When I got back home from Florida, I bumped into some friends of mine – funny, funny guys who said, ‘Hey, John, we just signed up at the American Academy to become actors, man! Come with us – the school is packed with girls!’ So I went home to ask my family for some loot. I went to my father and said, ‘I don’t want to go to college. I want to be an actor and go to this school.’ That was a lie, of course; I just wanted to be near all those girls. My mother said, ‘An actor?!’ But my father – he was very disappointed about my leaving college – said, ‘At least it’s something, let him be something!’

Then he gave me this very solemn look and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m really going to get it.’ And he said, ‘That’s a very noble thing to do. Do you know what kind of responsibility that is? You are going to be representing the lives of human beings. You will speak for all the people who have no voice.’

Nothing changes from where you are right now. Nothing will ever change except your own attitudes. Nothing. You’ll be put down. And you’ll get better. And you’re stupid, just stupid, if you get put down and you don’t find some way to fight that put-down. The main thing of being an actor or an actress is you have to fight the put-downs in yourself. You have to keep your mind’s eye view of what you think you are. You’ve got to keep it when you’re twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy – as long as you’re acting. As long as you’re doing it, you have to keep your own mind’s eye image because, when you get to be my age, what are you going to do? You’ll be impotent. The loss of your own unique thoughts and feelings makes it impossible to make a film that expresses what you’re trying to say.

Since none of us had any money, we had to use our wits. We had to get girls to give us their apartment, come in and cook for us, bring food over. We found that trying to get along with actresses who are broke too is no good. We had to go out and find people who weren’t actresses – airline hostesses, women who worked in grocery stores who could pick up some groceries for us. We had to find librarians to get a better book collection, and stuff like that. We had a wonderful time. I couldn’t wait for the next day to come so I could get involved with some new girl and promise to marry her and then stop seeing her. In those days, I promised to marry just about every girl I took out. I felt if that’s what they wanted to hear, that’s what I’d tell them.

When an actor is out of work a long time, he grows self-centered and bitter. I know. I went through it for five years. I used to walk around angry all the time. You get so wrapped up in your personal worries and miseries, you lose interest in other people. That’s deadly for anyone – especially an actor. Watching people is the only way to discover what they’re like. How else can you expect to understand them?

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).

When I told Sam I wanted to act in films he went to an agent, Robert Lang, and said he’d found a boy who was a great writer. And he showed a lot of old, unused filmscripts by the top boys as if they were mine. Naturally this agent is impressed and wants to sign me. But my friend explained how I’m an eccentric and, in spite of my literary genius, my great ambition is to be an actor. ‘Sign him as an actor,’ he said. ‘And then he’ll do the scripts for you.’ The agent agrees. I spilled a little soup on my collar before we met and sure enough I get a feature part on television. After a while he stopped asking me about the scripts.

It’s that terrible ego. What I mean is: don’t be ashamed of your ego. Because it’s the only thing that’s gonna carry you through. Can you imagine going on a show and saying, ‘Jeez, I have to put all this armor on and I’m not gonna be good doing “Hark!” the best that ever was?’ An actor is a rare animal. He only feels what he feels and is completely unaware of what anyone else feels. He’s a passionate person – passionate to the point where he has no logic as far as the rest of the world goes. He’s a person that has got to believe a dream. In other words, there’s a character. You read it – Dr. Wasserman – and you must play Dr. Wasserman to the point where society doesn’t bother you anymore. The life and love of this person must be the only important thing to you at this time. The person who is affected by society, and worries whether he’s making a good impression or people like him, fails because he’s not in what he’s supposed to be in, not fully concentrated on what he is, does not believe – and therefore cannot spin the dream that is so important to making films, theater or anything theatrical.

When his work doesn’t satisfy him, the actor can grow bitter. He knocks everything – knocks the political life, life in America, other actors, knocks himself – everything. That happens when an actor wants something so greatly and in his own mind doesn’t believe that he will ever achieve it. He has discovered for himself that he will never be a great actor. So he goes out to get something else – material gains – and the material gain, even if he achieves that, is not what he really wants. His motivation, his life’s force, is slowed up to a halt, and he has to go and get another reason to go on in order to survive. So it becomes money or success, or the cocktail party, or knowing people, being able to say hello to more important people than himself.