| "That night I was going on
Jean Shepherd's Night People radio show, because he had plugged Edge of
the City, which had just been released, and I wanted to thank him for it.
I told Jean about the piece we had done in class [an improvisation in
Cassavetes' acting class that would form the basis of Shadows] and how it
could be a good film and he asked if I thought I'd be able to raise the
money for it. 'If people really want to see a movie about people,' I
answered, 'they should just contribute money.' And the next day, $2000 in
dollar bills came in to Shepherd." |
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BIRTH OF THE COOL - Beat, Bebop, and
the American Avant-Garde
by Lewis MacAdams.
Section title: THE AGE OF COOL.
Chapter title: STRUGGLING TO REMAIN COOL.
Beginning of chapter, page 223 |
In 1957, the actor John Cassavetes,
twenty-seven, went on Jean Shepherd’s Night People [sic] on WOR, the
hippest radio show in Manhattan, to publicize his new movie, a pedestrian
Martin Ritt policier called Edge of the City.
The New York-born son of a Greek immigrant
importer-exporter, the handsome, dark-eyed Cassavetes was already making a
name for himself playing edgy misfits and tightly torqued tough guys in
low-budget double-feature fodder like The Killers and Crime in the
Streets. Shepherd, a wildly improvisational radio monologist, was then at
the top of his game and he boasted a large and dedicated audience.
Shepherd’s flock responded enthusiastically when Cassavetes claimed that
he could make a better movie than Martin Ritt, and if they wanted to see
an alternative to the Hollywood mindset, they should send in money to fund
a project Cassavetes was creating in collaboration with his drama
workshop. Over the next few days, two
thousand dollars in bills and coins poured in.
A week later, Cassavetes started his
film,….Bass player Charles Mingus did the score. The final product was
titled Shadows.
courtesy: Gene Bergmann
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