John Cassavetes and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie: Paying the Price for Your Art (a Tom Charity interview, with my own reflections on John Cassavetes)

I file the work of John Cassavetes - the films he made as director, that is - into seven categories. Which is quite a few, considering that, as director, he only made twelve feature films. The categories (and the films in them) are: 

1. The Cassavetes film that is most important to me, historically: Husbands. 

Saw Husbands on late night TV at age eleven. It fascinated me - it was so raw, so exuberant, so filled with emotion and honesty that even as a kid I was impressed. It was the film that got me obsessed with tracking down other films by Cassavetes, which was not easy to do - few had come out on VHS, and those that had were not at any video store in Maple Ridge when I was growing up.  I have no idea what I make of it now, actually - watching it as an adult, it's a difficult, demanding, problematic, self-indulgent, uncomfortable film that no longer seems like it has answers, which is not how it felt when I was a teenager. Still, it was the film that set the bar for me for what a movie should/ could/ can/ ought to do: to dig into human emotion and drag it kicking into the light, to bust through people's defenses and confront them with real feeling and make them vulnerable to change. Whether I ever actually see the film again, it had a huge formative impact on me. And not just on my relationship to cinema: I'm kind of afraid to show it to my wife, lest she recognize some of me in the film's characters...   

2. The Cassavetes film that I think is objectively his greatest: Faces. 

A harrowing masterpiece about a couple, on the verge of divorce, who each go off on their own "wild nights" in pursuit of some sort of emotional freedom and self-realization that neither end up finding, Faces is energetic enough in how it tackles the traps its characters are in that I never really found it depressing, though friends of mine sure did. Being much closer in age to its characters now, I'm a bit scared to revisit it, but I'm still full of admiration for it, and suspect that, European arthouse be damned, it was Faces that, like the hand reaching down from the heavens to tune the monochord of the universe on the cover of the Harry Smith anthology, gave birth, more than any other single film, to the New American Cinema, setting the tenor for so many films of the 1970's - that without Faces, you wouldn't have Scorsese or Coppola or Altman or Penn or Schatzberg or...  It's my pick for the greatest movie ever made in America: a film shot on handheld cameras in the filmmakers' home, with a cast mostly made up of his friends and, of course, wife (Gena Rowlands at her loveliest). 

3. The Cassavetes film that I love beyond all others, have the deepest personal attachment to: Love Streams.

Love Streams - very much Cassavetes' goodbye to cinema, even if he made one other movie after it was completed - is his sweetest, funniest film (but it takes awhile to get to the sweet and funny parts - it starts out seeming pretty harrowing, too, but you reach a sort of surreal transcendence about the time Gena starts bringing the animals home). This is the Cassavetes film that first saw me interviewing Tom Charity, sixteen years ago. It's also a film I'm still annoyed with Criterion about, for having snipped a brief bit of nudity from their release of it. This relates to news I broke in regard to the 2006 screening, years before the Criterion blu got announced, which I was shocked to see ended up being the same. I took it up with them on their website, they justified themselves, pointing to Michael Ventura as support, despite his book on the making of the film painting quite a different picture of the filming of the scene in question than they suggested. Then they removed the whole discussion; all that remains is me, crying in the wilderness on my blog. 

I still love the film. I have a French DVD of it, which does contain the missing few seconds, though I can't play it at the moment because of region coding. And I did buy the Criterion blu-ray, though I think tinkering with a filmmaker's works after his death is wrong. Cassavetes had enough trouble with that during his own lifetime. Criterion is supposed to be better than that, and I'm sad that they have continued the tradition past his death. 

4. Cassavetes films that are perfectly made but not personally that important to me. A Woman Under the Influence,  Shadows, and probably Opening Night. I probably enjoy A Woman Under the Influence more than any of the others in this category, and have seen it three or four times. But I didn't go to the VIFF Centre screenings. I would probably have watched the original cut of Shadows if Criterion had released that with their box set, because, I mean, I've read Jonas Mekas, in Movie Journal, talking about it with great enthusiasm, and have always been curious to see what he meant: according to Mekas, the original cut was the "experimental film" version, which Mekas felt Cassavetes betrayed by re-editing it and shooting new material to make it something more narrative. It floors me a bit that Criterion (supposedly) had the opportunity to put it out and declined to do so. I generally like Criterion and I'm glad they've put out Cassavetes' films but there's been some weirdness around a couple of them, especially where Ray Carney is involved, but the whole story there may never come to light; as far as I know, he was basically thrown off the Cassavetes box set and given what I've always read as an insulting fuck-you goodbye - the hidden "Jimmy Crack Corn" in the box, which seems to riff on Carney's jiminy-cricket appearance. I was interacting with Ray at the time and know that his being dumped caused him great distress, but I have only heard his side of things, which also involved a feud over who owned the original, short version of Shadows, which, precursor to l'affair Rappaport, Ray refused to give to Faces International, alleging that they might destroy it. We only have his version of events, if any of that is still online, along with his detective story of how he came to be in possession of that early cut, which I have come to suspect a bit; he was also pretty publicly ad-fucking-hominem against Gena for awhile, there, and... well, anyhow... it was a mess, with the largest loss being that the wider public will probably never see that original version of Shadows. It's a shame. 

 

5. "Lesser works." I like Gloria, in fact - but it's a small film, for Cassavetes. Minnie and Moskowitz, which I did revisit when it screened a few weeks ago, ultimately sort of fits in this category too. Both are enjoyable but neither accomplish very much on their own; they're entertaining in their own right, sure, but their real value lies in their relationship to Cassavetes' larger body of work, not anything singular they accomplish in and of themselves.  

6. Compromises and "failures." Cassavetes made a few films that were not really "his" films, where he didn't get final cut, where he struggled with commercial expectations and himself emerged dissatisfied. A Child is Waiting is the best of them, in terms of being a pretty good commercial "issue" movie about a novice teacher (Judy Garland) working at a home for developmentally disabled children run by a stern senior teacher (Burt Lancaster) whose methods she is at odds with. But Cassavetes is supposed to be about much, much more than making "pretty good commercial movies" and - to my recollection - basically disowned the final version of this film (the Kino Lorber release of it features a commentary track with Tom Charity, btw). Too Late Blues is less watchable, but may be the more interesting, if you think about it, starring pop idol Bobby Darin as a musician struggling with the temptation to compromise (Carney has argued that the film is sort of a metaphor for itself, that Cassavetes' own compromises are given voice by Darin's character; maybe. Think that was in American Dreaming? I don't presently have a copy of the book, but it was the first published work of serious film scholarship about Cassavetes). I am not sure whether Cassavetes had final cut or not, for this, but it's a film that falls apart all over the place, the second-least film Cassavetes ever made. And there's Big Trouble, a silly spoof of Double Indemnity that Cassavetes stepped in to complete as a favour to star Peter Falk, when - if memory serves, the previous director dropped out or was removed or such. It isn't really worthy of discussion, is noteworthy only in that it's a shame that it gets to be a great filmmaker's final film, especially after the poignant goodbye to cinema that he gives us at the end of Love Streams.  

 

7. Then there's The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, both cuts, standing alone, uncategorizable, un-processible, apparently no matter how often you watch them. That's how it feels to me, anyhow. To categorize either, I'd have to create a category for Cassavetes films that I just don't get, the "it might just be me" category. Which cut is better? Do either of them really work? Have I just been watching them all wrong? Is there a time in my life when I will sit down to this movie and the scales will fall from my eyes and I will see it as a masterpiece? Maybe this will be the week! I've seen the film half a dozen times, in one cut or the other, and still feel like my work with it is not done. I can recognize that there are moments of great power in both the long 1976 cut and the more streamlined 1978 cut, and some great performances, too. It's fun watching Seymour Cassel as a tough guy, and I've always enjoyed Timothy Carey and found his character in this film - an ambivalent, sentimental, maybe even weak gangster - strangely affecting, and - along with Saint Jack, a great Peter Bogdanovich film with which Bookie been paired as part of the upcoming screenings - think Cosmo Vitelli  (presumably the namesake for Clash manager Kosmo Vinyl) is one of Ben Gazzara's best roles ever, one of the characters he was born to play. 

And what's weirdest about my not "getting" this film is that I think I understand what the film is doing, understand the theme, which I think Gazzara himself lays out very clearly in one of the box set extras: the survival of the artist against the petty, greedy forces behind the scenes that would drag him down or compromise his vision. I applaud that, think it's a great premise, a great theme to mine. But understanding what a film is about is not the same thing as knowing how to enjoy it. The trouble is, the burlesque shows at Cosmo's club, the Crazy Horse West - the "art" that becomes a life or death matter for Cosmo - are just... so...  fucking... ridiculous, spilling over the edges of the film, sabotaging the grim, desperate mood that the more "gangstery" bits in the film establishes so well. The cringeworthy, weird baaaadness of the routines (and, god help me, the performances of Mr. Sophistication) undercut your ability to root for Cosmo; you can't identify with him or feel for his challenges or cheer on his survival because on some level, the art he's fighting for is very clearly not worth what it costs. Is Cassavetes being self-deprecating, self-sabotaging, self-mocking, or some combination thereof? You can understand that he can't make Cosmo too much of a hero, lest the filmmaker seem to be just flattering himself, or indulging in self-pity ("See how I suffer for my art!")... but it may simply be setting the bar too high for him to ask us to feel for Cosmo's struggles when it seems like he's just deluding himself - when his "art" is just ludicrous crap. 

Maybe Tom Charity can help me. For the following interview, I'm in italics, Tom is in bold. 

Allan: Where does Bookie fit in your list of Cassavetes films? How many times have you seen it (long cut/ short cut?) It sounds like you started with the short cut - that the longer version was unavailable when you wrote Lifeworks? Did you end up with a sort of baby-duck fondness for the shorter version? Did you have a choice of the short cut or long cut, in trying to program it? Did you deliberately opt for the short?

 
The program guide makes it sound like the long cut was a mess and the long cut was a masterpiece, but I don't know if you wrote that, and I do not know that I would go there, myself; last I checked, I kind of preferred the long version - it's more work, more sprawling, but also feels truer to the intent of the film - the short cut makes it "more like a genre film," no?

Tom: When I wrote my book on Cassavetes in 1999 this was the hardest chapter for me to write. In the UK by that time (and I think in North America too) the film had been completely reevaluated and was definitely seen as a key Cassavetes movie - a complete reversal from the way it was received in the 70s. And to be honest I struggled to get onto its wavelength.

The only version that was available to me was the shorter 1978 recut. This is the version that played on the Rep circuit in London, and was available on VHS... I forget if there was a DVD of it back then, too. I believe the first time I saw the original '76 cut was in the Cassavetes retrospective at the National Film Theatre in London which I curated along with the publication of my book. (Obviously things are very different twenty years later: the alternate cuts are both available on the Criterion releases of the film for instance, and no doubt you could track down a pirate stream too.)

Seeing the longer version made the movie much more accessible to me, and if I was forced to choose between them, I might opt for it. That said, this is a very complicated choice. Unlike most director's and extended cuts, the two films are radically different: there are different scenes, but also different takes of the same scenes. I think in the longer '76 cut the narrative is easier to follow. But also it's more digressive with a lot more Crazy Horse West "colour". I like the early scenes with Seymour Cassel in this version. But I also think the burlesque sequences go on too long, so personally I would like a hybrid version of the two.

In writing the book I talked to lots of people who worked with John on the film, including producer/DP Al Ruban, Michael Ferrris who operated the camera, Bo Harwood who did the music, and Seymour Cassel who is in the movie. And I would ask them about the two versions. It was pretty split between those who preferred the longer and the shorter version. I think Seymour said, with John, more is always better - but then there is more of Seymour in the longer cut, so take that with a pinch of salt.

But it was clear from these conversations that Cassavetes was much more hands-on in the editing of the '78 cut. In that sense, it is a true director's cut (and one of the rare director's cuts that is shorter than the release). So I think in programming the film, and not having the capacity in this context to programme both versions, one should respect the filmmaker's final cut.

It is still a problematic film for me but in a productive way. I think it wants to be a genre film and it doesn't. It was born of conversations between John and Scorsese, and you can imagine the story working as a Scorsese picture. I think if you look at the mise-en-scene, it's a marked departure from what Cassavetes was doing up to that point: he's framing scenes with more calculation, he's playing with colour, he's engaging with the aesthetic tropes of the gangster movie. But the movie also keeps stopping to watch these performers on the stage of the Crazy Horse West... It's as if the camera is entranced by Mr Sophistication and the De-lovelies. For myself, in the recut, less really is more when it comes to these scenes.

I like how in the '78 version he strips out a lot of the connective tissue that we expect from genre storytelling in a way it feels very modern, and which, paradoxically, makes it function more smoothly on that level. And it becomes this existential drama about a half baked showman who is in so far over his head even the audience can't gauge the extent of his problems.

 

Did you ever figure out who the robber in the Seymour Cassel anecdote was? ...For those who don't know it - Tom relates in Lifeworks Seymour Cassel's story of returning from softball with Cassavetes and the two men being held up at gunpoint. 

John protested that he didn't have any money, they'd just been playing softball. "The guy said, 'I know you have money, you're an actor. I've seen you on television.'

John said, 'Look, I've got 20 bucks. I'm going to get some ice-cream for Se and I. You want to have some ice-cream? Why are you robbing people? Why don't you get a job?'

The guy said he couldn't get a job. John said, 'I'll give you a job!' And he did, on Chinese Bookie. The guy's an actor now, and he became a friend. Turns out, we're having ice-cream, he didn't have any bullets in his gun, but we didn't know that at the time. John even gave him the change from the ice-cream. I couldn't believe it - tipping him for not robbing us!" [pp. 143-14]). 

.I have wondered if that was an apocryphal story - because if I were that guy, I'd have come forward by now!

No! It's a great story and I believe it, but I have no idea who it could have been.

I was reading on Wikipedia that David Bowie was on set and can be seen in the audience somewhere at Crazy Horse West! I've never known that, never knew that Bowie and Cassavetes interacted... any other stories there? Do you know where Bowie appears?

This one I don't believe. I've recorded DVD commentaries with Mike and Bo and Mr. Bowie never came up.

I've always been pissed off that Criterion removed the boobs from Love Streams, and more pissed off that they claimed - this despite the flesh on display in Bookie - that Cassavetes would have wanted it that way, that it had only been because of Golan and Globus that there was nudity in the film. That seems dubious to me. Is it true that Cassavetes had a distaste for nudity - do you know if he ever explained that? - and if so, how do we square that with him setting Bookie in a burlesque club? Seems like an odd choice for a man who didn't want to have nudity onscreen.

My understanding is that Cassavetes was quite prudish about on screen nudity and if you look at his work and the work put out by Cannon Films (Golan and Globus) I think it's entirely credible that the boobs popped up there for contractual reasons. I don't want to pretend to speak for him, but he was making movies independently at a time when cinema and especially art house cinema was breaking taboos and showing sexual acts, nudity, violence in ways that had been unthinkable. But you don't see any of that in Cassavetes' films - only emotional violence, raw human behaviour. And now let's look at the burlesque in Chinese Bookie... I mean, it is a long, long way from the strip clubs you find in most American movies. It's not a coincidence that the name evokes the Crazy Horse club in Paris (which John had visited, and which later became the subject of a Fred Wiseman documentary). These routines really do aspire to some kind of art, albeit a tawdry, tatty, LA version of the Parisian girl shows. And Cassavetes sees the girls as people, and performers, the nudity is really very casual in this film, not sexualized.

This connects also with the question of violence, and another great story - how when it came down to it Cassavetes really didn't want to shoot the bookie. I think he found these movie entertainment staples - sex and violence - fundamentally unpalatable or uninteresting. And again, if you look at Cassavetes' movies for gun porn, there's not much there - only, fleetingly, here, and, granted more in Gloria, which showed that he could do it if he wanted to, or rather, had to (and he didn't like that movie).

Ever have a chance to interact with Lars von Trier? I believe he either said that Bookie was his favourite Cassavetes film or else his favourite film outright at one point...? Apparently he drops a reference to it by having a character in The House that Jack Built call himself Mr. Sophistication, but I've never been able to watch that film past the baby duck scene.

I guess I would remember if I had met von Trier... I did think there were parallels between what Cassavetes did and the aims and methods of the Dogme manifesto and so I tried to get a message to him to invite him to write something for the book, but without success. (And although I have a lot of time for von Trier I did avoid The House That Jack Built. I feel like cinema and TV developed an unhealthy obsession with psychopaths in the wake of Silence of the Lambs and that I could opt out on that.

I'm looking forward to seeing the film back to back with Saint Jack on Thursday. It occured to me as I was tasked with writing a very short capsule to promote the two films together that Ben Gazzara is playing a variation on Bogart's Rick Blaine in both these movies, and I am curious to see where that idea might go...

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie screens Thursday at the Vancity Theatre, double-billed with Saint Jack. Both films have studio screenings thereafter. The screening on the 25th is the one you want to make it to, if you can; better seats than in the studio, plus an introduction to Killing of a Chinese Bookie by Tom Charity and another for Saint Jack by novelist Erik d'Souza.