[...] 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.