Everett Chambers, a television casting director on NBC’s Philco Playhouse and subsequently a good friend, said Cassavetes was the most persistent unemployed actor he ever saw. Cassavetes would come to his office; Chambers would, only half-facetiously, yell at him to get out and throw a telephone book at him; and Cassavetes would return the next week without fail. At one point, Cassavetes chained himself to a radiator at CBS to force them to give him a walk-on in You Are There. Underneath the nutty behavior, it was an extremely discouraging time. Cassavetes later said he could never afterward bear to ride the New York subway because it reminded him of these days of round-making. The problem Cassavetes and his friends were up against was that Actors Studio graduates were the only ones taken seriously by the early television producers.

The only anecdote I am aware of from this period in Cassavetes’ life describes how the production featured three knock-out beautiful actresses in small parts and how he used to go on stage to talk to them between acts. He would get a little carried away by the conversations at times so that one day, when the stage manager opened the curtain, Cassavetes was still sitting on a sofa on stage talking to the girls. Since the set was supposed to be the living room of a penthouse on the ninetieth floor, for years afterwards every time Skulnick and Worth ran into him they would remind him of the time he dove headfirst out of the window from the top of a skyscraper.

When Cassavetes told him he was an actor, Shaw said he wanted to help him in any way he could. The older, more experienced man immediately ‘adopted’ the younger. Shaw would be one of Cassavetes’ closest friends and collaborators for more than thirty years – initially introducing him to most of the movers and shakers of the New York artistic and cinematic scene, and subsequently advising and doing uncredited photogra- phy on Shadows; producing or co-producing Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Gloria and Love Streams; and (with the assistance of his daughter Meta and son Larry) doing most of the photography, layout, design and writing for the films’ press packs, theater posters and newspaper ad-campaigns.

Shaw was a more worldly and slightly younger version of Cassavetes’ own father, with a similar reverence for art and artists, and brought to the relationship a vision of film’s artistic importance that inspired Cassavetes. Shaw believed in the importance of art and treated Cassavetes as an artist, in the most exalted sense of the word. He had boundless faith in and unfeigned enthusiasm for Cassavetes’ projects, no matter how uncommercial. Cassavetes’ ad hoc ‘repertory company’ would later consist of individuals of varied backgrounds and interests. Some were actors of the highest level of accomplishment (Rowlands, Falk, Gazzara and Cassel), others had technical abilities (Bo Harwood’s musical ability, George Sims’ and Mike Ferris’s abilities with a camera, George Villaseñor’s editing skills), and still others had organization skills (Al Ruban and Moe McEndree’s ability to run the business side of a production). But Shaw was the ‘poet’ in the group – less interested in lenses, focus and f-stops than in the ‘music’, ‘poetry’ and ‘truth-telling’ power of a work (to invoke terms frequently on Shaw’s lips).

In early 1956, Cassavetes and Lane rented a room on an upper floor of the Variety Arts Building at 225 West 46th Street (the site of the old Malin Studios) and invited friends to come and read scenes with them. A few months later they moved into the vacant ground floor which was available for around $800 a month. It had not been used for years and was a complete wreck. Lane and the actor-students threw up interior walls to make a few small offices, a medium-sized classroom and a practice stage. Everything was done on a shoestring and the result was not very fancy. The stage was tiny and interrupted at one end by a stanchion that supported the floor above. Stage lighting was provided by a single ceiling spotlight in front and seating consisted of four rows of folding chairs (which were later replaced with seats from a razed movie theater) – thirty or forty seats in all, which was at least twenty more than they needed. Since the room was not soundproofed, the thumps of dance classes on the floor above could be heard throughout the day. The official name of the group was ‘The Cassavetes–Lane Drama Workshop’, but most of the students simply called it ‘Variety Arts’ or the ‘Workshop’.

The workshop was extremely small and fairly informal, with classes held in the evenings a few nights a week. Initial membership was almost entirely by invitation, with only seven or eight actors involved at the start (though the number doubled in the first few weeks). The workshop was divided into groups based on experience. Lane worked with the beginners and intermediate students, and Cassavetes worked with the advanced group, where some of the actors had a little previous experience. Hugh Hurd had done some television and film work, including singing in the chorus in Carmen Jones, and had met Cassavetes earlier in 1956 when they acted together in Edge of the City (though Hurd’s role is so small it is uncredited in Ritt’s film). Tom Allen and Cliff Carnell had done a little prior television and stage work. Tony Ray and Lelia Goldoni arrived a few months later. Ray had had a small part in Anthony Mann’s Men at War and had done some soap-opera acting. Goldoni was an eighteen-year-old from Los Angeles who had danced a little with Lester Horton and studied drama with Jeff Corey but never performed professionally. If truth be told, the members of Cassavetes’ group joined more because they hoped the connection with Cassavetes might lead to a paying job than out of a desire to take classes.

[...] To an interviewer who visited the workshop, Cassavetes somewhat vaguely described the classes as being designed to teach students to act ‘naturally’, so that their work didn’t look ‘staged’ or ‘artificial’. He said his goal was to bring ‘realism’ back to acting, and that the highest compliment that could possibly be paid to one of his actors was to say that he or she didn’t appear to be ‘acting’, but simply ‘living’ his character. The journalist regarded the explanation as fairly trite until Cas- savetes added that the ‘artificiality’ of the expression of emotion was more than a dramatic problem. It was a problem in life. The young actor argued that most lived experiences were as ‘staged’ and ‘artificial’ as most dramatic experiences, and that the real problem ‘for modern man’ (as Cassavetes inflatedly put it) was ‘breaking free from conventions and learning how to really feel again’. It was a daring leap: lived experience could be as much a product of convention as dramatic experience, and in fact the one sort of convention could be the subject of the other. It was the first and most succinct statement of the subject of Shadows and all of Cassavetes’ later work.

The workshop was founded as a conscious alternative to the Actors Studio. Cassavetes had both personal and intellectual differences with Lee Strasberg’s group. To start with, he was resentful about the power the Studio exerted over casting directors, which he felt was what had held him back early in his career. He was also scornful of what he called the ‘guru’ aspects of the Studio and pointedly described his and Lane’s school as ‘anti-guru’. He felt that the Method was more a form of psychotherapy than acting, and believed that although figures like Clift, Brando and Dean had had a salutary influence on acting in the late forties and early fifties, by the mid-fifties the Method had hardened into a received style that was as rigid, unimaginative and boring as the styles it had replaced ten years earlier. The slouch, shuffle, furrow and stammer had been turned into recipes for profundity. The actor filled the character up with his own self-indulgent emotions and narcissistic fantasies. (The dismissive term Cassavetes and Lane used to described this process was ‘organized introversion’.) Normal, healthy, extroverted social and sexual expression between men and women dropped out of drama. Inward-turned neuroticism became equated with truth. The result was lazy, sentimental acting.

Though most reviewers treated Shadows as being about race problems, Cassavetes always thought of the film as more personal. Almost all of the scenes were based on his own experiences and feelings. In his early auditioning days, Cassavetes had once sung ‘A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody’ to introduce a girlie line in the Hudson Theater and been humiliatingly told to ‘shut up, sit down, and let the girls come on’ in his place. Many of the characters had parts of him in them. Ben’s aimless alienation and cruising for girls was not only modeled on Cassavetes’ own jobless drifting and carousing with his two roommates in the early fifties, but figured a lonely, nighttime, wandering side of his personality that endured throughout his life. Lelia’s romantic impulsiveness, Rupert’s and Hugh’s belief that friendship was more important than business, and Tom’s tirade about colleges and professors all embodied aspects of his feelings and beliefs. Though the relevant scenes were later cut from the print that comes down to us, it is also significant that Shadows initially focused on the idea that Tony ‘stole’ David’s girlfriend, which tied in with Cassavetes’ competitiveness with other men about women. Hugh represented the side of Cassavetes that felt drained by and resentful of the demands placed on him to do things for others. (Cosmo Vitelli would later constitute an even more extended self-portrait of this side of Cassavetes’ per- sonality – the part of him that in his view of himself did everything for everyone else and nothing for himself.) Most profoundly of all, Ben’s and Hugh’s relationship mirrored the relationship of Cassavetes and his older brother Nick. Hugh was a version of Nick – dutiful, responsible, hardworking and somewhat frustrated; while Cassavetes was a version of Ben – a self-centered slacker, who mooched off his older brother in the early part of the decade, and then watched him experience a discouraging series of setbacks to his career and finances at the end of it.

Beyond these specific references, the general subject of Shadows was close to Cassavetes’ view of his own situation at this point in his life. He thought of himself as doing the same thing in his world as Lelia and Ben did in theirs. In their different ways, he and they were attempting to ‘pass’ for something that was not necessarily a reflection of their true identities. As would be the case with all of his subsequent works, the issues in the film were close to Cassavetes’ heart. He could not satirize or mock characters who were so similar to him.

Both the conception and the style of Shadows were indebted to the neorealists. The young actor went to the Thalia frequently in the fifties and was deeply affected by the work of Visconti, de Sica and Rossellini, which was just making its way to the United States at that point. Cassavetes was also familiar with other New York-based independent film that preceded his own work. Commentators who regard him as ‘the first independent’ are only displaying their ignorance of the history of independent American film, which goes back to the early 1950s. Cassavetes was personally fond of the work of Morris Engel, Lionel Rogosin and Shirley Clarke, which he had seen before he began Shadows. He was particularly fond of Engel’s The Little Fugitive, Lovers and Lollipops and Weddings and Babies, and Rogosin’s On the Bowery. (I would note that although Cassavetes mentions Godard in the following statement from the mid-seventies, the works of the French New Wave had not been released in the United States at the time Shadows was begun.)

Another difference between the methods of Cassavetes and Strasberg was that Cassavetes studiously shunned group discussions of character. Actors developed their characters separately and even kept secrets from each other about what their character felt, wanted or knew. If two actors discussed their roles with each other, they might unconsciously incorporate each other’s views into their own and play their relationship falsely. Cassavetes wanted his actors to defend independent understandings of experience. One of the practical ramifications of this approach was that in his later films, at the start of the shoot, Cassavetes would promulgate a rule actually forbidding the actors to discuss their characters with each other. They were their characters; they entered into their characters’ viewpoints; they justified their characters’ understandings of life and defended their characters against attacks from others – all of which would be negated by leaving their characters behind ironically to comment on them or analytically discuss them with other actors between scenes. As Gena Rowlands later put it, ‘You were never to talk about your character with other actors. Not a word. Nothing.’

[...] Back in January, on Amos Vogel’s recommendation, Cassavetes had invited Albert Johnson, a programmer for the San Francisco Film Festival, to attend the Youngstein screening. Johnson not only loved Shadows but, by sheerest chance, had been asked to write a piece on the contemporary film scene for Film Quarterly. In early April, after shooting on The Middle of Nowhere wrapped, Cassavetes took a trip to Lon- don, and by coincidence, Johnson’s glowing review of Shadows had just appeared in print. Only a few months earlier, Jonas Mekas’s ‘New York Letter: Towards a Spontaneous Cinema’ had been published in Sight and Sound. Both articles championed Shadows as one of the most important films of the era. It was a textbook lesson in how a couple of perceptive critics could actually change the history of film. In England, other than those two articles, Shadows was a completely unknown, unscreened film with no commercial backing or sponsorship. But on the basis of Mekas’s and Johnson’s words Cassavetes received an offer to screen the film that would directly lead to its first commercial booking and a distribution deal. In his absent-minded way, Cassavetes almost blew the whole thing before it started by forgetting to provide the print. Fortunately, a few days before the screening, Penelope Houston called Cassel to find out why it hadn’t shown up.

McSorley gave Cassavetes a crash-course in screenwriting, and the two men worked together intermittently over the next five years on a variety of projects. Cassavetes later said that McSorley taught him the three most important things he knew: 1) that character was more important than plot, and that the most important thing of all was to present characters truthfully; 2) that the artist should not explain or define too much, or ‘do too much thinking for the audience’, but that the story should ‘evolve, so that people could understand it only gradually as it went along’; 3) that ‘style is truth’ and all that really mattered was that every scene should be as true to life, truthful about the characters and their real feelings and behavior, as possible.