided to approach the Laemmle Theatres with an idea for a Cassavetes Film Retrospective, produced, programmed and organized by me, and featuring Cassavetes’ entire work as a a director, as well as the Elaine May directed ‘Mikey and Nicky’ and the Los Angeles Premiere of the Cassavetes documentary ‘A Constant Forge: The Life and Art of John Cassavetes.’
Together with my creative partner at Bregman Films, Mario Luza, I programmed the line-up and ordered the prints, wrote, designed, printed and distributed the flyers and posters, facilitated and moderated the Q & A’s with Cast and Crew, and set up all press interviews, and organized the West Coast Premiere of ‘A Constant Forge,’ right before the TV premiere on IFC and inclusion in the Criterion Collection ‘John Cassavetes: 5 Films’ DVD Box Set.
All 11 films took place over the course of three months in the Fall of 2001 at two Laemmle Theatre locations simultaneously, the Sunset 5 in West Hollywood and the Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica where all the Q & A’s took place, and where I used to work from 1993 through 2001.
I had caught the classics of the New Hollywood of the 70s about a decade late on TV in the 80s in the Netherlands, but was right on time for the new independent film movement of the 1990s, working at the Laemmle Theatres.
After numerous creative attempts to get something like my life story out into the world, through novels, journals, screenplays and even poetry, and starting from Super 8 film to eventually go digital on the then available mini-DV, I discovered or rediscovered or finally properly discovered John Cassavetes in the late 90s and it changed everything about the way I looked at filmmaking.
Cassavetes had done for filmmaking what in my mind Jack Kerouac and Anais Nin and Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway all in their own ways had done for writing, and specifically my writing. They didn’t just write but revolutionized the whole medium. (I got over most of those writing influences eventually but they were all instrumental in informing my own writing.)
And John Cassavetes was in a sense a follow up to the Italian Neo-Realists and the French New Wave and even somewhat in line with Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee, but also entirely original in his own right. It was like there was John Cassavetes, and then there was everyone else, for me. He had his entirely own philosophy to both life and film.
The key to his meandering, “deceptively simple” but gut wrenching family dramas is simply the stripping away of all the superficial tricks we use to protect ourselves, to get to the brutal honesty, deep vulnerability, emotional integrity, and always in the end love, not necessarily pretty but love all the same, that we hold inside of us as human human beings.
And I use the term deceptively simple only because of the films’ seeming lack of plot, the same way the Neo-Realist films felt “simple” but within their stories contained the entire range of human experience.
I saw a wonderful review on Todd Haynes’ ‘Carol’ several years ago, by Francine Prose, titled ‘Love is the Plot,’ and I couldn’t help but immediately think that this should be the perfect collective title for all of John Cassavetes’ work. (Film professor and Cassavetes biographer Ray Carney already came up with a pretty perfect way of summing up John’s work though, through his book ‘The Adventure of Insecurity.’ I love both titles though and they both apply.)
I also can’t help but think everyone I appreciate has been to some extent inspired by Cassavetes and thought I saw some of that come through in Phyllis Nagy’s fantastic screenplay. I’m usually not completely off about Cassavetes’ influence, and while I’m talking on a level of primarily interaction between characters, the meandering between people, the missed opportunities of desperate personal expressions, the missed connections between characters, etc., anyone watching Cate Blanchett in ‘Carol’ could definitely recognize, visually at least, a Gena Rowlands in ‘Opening Night.’
And speaking of love being the plot, it has always struck me as strange that people have differentiated between character-driven and plot-driven films to begin with, since a screenwriter knows that character is plot. Plot is of course supposed to come forth from a character’s inner need and not primarily from external events happening to a character.
So Cassavetes’ films contain indeed a lot of plot, as the character’s are always driven by the need for love, whether openly embracing it, like most of the characters played by Cassavetes’ real life wife Gena Rowlands, or hiding it, denying it, resisting it, falsifying it, like many of his male characters.
My creative, filmmaking partner Mario Luza and I produced the John Cassavetes Film Retrospective ‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective’ in 2001 as a labor of love, and out of nothing but pure respect for our favorite filmmaker ever John Cassavetes.
We had also wanted to make it our core mission with the Film Retrospective to make a young, new generation of filmmakers aware of Cassavetes’ work, and to be able to see them on the big screen as they were intended to be seen and weren’t shown nearly enough.
We designed and distributed flyers all over Los Angeles where we thought we could find these new filmmakers, (hitting up every film school, acting school, art house, playhouse and coffeehouse in town to drop off a stack of flyers,) and the Cassavetes Retrospective became an enormous success not just because of film lovers and but because of the infectious enthusiasm of actual young filmmakers, new to his films and most eager to learn.
In this, and not necessarily box-office grosses, which were in fact very satisfactory as well, it was a total success for us. (It turned out to become one of the top retrospectives in Laemmle history.) But no industry professionals were specially notified or invited, no notifications to the Guilds or in the Trades, and discounts were given to film students instead.
Books by Boston University film professor and John Cassavetes expert Ray Carney were sold in the lobby, in addition to the screenings, so the audience members could take something lasting home from the 3 month-long Film Retrospective.
‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective’ (2001) was officially sponsored by the Laemmle Theatres, IFP/West (now Film Independent,) and Venice Magazine. The Film Retrospective was made possible with the participation of John Cassavetes Cast and Crew actors Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel, Lelia Goldoni and Lynn Carlin, and music composer and sound person Bo Harwood and camera operator Michael Ferris.
Gary Oldman interviewed John Cassavetes’ wife and longtime collaborator Gena Rowlands at the Cassavetes house for Nancy Bishop’s Venice Magazine, and Chuck Wilson interviewed Gena Rowlands for The LA Weekly, excerpts by and pictures of John Cassavetes were used with Ray Carney’s and Michael Ferris’ permission. Camera operator Michael Ferris was interviewed about his work on John Cassavetes’ films by Mike Plante for his Cinemad Magazine. Group photos were taken by Jen Tierney and Nicky Orlandou and used with their permission.
The John Cassavetes Film Retrospective ‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective’ is a Bregman Films’ Original Production, All Rights Reserved 2001.
(Bregman Films is comprised of Film Producers and Documentary Filmmakers Gabriella Bregman and Mario Luza. We are currently in production of an LGBTQ Immigration documentary called of ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights.’)
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Brief Bio:
My name is Gabriella Bregman, I am a Writer-Filmmaker-Producer.
I identify as a Gender Nonconforming Lesbian, (“non-op”) Trans-Masculine, am Bi-Racial (white & Asian,) from the Netherlands, and Los Angeles-based.
My pronouns are: they/them/theirs.
I also go by Orlando, as in Gabriella Orlando Bregman, (in a nod to Virginia Woolf.)
I am currently in production of a Feature Documentary titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights’ through Los Angeles-based Film Production Company Bregman Films.
The Documentary is about LGBTQ US-Immigration Exclusion-Policy, including my personal story of US immigration discrimination as International Film Student under DOMA (Defense Of Marriage Act, 1996–2015.)
It is based on the book ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights & Other Essays’ (2020.)
The John Cassavetes Film Retrospective ‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective’ at the Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles is a Bregman Films Production (2001.)
I am the Founder of a Nonprofit Film Organization The Auteur (2020)(theauteur.org) and an accompanying Film Theory & Film Criticism Publication The Auteur: An Independent Filmmakers Publication at medium.com/theauteur
A small book of Film Theory essays titled ‘Notes for a New Independent Film Movement’ will also be published in 2020, including a 4-Point Film Manifesto for a new Independent Film Movement.
And a related, untitled Feature Documentary project is in early development stages.
Thank you for reading,
The Auteur
An Independent Filmmakers Publication
