Flasz On Film

If he hadn’t succumbed to a terrible disease, John Cassavetes would be celebrating his ninety-fourth birthday today. On a day like this I wonder if, had he had the good fortune not to have developed a frightening liver disease which ultimately claimed his life, the world would have granted him the appreciation he only received after he passed away.  

All throughout his life, Cassavetes fought an uphill battle because he found his calling in filmmaking, a passion that relies heavily on other people to both show up to participate and to show up and appreciate. After all, movies are expensive to make, and they require an audience. It’s hard to make films just for yourself, unless you are obscenely rich. Unperturbed and inveterate, Cassavetes persevered despite all signs on heaven and earth telling him he should just give up.  

For much of his professional career, his work was derided by critics and misunderstood by audiences. In fact, only two of his films enjoyed critical acclaim in his home country, Faces and A Woman Under the Influence. Only after he passed away, his work was eventually reappraised. I have always wondered why that was and I believe that it must have had something to do with the simple fact that John Cassavetes was not in the business of making movies as much as he was a devotee to the process of making them. In fact, this maverick filmmaker began his directing career out of necessity because, as an actor, he couldn’t find a platform to express himself, to connect with his characters and to truly explore the subtext of the stories they were part of. He became a film director not to make money telling stories people would find entertaining and studio executives would see as profitable products, but because the process of moviemaking – from working with actors and allowing them to find intimate connections with their characters to painstakingly splicing untold millions of miles worth of footage together into such masterpieces as Husbands or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie – was in its own right what he loved. He let things happen. He allowed actors to influence and find new meanings in his movies through an iterative process of improvisational acting followed by extensively rewriting scripts on the spot.  

I think it goes without saying that his influence on cinema was unparalleled despite the fact he almost never received anything more than a pat on the back from his close friends and stalwart collaborators like Seymour Cassel, Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk and his dearly beloved wife Gena Rowlands. Cassavetes pioneered the kind of cinema filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater and others would evolve further. However, I think his cinema mostly speaks to young up-and-coming adepts of the medium, as he effectively shows – through decades of fighting for money, remortgaging his house to finish movies, spending years in the editing room and then scrambling to have his films seen by anyone – that making films doesn’t have to be a career choice, but a calling. He wasn’t interested in making entertainment. He was driven to express himself through the process of making films. He was all about the journey and not a destination.  

However, as much as I will go to my grave reminding everyone around me to watch Cassavetes movies, some of which are probably the most important American films ever made, if not the most important movies full-stop, I think John Cassavetes’ spiritual gaze extends over to other fields. The way this brash and bubbly maverick operated and how he committed himself to the act of making movies is something that truly inspires me personally. I find the Cassavetean philosophy of surrendering yourself to the process immensely empowering and one I have adopted in my own life, both professionally and in the realms of my many passions.  

At the risk of coming across as pompous and self-aggrandizing, I look up to Cassavetes who did what he wanted to do in a way that he wanted to without ever considering if the final product would enjoy mass appeal. I’m sure he wanted people to watch his work, as any creative would, but he would never succumb to the notion of trying to make films people would like to see instead of films he wanted to see. He knew general audiences wanted cheap thrills, romance, action and compelling plotting, but he gave them the opposite. He realized critics always derided his work for meandering and circling the drain instead of getting to the point, of navel-gazing, indulging and protracting instead of just showing us what happened. And he made his movies his way anyway because he wanted his characters to have breathing space. He wanted the viewers to spend time with his work, to hang out. To exist with the film. Not to just follow the story, get to the climax and go home.  

That’s probably why I write these long pieces nobody ever reads. And I write them knowing perfectly well where my affectations are and where my darlings live. Darlings I refuse to kill. Because I’m not here to give you five bullet points about whatever-it-takes-for-you-to-click and give me a penny in ad revenue. I’m here all by myself, for all I care. Like John Cassavetes in the editing bay, I am all alone with my keyboard because I am not interested in making content and turning profits as much as I am here to express myself.  

Which also extends to my own approach to podcasting, my other passion I have embraced in recent years and about which I might pen a few more words in the near future. I have been told repeatedly by many friends and sometimes by complete strangers that nobody will ever want to listen to the kind of podcasting I do. Who has the time to listen to a conversation about a single film that goes on occasion for multiple hours? After all, you can get your points across in twenty minutes and move on. Get your podcast into a forty-five-minute framework – the length of an average commute – and enjoy your success. Get to the point. Be succinct. That’s how you build a successful podcast.  

Yes. This is all true. This is exactly how you build a successful podcast, and I would hate every minute of it. In a world where everyone has a podcast or a YouTube channel and where the vast majority of them produce content aiming to make money, attract attention and generate ad revenue, I’m willingly refusing to participate in this grift. That’s because I’m not interested in the end goal. I don’t care about numbers, downloads, clicks, audience retention and all those metrics constraining most creators. I’m here for the process. I love hanging out with my buddies and talking well into the night about movies, digging deep into them and uncovering things I’d never hear on any other podcast or a review show. I love the art of the ramble and I personally love listening to other shows like mine just as well. I adore the idea of being in the moment with other people whose mission isn’t to second-guess themselves for long enough and to throw enough red meat at their audience to figure out what they need to talk about and how they need to go about doing it in order to get traction.  

I love raw podcasting and I fully submit myself to the patronage of John Cassavetes, the divine protector of raw filmmaking… and indie podcasting. Therefore, I’d like you to know that if you find this text by some weird miracle and you too feel you love the process more than the destination, if you despise the grift of content creation, you are not alone. I’m here too and I can only hope – even though I count myself as completely non-spiritual – that John Cassavetes looks over us lot: those who spend hours talking into a microphone knowing there’s nobody out there listening. Those who painstakingly edit their shows and also willingly leave all the “ums and ahs” in the recordings because removing them would distort the realism of how they speak. Those who podcast because they love the act and don’t care about appeal.  

Make no mistake, I still want people to listen to the show I run. Every new Patreon subscriber warms my heart. Every new download is a little spark. But I’d rather have twenty kindred spirits tuning in every Friday to hang out with me and my buddies as we commit ourselves to the act of the ramble, than to get a million listeners out of doing something I don’t believe in. I don’t think John Cassavetes would approve.