The Renegades Who Made A Woman Under the Influence
The costume designer cooked the spaghetti for A Woman Under the Influence’s big breakfast scene. At one point, the script supervisor found herself operating a camera. A recent college grad hired to help paint the set wound up overseeing the entire lighting operation. “We all did everything,” says Elaine Kagan, one of the few people who was part of the movie from its earliest days, transcribing John Cassavetes’s dialogue in shorthand as the director paced around and smoked Marlboros.
Fifty years later, the film that made Gena Rowlands the most revered actress of her generation is synonymous with the kind of low-budget, high-impact independent production that gets by on scrappiness. A Woman Under the Influence was made for roughly $1 million in 1974’s dollars (half of which reportedly came from actor Peter Falk), and Cassevetes’ immersive methods required much of the cast and crew to fancy themselves jacks of all trades. Synergy became key to the naturalism that makes the domestic drama so wrenching. Together in a two-story rental house off of Hollywood Boulevard, a small band of eager artisans created one of the paragons of American cinema. At the time, the movie had no distributor, and Sundance hadn’t yet come around to galvanize the indie-film pipeline. Cassevetes used non-union professionals aware the gig wouldn’t do much for their savings accounts.
“For me, every day was heaven,” says Mitchell Briet, the aforementioned painter turned best boy turned “in charge of lighting” (as his credit reads) who also spent time in the editing room during postproduction. “I loved going to the set every day, and the crew bonded. We didn’t know how big and important it ultimately would be, but we knew we were doing something that we all wanted to be doing, with these iconic figures acting out scenes in front of us. John and Gena valued that we were there and that we were not getting paid a lot.”
Take the spaghetti. Rowlands’s Mabel Longhetti serves it to the coworkers her husband Nick (Falk) brings home after a long overnight construction job that hampered the romantic date they had planned. With no forewarning, she snaps into action as soon as the troop shows up. By then, the audience already has a grasp on Mabel’s topsy-turvy psychological state, which makes the meal a testament to her competence. She proves herself an affectionate spouse, a decent cook, and a charming host, but when Nick scolds her for overindulging on hospitality, we see how quickly and severely her stability can shatter.
The spaghetti the men eat around the Longhettis’ table is as crucial to understanding Mabel and Nick’s strained devotion as it is to capturing the dynamics of Cassavetes’ enterprise. Carole Smith, for example, has two official credits on the film, production secretary and wardrobe supervisor. Sometimes she was in the makeshift office upstairs doing administrative tasks, and other times she was sewing bits of Rowlands’ clothes. When Cassevetes needed someone to cook a vat of pasta, she stepped in to do that, too, with Kagan (officially the script supervisor) and others pitching in at Smith’s side.
“Peter kept changing the way he was playing it,” Breit says of the scene. “There were lots of takes, there was lots of spaghetti, there were a lot of camera angles. I don’t think we were doing two cameras at that point — just one camera. When you change things around with the camera, which John liked to do, the lighting has to change, so it took time. I remember it being frenetic.”
At the time, Caleb Deschanel, a recent AFI graduate who went on to shoot The Right Stuff and The Passion of the Christ, was the director of photography. He had trained under Gordon Willis, the cinematography great best known for the Godfather trilogy. As Breit tells it, Deschanel’s traditional practices didn’t always mesh with Cassavetes’ roving experimentation. “John and Caleb were not on the same wavelength,” he recalls. “John was used to being the person who held the camera. He had a different way of doing things.” One day Breit showed up to the house and Deschanel was gone, along with a lot of the crew he’d brought on. That’s when Cassevetes promoted a 22-year-old Breit to gaffer, the person who manages the lighting. (Deschanel’s rep did not respond to Vulture’s requests for comment.)
Briet and Kagan both got front-row seats as Cassevetes and Rowlands, who had already been married for nearly 20 years, birthed the film that now defines both of their legacies. Cassevetes wrote the role specifically for Rowlands, intending it as a theater piece until Rowlands told him she wouldn’t be able to get through eight emotionally grueling shows a week. Even on screen, it’s easy to imagine her being driven mad by what is essentially a 155-minute nervous meltdown. Sometimes she was driven mad. “I also liked the fact that in that film, I was a little wacko, but my husband understood that and he loved me, and it didn’t bother him that I was as strange as I could be,” Rowlands said in 2016. “When I have this terrible breakdown and have to go away for a while, leave him and my children, oh — that’s a hard scene. We’re showing a hard moment in a person’s life, a terribly hard moment.”
Kagan remembers how taxing it was for Rowlands to repeat the living-room freak-out where an erratic Mabel tries to ward off the psychiatrist Nick has enlisted to evaluate her wellbeing. When things got tense, there were no trailers or commissary to escape to. And yet Kagan describes Cassavetes and Rowlands as “very in sync.”
“She cried, she got upset with him,” Kagan says. “Everybody got upset with everybody. All of the characters’ emotions swapped over to the emotions of the actors. If she wanted someplace to go by herself, she’d go upstairs. But the magic of their romance melted into the project. We had so much fun, and it was so hard, and we were there all the time, and we didn’t have the money. Carole Smith and I were constantly calling to get short ends to shoot the next day. The intensity was exciting, besides being exhausting.”
Even though the crew disbanded after the shoot, A Woman Under the Influence’s renegade spirit carried over to its rollout. Cassevetes hired publicist Steve Jaffe, who also worked with the Stanleys (Kramer and Kubrick) and other revered directors, at a fraction of the roughly $15,000 to $25,000 that Jaffe typically charged. The movie still didn’t have a distributor, and they worked out of a dimly lit office at a theater on Wilshire Boulevard where Cassavetes personally called up theaters in markets like Chicago and Dallas to four-wall the film. “He believed in the arts in a way few others that I worked for did,” Jaffe says. “He was like an Orson Welles type. He had such an enormous ego, but his charm was overwhelming, so you didn’t notice the ego.”
The night Woman premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 1974, Jaffe, Cassavetes, Rowlands, and Falk walked around Manhattan hanging posters on lampposts and in bar windows. Their aim was to drum up attention for the movie’s proper release, and afterward they convened at Joe Allen in Midtown to await the reviews that appeared in newspapers the following morning. After it opened in New York on November 18, Cassavetes spent roughly a year traveling with the film, giving Q&As at theaters and seminars on college campuses. In 1975, he and Rowlands earned Oscar nominations for their work. (He lost to Francis Ford Coppola, and she lost to Ellen Burstyn.) And in 1992, three years after the director’s death, Touchstone Home Video released A Woman Under the Influence on VHS, greatly extending its shelf life. Today, it’s a Criterion staple and perhaps the most-cited hallmark among serious-minded actresses. Kirsten Dunst, Laura Dern, Cate Blanchett, Dakota Johnson, Aubrey Plaza, Kathryn Hahn, Carrie Coon, Carmen Ejogo, Kristen Stewart, and Julie Delpy have all named Rowlands among their chief influences. The through line from Influence to the raw performances these women have given in recent hits like The Power of the Dog, Blue Jasmine, and The Nest is clear.
“There was a kind of camaraderie that did not exist on any other film I’d ever been part of,” Jaffe says. “John was very proud to present the film because it was the ultimate role that he could give his wife, and he just fawned over her. He loved her so much.”