As Cassavetes worked on the film, Cosmo grew into a reflection on male psychology. In particular, he represented a meditation on aspects of Ben Gazzara’s off-camera personality. Gazzara was similar to Cosmo in many deep and half-veiled respects – most notably in his devotion to living a life of ‘style’ and ‘class’ and his interest in ‘looking good’ and being the center of attention in a group. Cassavetes was fascinated with this aspect of Gazzara’s personality because he shared some of its qualities, including the love of costumes, corsages and limos. (The ‘style’ issue was possibly suggested to Cassavetes by Carver’s Capone, which briefly raises it in a scene in which Capone comically attempts to play golf at a country club.) It’s hard not to see a portrait of Cassavetes’ older brother in Cosmo.

Shortly after he got married in the mid-fifties, Nicholas Cassavetes took a big gamble and left his metallurgist job to become a stockbroker at E. F. Hutton. In 1957, when the market went down, he lost thousands of dollars of his own and his friends’ investments. With the sense of dutifulness that had defined his entire life, he was overcome with feelings of personal responsibility and attempted to make good on many of the losses. He died a short time later, never having finished the repayments. The obvious question is where our responsibilities to others end and our responsibilities to ourselves begin. Cassavetes had been asking it since he created the character of Hugh in Shadows.