Another respect in which Cassavetes and his protagonist are similar is that they were both interested in the power of art and the imagination to transform reality. The routines Cosmo choreographs and his night out with his girls testify that his real love is not naked bodies but the costumes that adorn them. Cassavetes and Shaw frequented strip-clubs less to see exposed skin than to study the art of concealing it. Cassavetes was, in fact, quite conservative in his attitude toward nudity – in life and in art. There are no ‘love scenes’ in his work and extremely few moments in which you see anyone unclothed. Here and in Love Streams, when it came to playing nude scenes, Cassavetes was extremely deferential to his actresses, never asking them to do anything they were personally uncomfortable with or that would violate their sense of modesty. The reason why the two girls Robert Harmon sleeps with in Love Streams are not naked is that, when they expressed shyness about removing their clothes, Cassavetes allowed them to keep them on. In a similar vein, he told his actors and crew to be extremely respectful when they shot the dressing-room scenes in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The line – ‘What kind of strip-joint is this? Nobody takes their clothes off’ – was actually something Gazzara improvised on the spot in response to Cassavetes’ decision to allow his actresses to stay clothed for some of the stage acts.