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.