Book Description
Since his death in 1989, John Cassavettes has become increasingly renowned as a cinematic hero--a renegade loner who fought the Hollywood system, steering his own creative course in a career spanning thirty years. Having already established himself as an actor, he struck out as a filmmaker in 1959 with Shadows, and proceeded to build a formidable body of work, including such classics as Faces, Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Gloria. In Cassavettes on Cassavettes, Ray Carney presents the great director in his own words--frank, uncompromising, humane, and passionate about life and art.
Customer Reviews:
As brilliant as it gets!.......2006-03-14
Absolutely necessary reading for those interested in American alternative cinema and not only. The book gives a brilliant picture of USA's one of the best directors ever.
Highly recommended for everyone. No other book shows Cassavetes in this light. Packed with interesting material, as good as Cassavetas' cinema itself.
Truly inspirational!.......2004-08-17
Ray Carney's "Cassavetes on Cassavetes" is a wonderful introduction to Cassavetes' work. I found it to be a great read - amazingly free of academic jargon or fancy terminology. It was hard to put down! And with incredible photos of the wild-man at work. A must for every fan of indie film as well as aspiring directors and artists - and also for students of life! If you want to know even more, I'd also recommend Ray Carney's massive web site devoted to Cassavetes and indie film. Any search engine will take you there. It has wonderful behind-the-scenes information about the making of Cassavetes' work. If you want a volume to provide ongoing daily inspiration and encouragement regarding the artistic process, buy this book. It is a book you will go back to again and again and again...
My Way.......2002-11-07
Ray Carney's done a great service to film fans by bringing Cassavetes' scattered talks and interviews together into a coherent statement on art. Carney shows how Cassavetes' whole process of filmmaking was tied to his outlook on life. Combative, spontaneous and deliberately amateur, he aimed for situations where writer, actor and viewer are all left without direction, forced to respond to the story as individuals rather than reach for pre-approved 'social codes'. He savagely edited his films to defy audience expectations, usually rejecting versions that the studios, his collaborators and even his wife liked best. Some of Cassavetes' statements made me wonder if he did this to edit some part of himself--the Greek immigrant son made good, with the blonde wife and kids and Hollywood home. In some ways he was an insider desperate to stay on the outside. Conflict was fun for him, he thought America needed more of it, and the messy collaborative 'families' he built around each film were his alternative to the button-down corporate society he fought against all his life.
As Carney presents him, Cassavetes wasn't out for the money, the glory, the ego or ultimately maybe even the art. He wanted fun, he wanted friends and he wanted people to really live as individuals. Are there folks like this around anymore? We need them more than ever.
Possibly the best book about any director........2002-07-06
My half-hearted browser's interest in Cassavetes needed a kick in the seat of the pants, I now realize, and reading this book shows me how much I failed to appreciate him while we were lucky enough to have him around. The format is eye-opening. Cassavetes speaks, and then the author. The constantly shifting P.O.V., and the frisson between the truth Cassavetes himself presented, and the unvarnished truth as discovered by the author, makes this book constantly stimulating and endlessly arguable.
Cassavetes life and films are worth a serious look-see -- and this book is an EXCELLENT place to begin that-- if only because he is that rare individual who absolutely refused to accept mediocrity in himself and others, both as an artist and a committed liver of life. He went for the burn every time out, and could often be an ornery s.o.b. when he detected that people were simply going through the motions in their life or art. (The book is rife with anecdotes that literally make you wince and leave you wondering "Could I have long tolerated this behavior in a friend or family member?") He seems never to have thought "I'd better not burn my bridges here", or practiced any of the other forms of incremental, over-thought cowardice that most of us do.
Cassavetes was driven like no one else; he never made a lazy, easy commercial film. He let his life and films commingle, letting the cameras roll for hours, shooting thousands of feet more film than he could use, afterward sculpting it into a shape that could be released. (He said film stock was the one part of his film making on which he would never scrimp.) His films were, probably more than any other director's, explorations of life.
Cassavetes lived life so completely that it might be truthful to say he did something the average person would call foolhardy nearly every day of his life, in some way or other. But in spite of this, or because of it, it's impossible to come away from this book without an awakened admiration for him.
Great Interview Book.......2002-01-11
If you're intrigued at all by the work of John Cassavetes, this book is well worth your time. The book itself is a collection of interviews Cassavetes gave through his entire life, edited into chapters that correspond to the movies he talked about. The excerpts themselves are pretty interesting, but it is author Ray Carney's commentary in between quotes that really makes this book worthwhile. Carney gives us the back story, and fills in the missing parts, but he also sets things straight when John rambles into fiction. It's easy to see that Cassavetes liked to talk about his work. There are over 500 pages on roughly a dozen films.
If you are new to Cassavetes and read this book, you'll want to view his films. I have only seen a handful myself, but his total commitment to getting them made is so impressive that I feel ashamed to have not seen more. I saw my first Cassavetes film in college and felt that it was interesting, but a little over the top in places. As I get older, I think that real-life might be more over the top than I first realized.
John Cassavetes passion for making movies shines through in this volume. Ray Carney's insight tells the rest of the story. If you are interested in independent film making, this book is a must.
Book Description
A handsomely illustrated, general introduction to Cassavetes' major films. The book contains an introductory essay, as well as essays on Woman Under the Influence, Faces, Shadows, Minnie and Moskowitz, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Husbands, Love Streams, and all of the other major films. It features a new, previously unpublished interview about Cassavetes' life and work, and is beautifully illustrated with more than two dozen behind-the-scenes photographs of Cassavetes working with his actors and his crew.
Customer Reviews:
A new way of knowing.......2004-08-17
This insightful book about Cassavetes by Ray Carney will open up a new way of seeing and knowing film. Carney is most persuasive about the importance of film as the newest art form. Gone are the canned, predictable experiences of current day studio films. Cassavetes' films are about life as we all experience it, in all its complexity, richness and craziness. Carney's easy-to-understand text will open up Cassavetes' films to you as a way to embrace life and art through film. Cassavetes wrestled with the questions we all wrestle with and allows you to form your own answers and understanding. A wonderful book about this film giant!
If you want to know more about Cassavetes and his films, Ray Carney has a MEGA-WEBSITE. Search on Cassavetes on any search engine to find it. You won't be sorry! It includes great background information on how Cassavetes made his movies, along with terrific photos of the genius at work. A must for indie film lovers and aspiring directors...
This book will change how you view film.......2000-04-23
Ray Carney's writing is so different from most film criticism. It reads so clearly. You won't find any jargon, or fancy-schmancy film-book theories here. He doesn't attempt to explain the films or their characters by offering simplified psychological or sociological understandings. Instead, Carney shows how valuable it is to stay with the complex experiences offered in the films, to allow yourself to let the films teach you something new. Carney argues that all great art can give us new powers of understanding, more perceptive eyes and ears. (I highly recommend you check out his website, Ray Carney on Life and Art, which features his writing about other indie filmmakers, masterwork paintings and American culture.) Carney's deep belief in the importance of art comes through in his writing as the most radical, original and hopeful statements on art that I've ever read. The Films of John Cassavetes: The Adventure of Insecurity has changed the way I now look at all film.
This Book Will Change How You View Film.......2000-04-15
Ray Carney's The Films of John Cassavetes: The Adventure of Insecurity has become my essential viewing guide to Cassavetes' films and it has changed the way I now look at all film.
Carney's writing is so different from most film criticism. It reads so clearly. You won't find any jargon, or fancy-schmancy film-book theories here. He doesn't attempt to explain the films or their characters by offering simplified psychological or sociological understandings. Instead, Carney shows how valuable it is to stay with the complex experiences offered in the films, to allow yourself to let the films teach you something new. Carney argues that all great art can give us new powers of understanding, more perceptive eyes and ears. Carney's deep belief in the importance of art comes through in his writing as the most radical, original and hopeful statements on art that I've ever read. I highly recommend you check out his web site at http://people.bu.edu/rcarney which features his writing about other indie filmmakers, masterwork paintings and American culture.
This Book Will Change How You View Film.......2000-04-15
Ray Carney's The Films of John Cassavetes: The Adventure of Insecurity has become my essential viewing guide to Cassavetes' films and it has changed the way I now look at all film.
Carney's writing is so different from most film criticism. It reads so clearly. You won't find any jargon, or fancy-schmancy film-book theories here. He doesn't attempt to explain the films or their characters by offering simplified psychological or sociological understandings. Instead, Carney shows how valuable it is to stay with the complex experiences offered in the films, to allow yourself to let the films teach you something new. Carney argues that all great art can give us new powers of understanding, more perceptive eyes and ears. Carney's deep belief in the importance of art comes through in his writing as the most radical, original and hopeful statements on art that I've ever read. I highly recommend you check out his website (Ray Carney on Life and Art) which features his writing about other indie filmmakers, and American culture.
Book Description
The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies is the first book to tell in detail the story of a maverick filmmaker who worked outside the studio system. Providing extended critical discussion on six of his most important films (Shadows, Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams), Ray Carney argues that Cassavetes' work is a distinctly life-affirming form of modernist expression that is at odds with the world-denying modernism of many of the most important art works produced in this century. Cassavetes is revealed to be a profoundly thoughtful and self-aware filmmaker and a deeply philosophical thinker, whose work takes its place in the American tradition along with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. The six films treated here emerge as expressive interpretations of the bewildering challenges in contemporary American cultural experience.
Customer Reviews:
Read and Reread.......2007-03-29
I doubt that I can say anything about this book that hasn't been said before but this is, by every measure, an outstanding examination of Cassavetes amazing body of work.
I go back to this book every six months or so and have for a number of years. It is a very thorough, reverent, and insightful reference book but it goes well beyond that. Though very full of information, it is personal enough that it has allowed (and encouraged) me to go and evaluate the films myself without the feeling that there is a "law" or an agenda already set with these films.
The greatest beauty of Cassavetes' films is that each one belongs to the individual; meaning that every person who chooses to lend his or her heart to the characters, stories, and subject matter(s) can get something out of it that belongs solely to that person. The films can excite, enrage, entertain, and rattle you in ways that films seldom do.
Cassavetes films make you more than an audience member as they make you more aware than ever that you just might still be human.
Great book and highly reccomended.
a very interesting and important book.......2003-09-06
I originally got this book and read the whole thing, before i had seen any of cassavetes movies. This is not a recommended route. I have now seen all of his films, except for husbands, and i can't tell you how amazing i think the importance of this book is. I wonder what the ratio is between the people who disagree and agree with it's context, in respect to it's attitude towards american cinema. the book really does rewire your brain. The people who i am friends with, who are also interested in film are dumb founded when ever i casually undermine 2001 or citizen kane in a conversation. More importantly though, this book, like Cassavetes films, extends into life and actually opens you up to knew spiritual territory
you didn't think about. One last point: Does any one notice how suprisingly objective Carney is when he mentions his most hated film makers like Spielberg ? Get this book. It may feel too intellectual, but it really isn't. If you think that then you are reading it too quickly and not thinking about what it's actually saying.
Boring is as boring does.......2001-11-21
I'm not sure what book the reviewer below this read, but I don't know how many times I'd have to read about films that completely re-imagine the way I (and our popular culture) see the world and my own experience before I'd feel "bored" or anything less than inspired and envigorated. In fact, I read this book very often - not just to gain information, like a dictionary or an encyclopedia, giving me facts and figure data I didn't have before, but as mental calethenics, or something like spiritual openess training. This is a much more meaningful and important activity than thematic comparison and contrsating, no matter how technically interesting that is. As the concepts and points of view on the world process thru my brain as I read them off the page, I gain new abilities to understand and see - and this takes work, and often repetition. So I reccomend anyone who reads this book and hopes to gain insight, not just into Cassavetes and his films, but into their own personal attitudes, to keep themselves OPEN, as Cassavetes explicitly did in every frame of film he exposed, and to always give the artist (or author) the benefit of the doubt before passing judgement based on arbitrary ulterior motives (which, naturally, we all have). This isn't easy (especially to the greatly film cultured), but I dare say you'll enjoy this book, and your life, a lot more.
Don't read it without support.......2000-05-10
Almost everything Carney says, you tend to utterly hate him for at first. His most recent article seemed so pessimistic that I spent an hour in my apartment, sitting in front of the TV depressed by it all.
Everything Carney writes tends to be tough at first, because, like Cassavetes, he mentions truths about life that very few people wish to confront. There is no evasion of reality in this book. People can be horrible to each other. We all die in the end. That's life.
Carney doesn't analyse Cassavetes' work in relation to other movies and cultural trends (as most film professors tend to do), but prefers to focus entirely on the performances of the characters on screen. Like Cassavetes, he never really explains the characters' motivations, but instead focuses on how they react to their environments. Everything he writes is about life -- you'll find nothing about tendentious compositions, popular culture, or auteur theory. The only important thing here is Carney's love for the characters and their creator.
One of the greatest books ever written on American film.
A worthy ordeal.......2000-02-28
I'd like to corroborate Matthew Langdon's review (above or below this one). I had the advantage of having Ray Carney as a professor at Boston University. By some stroke of genius (possibly by administrative accident), all entering film students were required to take a survey course from him on film art before taking anything else. Carney started with warhorses like Hitchcock's "Psycho" and made the roomful of us (vocally) do exercises during the screening that exposed the highly polished but rather ridiculously superficial artifice of the "classic film". We all thought he was crazy. Here was this man -- that one friend described as a combination of Andy Warhol and Orville Reddenbacher -- unsubtly undermining a number of the most globally revered films. He then paraded a host of highly experimental films (many from the library of Congress that practically noone outside of a Carney class has ever or will ever see) before us that were appallingly difficult and often downright confrontational. It's pretty safe to say that practically none of us really "got it" until long after that semester, possibly years. At some point I did. Carney loves film just like we all do, however he had recognized something that we (and, most likely, you, too) had not, that film can be so much more than anything we had imagined (or yet been exposed to). That's largely what he wanted to show us in this class. Film is still a nascent art, highly immature in scope and depth. So far, Cassavetes -- one of the EASIER filmmakers Carney introduced us to -- is one of the handful of film artists that has done something deeply new with the form since its inception. If you develop an interest in Cassavetes, you will find this book essential, and you will return to it after every screening.
Book Description
In the world of independent filmmaking, John Cassavetes became the prototypical outsider fighting the system for much of his career. A major star of live television and a serious actor, he stumbled into making his first film, Shadows, and created a template for working outside the Hollywood system that would produce some of the most piercing and human films of the last thirty years including A Women Under the Influence and Husbands.
Film critic Marshall Fine has been hailed by the New York Times for this "first full life of Cassavetes." The Minneapolis Star Tribune said, "Accidental Genius is as thoroughly researched as an academic study but reads like a pop biography minus the fawning." Fine reveals the passion and singularity that characterized Cassavetes and his lasting influence on filmmaking.
Customer Reviews:
Any film library needs this........2007-02-09
The rise of independent film in Hollywood is an event which boils down to the efforts of one man: John Cassavetes. ACCIDENTAL GENIUS: HOW JOHN CASSAVETES INVENTED THE AMERICAN INDEPENDENT FILM is thus a biography any film buff will want: it holds an essential key to understanding the foundations and evolution of independent film as a whole, revealing his life and work in context of the evolving Hollywood industry. Any film library needs this.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
snooozer.......2006-12-17
Not sure why I picked this book up. Knowing next to nothing about Cassavetes before attempting this book, I decided halfway through it, that I don't care who Cassevetes is. Not my cup of tea at all.
Reverential Biography of the Film Auteur Who Gave Rise to Independent American Cinema-Verité.......2006-08-14
I just saw one of John Cassavetes' early films as a director, 1963's "A Child Is Waiting", which he apparently disowned once producer Stanley Kramer edited it to make the story of mentally disabled children in a state-run institution a more sentimental movie. Despite Cassavetes' misgivings about the finished product, what remains has some truly unexpected moments of emotional honesty. Author Marshall Fine, film and TV critic for Star Magazine, has written a thorough, sometimes effusive biography of the film auteur who died in 1989. Cassavetes is most definitely a worthy subject for a comprehensive book, as he was a groundbreaking filmmaker who made gritty, low-budget independent films well before Sundance.
His style was polarizing, but there is no getting around the fact that he dared to go to places other filmmakers feared, primarily the dark spaces where self-pity and hurtful actions were predominant. Even though his favorite director was ironically the supreme optimist Frank Capra, Cassavetes liked exposing the chaotic nature of life among the middle classes and refused to tie up loose ends for the sake of a happy ending. Fine does an illuminating job of showing the filmmaker's psyche at work and how he kept the focus constantly on the actors, especially as he created an intimate environment where spontaneity was encouraged and prized. Lacking the desire for a more formal process, Cassavetes employed a hand-held, semi-documentary style to elicit the naturalism he wanted to capture even when it meant constant script rewrites.
The author also explores the downside of the filmmaker's work techniques: his quick temper, his megalomania, his lack of savvy in dealing with studio bosses. More importantly, Fine takes us behind the scenes on each of Cassavetes' films beginning with 1959's jazz-infused "Shadows" of which he did two versions. From there, we see him at work on such acknowledged classics as "Faces" and "A Woman Under the Influence" all the way through the end of his life when he took over from Andrew Bergman on 1989's "Big Trouble" as he was dying of cirrhosis of the liver. Recollections are meticulously detailed but do not feel extraneous. It's a fascinating career well documented by Fine, though I wish he could have been more critical on the finished films and more interested in letting us know who is carrying on Cassavetes' legacy.
FASCINATING ACCOUNT OF A DYNAMIC MAN.......2006-05-24
Biographer Marshall Fine (Harvey Keitel and The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah) introduces us to John Cassavetes by describing a 1954 night on a deserted New York street when the actor frightened away four thugs by "pretending to be a madman having a full-blown psychotic episode."
From this incident we learn as many would later discover that Cassavetes was someone who enjoyed turning things around, he loved spontaneity. Later he would become known as a gifted actor, an innovative director, the man whom many consider to be the father of independent films.
Although she declined to be interviewed, responding as she always did that John did not want a biography, Cassavetes' widow, Gina Rowlands, did give Fine her approval and access to many of the actor's close friends and associates. Thus, we are rewarded with an intimate portrait of this enigmatic individual who so changed the way we view and think of movies today.
After success as a star in 1950s television, Cassavetes began his highly acclaimed motion work work and made his first film, Shadows (1959). It was while he was serving as director of an acting workshop that he came up with a blueprint for films other than the ones made inside the then accepted system. In order to do this he tackled subjects other film makers wouldn't touch - race relations in America, marital relationships.
Faces, which many consider to be one of his finest works, received three Academy Award nominations, one of which was for best screenplay by Cassavetes. Later, Woman Under The Influence garnered an Oscar nomination for Gina Rowlands as best actress in a leading role and Cassavetes was nominated Best Director. Those were not his only accolades - as an actor he won an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor for The Dirty Dozen.
Much of the richness in this extensive bio is found in the recollections of Cassavetes' close friends, such as Peter Falk and Ben Gazarra. Accidental Genius is a fascinating account of a dynamic and driven man who said, "It is not so important that people like your films. It's only important that you make something you like."
Highly recommended.
- Gail Cooke
Someone FINALLY Got it Right!!.......2006-04-18
After years of either being forgotten by the genral public or written about in the most pretentious, yawn-inducing dirges, author Marshall Fine finally got it right in his bio of actor/director John Cassavetes. The author's style is accesible, his subject fascinating and the theme is undeniable. Cassavetes is to independent cinema what Elvis Presley was to Rock and Roll: Neither one invented their respected venues but they definitely created the way in which they are percieved today.
Not only does the author give the man his due, but the freshly recounted anecdotes of Cassavetes' cohorts certainly brings the man back to life. No, it's not like having him in the room with you -- it's more like being at the Irish wake in which friends recount with a glass held high what it was that made the man so great.
To the naysayers who have already written about this book, what did you guys read?? Fine does not state that Cassavetes 'created' independent American films but is the progenitor, as in laying down the groundwork that others have followed. Before Ruth Orkin and Morris Engels, there was also independent black filmmaker Oscar Michenaux and Kenneth Anger, and countless others but the original consistency of effort and undeniable style belonged to Cassavetes alone. All hail the Acciental Genuis!!
One quibble: Why no index? It makes looking up remebered moments MUCH eaiser to find.
Average customer rating:
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Faces
John Cassavetes
Manufacturer: Signet Book
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000F81ARE |
Book Description
"A good movie," John Cassavetes has remarked, "will ask you questions you don't already know the answers to." And in his films, Cassavetes is as good as his word. Taking up the radical question that Cassavetes's films consistently pose—specifically, where is the line between actor and character, fiction and reality, film and life?—George Kouvaros reveals the unique, and uniquely illuminating, position that Cassavetes's work occupies at the intersection of filmmaking and film theory.
Central to any understanding of Cassavetes's achievement is the issue of performance. Looking at the work of Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, and Cassavetes himself in films such as Faces, A Woman under the Influence, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Kouvaros shows how performative instances—gestures, words, or glances—open up intimations of dramas belonging neither strictly to these films nor to the everyday worlds in which they are immersed.
A major reassessment of the filmmaker as a formal experimenter, Where Does It Happen? gives Cassavetes his due as a filmmaker whose critical place in the modern cinema is only now becoming clear.
Customer Reviews:
An excellent essay about Cassavetes.......2004-08-19
An excellent essay about Cassavetes, perfectly clear, well informed and innovative. Among many strong proposals, it shows in a very rigorous and fascinating way how and why films are welcomed in a temporal context, what aspects of them are seen or not seen... How deeply films are historical subjects. A sensitive and exciting book.
The best critical book in English on Cassavetes.......2004-08-14
The shocking intolerance and hysteria of "idiephile"'s review demands a response. Comparing the writing of Ray Carney to ice cream and the writing of Kouvaros to ground glass is cheap-shot sloganeering and advertising, not criticism of any kind. In fact, the prose of Kouvaros is lucid and pleasurable, and what he has to say about Cassavetes is thoughtful and unpredictable. What a strident anti-intellectual like Cassavetes might have thought about any book written about him, especially an academic one, is irrelevant.
A splendid addition to Cassavetes studies.......2004-08-12
Many regard John Cassavetes as something of a wild home movie-maker, shooting improvisational and self-indulgent slices of autobiography in his own house, enlisting friends and family as collaborators, paying little regard to aesthetic or formal concerns. It is this idea that George Kouvaros sets out to challenge in his splendid new book. Courageously determined not to take Cassavetes at his own word, Kouvaros very title, WHERE DOES IT HAPPEN?, seems deliberately intended as a provocation, attached as it is to this study of a director who privileged the 'who' over the 'where'. But the word 'where' in Kouvaros' title refers equally to that place where his book 'happens', namely the arena of film theory. It is here that Kouvaros excels, since he has clearly read everything there is to read about Cassavetes, and puts his research to good use. WHERE DOES IT HAPPEN? is, then, as much a history of critical trends as a study of one man's oeuvre, and Kouvaros' book provides a fine overview of approaches to the director. Which is not to say that Kouvaros' book adds nothing new to the debate. On the contrary, chapters dedicated to THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE and LOVE STREAMS provide a series of sustained insights which made me eager to watch these masterpieces again.
Academic gobbledygook.......2004-07-16
Why do the professors feel that they have to turn everything into academic gobbledygook? This book takes a filmmaker who was known for his freedom from intellectual abstractions and critical cliches and turns him into a practitioner of the latest French-fried intellectual practices. You can't find Cassavetes here for the cant. His work is lost and unrecognizable, buried under the layers of continental critical jargon. If you are really interested in learning abouto Cassavete, skip Kouvaros and read the filmmaker's own descriptions of his films and his accounts of making them in Cassavetes on Cassavetes or in Ray Carney's books. Carney's books read like eating ice cream. This is like trying to chew and swallow ground glass. Too bad. Cassavetes deserves much better. He would have been howling with laughter at what has been done to him.
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Minnie and Moskowitz
John Cassavetes
Manufacturer: Black Sparrow Press,U.S.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
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ASIN: 0876851510 |
Average customer rating:
- An American Original
- Telling it like it is
- A Major League Disappointment
- JC would be proud
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John Cassavetes: Lifeworks
Tom Charity
Manufacturer: Omnibus Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Entertainers
| Arts & Literature
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Movie Directors
| Arts & Literature
| Biographies & Memoirs
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General
| Biographies & Memoirs
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Direction & Production
| Movies
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ASIN: 0711975442 |
Book Description
Unfashionable in his lifetime, John Cassavetes appeared in mainstream films like Rosemary's Baby and The Dirty Dozen in order to finance his own highly distinctive independent films. This detailed biography celebrates the work of a uniquely uncompromising filmmaker whose examples inspired leading directors like Martin Scorcese who described him as “a guide and a teacher”.
Customer Reviews:
An American Original.......2006-04-11
I've long been a fan of John Cassavetes, the actor. But after
reading this book, I realize that the man's gift to film wasn't
in the acting he did for others, but rather his amazing body of
work as a writer and director. This book provides a thorough
account of each of his movies and insight into his many
collaborators. Not a coldly analytical critique, but an honest
and detailed look at the career and character of an American
original, warts and all.
Telling it like it is.......2002-05-19
...
Far from being a rush job, Charity's book boasts considerable new research and interviews with most of the important figures in Cassavetes' life (though, sadly not Gena Rowlands, his widow). I spotted a handful of errors, generally minor cultural lapses you might expect from a foreign critic - but, let me emphasise, these are few and far between. Packed with great, sometimes hilarious anecdotes (Cassavetes really rocked!) Charity's book brings JC to life - and the same can be said about Cassavetes' notoriously difficult films, which have rarely been explored with such vivid insight and penetration. As a major bonus, the book comes with fascinating tributes from the likes of Gary Oldman, John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch and Pedro Almodovar, to name but a few. It would be worth buying for these alone - but then it would be worth buying without them too...
A Major League Disappointment.......2002-02-14
I bought this book with great hopes. John Cassavetes is an important filmmaker
whose work is still inexplicably neglected by mainstream film critics,
historians, and teachers. But I'm sorry to say that the book was a major league
disappointment. Tom Charity is a reviewer for Time Out magazine and the book
shows all the flaws of what I might call "the reviewer's syndrome." It is all
too obviously a quickie project thrown together in a few weeks or months to cash
in on Cassavetes' increasing popularity. Omnibus Press, the publisher of the
book, has in the past specialized in precisely this sort of book and Charity's
volume unfortunately takes its place alongside their previous biographies of
Madonna, New Kids on the Block, and other pop culture flashes in the pan. It is
shallow, glib, and (worst of all) mistake-ridden.
The first problem is that Charity's "research" (such as it is) shows every sign
of being rushed, slipshod, and superficial. The book is riddled with
errors--hundreds and hundreds of them--from scores of factual mistakes, wrong
names, and dates to a a whole series of interpretive gaffes, when Charity a
journalist who has previously attempted nothing more ambitious that a volume on
the astronaut movie, The Right Stuff, attempts to produce high-brow
interpretations of Cassavetes' challenging works of art. The second problem is
the organization of the book, or more precisely, complete lack of organization.
Clearly at a loss to fill the space available to him, Charity throws in bits of
this and that helter-skelter to fill up the pages: a given chapter might begin
with vacuous "celebrity" quotes from a contemporary director about Cassavetes,
which leads into a sketchy (and, as I noted, mistake-ridden) production history;
followed by a series of excerpts based on fawning, sycophantic!
, and completely unrevealing interviews with actors who knew Cassavetes, and end
with a wool-spinning series of generalizations by Charity about the meaning of
the film. Charity doesn't even make a half-hearted attempt to bring it all
together. It's just thrown out there, one thing after another, a little of this
and a little of that separated by rows of asterisks, for what you can make of
it. No vision of Cassavetes the man or Cassavetes the artist emerges. It's a
method that might be described as "back up and dump"--one (all too often
mistaken) fact or event after another, with no rhyme or reason to hold it
together, and no insights or revelations at the end.
The best parts of Charity's book are the sections where he quotes extensively
from another critic who not only knew Cassavetes personally, but has written far
better books about him: Ray Carney. That fact alone should tell you something.
If you want to know the real truth about Cassavetes' life and work, check out
Carney's newly published Cassavetes on Cassavetes or any of his other books on
the filmmaker. Or check out his web site which has extensive information about
all of the films. Carney's work is the opposite of Charity's quickie make-a-buck
volume: It is deep, searching, thoughtful, carefully researched and presented,
and impeccable in its accuracy. It is an attempt to probe the soul of the man
and the artist. Do yourself a favor and skip Charity and read the critic Charity
borrows his few decent points from.
JC would be proud.......2001-12-06
A terrific introduction to one of the most important American film-makers of all time, whose influence extends around the globe (there'd be no dogme without him) and whose films are testaments to being true to artistic vision, to oneself and to others. I say 'introduction' because that's what all books on film should aspire to - to introduce the reader to the movies but not replace the experience of watching them. Charity, who writes with tremendous affection laced with a touch of hard-boiled cynicism that is perfect for his subject, is an ideal guide. His brisk and authoritative text is laced with anecdotes (many of them told in the first person by an astounding range of interviewees who knew, loved and worked with Cassavetes) and it includes testaments from a variety of film-makers who testify gladly to the effect that Cassavetes had on their work, from Almodovar to Gary Oldman and Jim Jarmusch. There are few biographies of film-makers that can make you feel like you know the subject - even Frayling's massive work on Sergio Leone is cold and distant compared to this. Reading Lifeworks was like watching Cassavetes films. I can't think of any higher recommendation. Except to say that this book also made me want to watch them all again. And again.
Mr Charity, sir, I salute you.
Average customer rating:
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American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience
Ray Carney
Manufacturer: Univ of California Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0520050991 |
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Cassavetes Directs
Michael Ventura
Manufacturer: Kamera Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1842432281 |
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