…with Rowlands in only a minor role, he had no real allies left, the last straw coming during post-production. For him, the primary focus of the picture had always been the children at the heart of the story, not the adult leads. Stanley Kramer saw things differently. When Cassavetes attended the first screening of the film for the executives at MGM, he discovered that Kramer had completely re-edited it behind his back to amplify the sentimentality. “Take my name off the picture”, said Cassavetes as he stormed out of the screening room. Then he smacked Kramer in the mouth for good measure. For the time being, the director’s Hollywood career was over.
Using his salary from a short-lived day job at Screen Gems (coming up with ideas for new TV shows that were never commissioned) and the fee from an unproduced script he wrote for Don Siegel, Cassavetes moved ahead with the unheard-of-at-the-time idea of an entirely self-financed production. Favours were called in at every opportunity, from the use of friends’ and family’s homes for locations to the use of Haskell Wexler's camera. A young Steven Spielberg, worked as an unpaid runner, while the milkman was given a promise of the share in any profits when Cassavetes couldn’t afford to pay his bill.
Refusing to work to any form of schedule or budget, Cassavetes let the production evolve organically, giving his company of actors whatever time they needed to find their way into character, shutting production down whenever rewrites or extra rehearsals were required. Rowlands would give the first of six extraordinary performances in her husband’s work, despite later describing the shoot as the most difficult she’d ever undertaken. With Rowlands pregnant at the time with daughter Xan, Cassavetes’ insistence on goading her through multiple takes took its toll and tensions between the two ran high.
Finally printing over 115 hours of 16mm stock (paid for through several remortgages of his and Rowlands’ home), Cassavetes would spend 30 months in post-production, shaping the film into what would ultimately become the director’s first masterpiece. bye.
