Our discussions covered a lot of territory, but one of the things I spent most time asking him about was the fate of alternative versions of his films. Because Cassavetes made most of his movies outside the studio system and financed them himself (paid for from the salary he made acting in other directors' films), he was free from the constraints that limit Hollywood film-makers. He could take as long as he wanted to shoot his projects, spend as much time as he needed to edit them and, if he was so inclined, reshoot or re-edit them as much as he wanted. The result was that at various points in their creation, most of his works - including Faces, Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie - existed in wildly differing versions.
The film we spent the most time talking about was Shadows. Cassavetes' first feature, generally regarded as the beginning of the American independent movement, had had a vexed history. The film-maker in effect made it twice, filming an initial version in 1957, and screening it in the autumn of 1958 at New York's Paris Theatre for invited audiences. But, dissatisfied with the response, Cassavetes reshot much of the movie in early 1959, replacing approximately half of the footage in the original print with new material. In late 1959, the so-called "second version" of Shadows premiered.
What made the Shadows story particularly interesting was that a number of critics and viewers who saw both versions were convinced that Cassavetes had made a grievous mistake. Jonas Mekas's Movie Journal column, published in the Village Voice on January 27 1960, can stand for all: "I have no further doubt that whereas the second version of Shadows is just another Hollywood film - however inspired, at moments - the first version is the most frontier-breaking American feature film in at least a decade. Rightly understood and properly presented, it could influence and change the tone, subject matter, and style of the entire independent American cinema."
At the end of his piece, Mekas expressed the hope that Cassavetes would come to his senses, suppress the second version and release the first version; but it was not to be. Cassavetes withdrew the earlier print and refused to allow it to be screened again. From that point on, the only version of Shadows anyone would ever see was the re-edited version.
When I asked Cassavetes the whereabouts of the earlier print, he said he doubted it still existed. The likelihood of its survival was all the more remote when one took into account the modesty of his film-making operations in the late 1950s. The film-maker told me that the first version of Shadows had existed only as a single 16mm print. He had not had enough money to make a duplicate or a backup, and the negative that that print was made from had itself been cut up to make the second version of the film.
The one small lead he offered me was that he said he vaguely remembered donating the early print to a film school. Mekas subsequently told me of a conversation he had with Cassavetes in which the film-maker was slightly more specific and said that he had donated the print of the first version to "a school in the Midwest".
Unfortunately for my peace of mind, the damage had been done. I contacted every school in the Midwest, starting with the alma mater of Cassavetes' wife, Gena Rowlands, the University of Wisconsin. I also tracked down anyone I could locate who had been associated with the schools' film programmes when the gift would have been made. I had many wonderful conversations, but came up emptyhanded.
Around the point Cassavetes died, in 1989, I expanded the search. I contacted staff members at every major American film archive, museum and university film programme to see if the print had somehow been squirrelled away in one of their collections. After all, the title would have been the same for the first and second versions. I began making announcements at film events I organised or presided over. I asked friends to spread word of the quest.
There was no shortage of leads to pursue over the course of the next decade. There were thrilling days when it seemed that the print was within my grasp if only I could get in touch with a particular person who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone. But that final someone always eluded me. There were wild goose chases where I flew into a strange city and met with a collector who I had been led to believe had the print in his possession. Needless to say, each time the film turned out to be the second version. There were also comical tricks of fate. For example, while searching for the Shadows print in the Library of Congress collection, I stumbled across an uncatalogued, unrecognised, long print of Faces. Very interesting, very valuable; but, sorry, wrong movie.
I can't say I didn't get discouraged. Some time in the mid-1990s, I put the search on the back burner and decided to take another tack. If I could not actually find the physical print of the first version, I would imaginatively reconstruct it by drawing on memories of the cast, crew and people who had seen it, as well as by studying the second version, which included approximately 30 minutes of footage that had been in the earlier print. I reinterviewed the cast and crew to pick their brains for memories about the first version, then studied the composite second version shot by shot for tell-tale clues about which footage had been filmed in 1957 and which in 1959.
Almost all of that research had to be done at actual movie theatre screenings, since a video image doesn't reveal the kind of detail I required. I pulled friends, dragging their feet and complaining, into 35mm screenings in theatres, handed them clipboards, and we sat together in the front row, whispering in each other's ears and taking notes about how an actor's socks changed in two successive shots. We noted the length of the shadows on the ground to tell what time of day scenes were filmed; or the size of the leaves and the openness of buds on bushes in the background of a park scene to decide what month the scene was filmed. Everything eventually connected with everything else. The title of a film on a marquee would allow us to date an actress's hairdo, which would then allow us to date a scarf that an actor wore in another scene and, three or four steps later, we could conclusively induce that another scene, different from any of the above ones, was filmed in March 1957. It took years, but I reconstructed the entire first version out of such spider-web tangles of relationships. As the jigsaw puzzle got filled in, tiny piece by tiny piece, the big picture of what had been filmed in the two different periods of shooting gradually emerged. I eventually published two books with my conclusions.
Then, one day two years ago, one of the friends I had told about the search called, saying he had run into a woman who might have some information. When I finally tracked her down and got in touch with her, it was your typical "good news/bad news" situation.
The good news was that she confirmed that, yes, the title sounded familiar. Her father had run a second-hand shop in downtown Manhattan. One of the ways he replenished his stock was by attending "lost and found" sales held by the New York City subway system. There were so many forgotten umbrellas, mittens, eyeglasses, hats, pens and other things left on the trains that the Transit Authority annually auctioned them off. Though a nice watch might go for $10-20, everything else generally went for a dollar or two per "lot" - a box that might contain 50 or 100 umbrellas, mittens, or hats. One year a long time ago (it was impossible to pin down the date), there was a fibre-board film container in one of the boxes her father bought. When he got home and opened up the carton, he saw the title Shadows scratched on the outer leader of one of the reels, but since he had never heard of the movie, she told me he simply put it aside and joked that he was disappointed it was not "a porno film".
In this case, the good news was also the bad news. The subway was the wrong place to find the first version. Not only didn't it square with Cassavetes' account of what he had done with it, it just didn't seem a plausible scenario. If the only print in the universe had been left on a subway car, why hadn't whoever lost it simply claimed it the next day? A print found on the subway was much more likely to be one of the dozens of prints of the second version being couriered to or from a college or arthouse screening in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
Even worse news was that all of this had taken place something like 30 or 40 years earlier. In my very first conversation with her, the woman emphasised that even assuming her memory of the title was correct, there was virtually no chance the actual print still existed. The junk shop had gone out of business long ago. The father had died years before. The children had married, had their own families and moved away to other cities. The store's contents had been sold off or thrown out years ago. The woman put so little stock in the print's survival that she didn't even really want to search for it when I asked her to. She emphasised that she had no idea where to look.
It would take almost two years of polite pestering on my part before she came up with anything; but I have to admit that even as I went through the motions of talking to her every few weeks to remind her to ask other family members if they had any idea if the print might have survived or where it might be, I privately wrote off this lead as one more dead end in a dead-end story.
That's why when the film was found in the attic of one of the children's houses in Florida, shipped to me, and finally in my hands, I didn't even bother to look very carefully at it for a while. I was absolutely convinced that the odds were completely against it being the right print of the film. Indifference suddenly turned to excitement, and then terror a few hours later, when I manually unspooled four or five feet of footage from the first reel and held it up to my desk light. All I could make out was a figure walking down a street, but that was enough. The known version of Shadows began with a crowd scene.
In 10 seconds, I went from being blasé to being afraid to touch the print. I have a screening room in my house, but (although it took considerable self-restraint) I didn't dare thread the film and project it. If this actually was the long-lost first version of Shadows, the fruit of a 17-year search, it would be just my luck to have my projector scratch or shred it. I carefully sealed up the carton and made an appointment the next day at a professional film transfer house to have a high quality video copy made, so that the original would never have to be run through a projector again. There was an inevitable delay, of course. It would be about a week until I could get an appointment - a week of suddenly anxious sleep - fearful, with the completely irrational fear all collectors know, that my house would burn down in the interim, before I was able to get it to a lab and watch a movie that hadn't been seen in 45 years.
The print exceeded my expectations in every respect. In terms of content, there are more than 30 minutes of entirely different scenes that are not in the later version. The discovery gives us a large chunk of new work by Cassavetes - a little like discovering four or five lost Picasso paintings. Physically, although the celluloid base was shrunken and brittle from 50 years of storage, the emulsion was in unbelievably fine condition. Remember that, unlike movies we see in a movie theatre, or the prints of the second version of Shadows that I myself had seen, this print was not a duplicate or a blow-up, and it had only been passed through a projector four or five times before Cassavetes withdrew it. In film terms, it was pristine, as good as a film can be. Not only was it custom-printed directly from the original negative that had passed through Cassavetes' camera in 1957, it was virtually brand new, unworn and unscratched.
One could ask if the discovery proves Mekas right or wrong; but that doesn't really matter. Each version of Shadows stands on its own as an independent work of art. The value of the first version is that it gives us an opportunity to go behind the scenes into the workshop of the artist. Art historians x-ray Rembrandt's work to glimpse his original intentions. Critics study the differences between the quarto and folio versions of Shakespeare's plays. There is almost never an equivalent to these things in film. That is the value of the first and second versions of Shadows. They allow us to eavesdrop on Cassavetes' creative process, as it were to stand behind him as he films and edits his first feature. We watch him change his understanding of his film and his characters. His revisions - the scenes he adds, deletes, loops new dialogue into, adds music to, or moves to new positions as he re-films and re-edits Shadows - offer an almost unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of the heart and mind of one of the most important artists of the past 50 years.
The odds against finding the print still astonish me - not only because it was the only copy in the world and was found in such an unexpected location, but because of the luck of the timing. The junk-dealer's children are themselves now old people and the dusty carton would almost certainly have been thrown out by the next generation when they died. My friends used to joke that I was looking for a needle in a haystack, but what I realised after I found the print was that the situation was even more dire than that. The haystack was not going to be there very much longer. If the print had been in an archive or museum, it would have patiently sat there for the next 1,000 years waiting for someone to discover it; but as an unknown object in a brown container gathering dust in the corner of an attic, it would not have survived the clean-out of the next generation. Though I had had no idea that the clock was ticking while I was engaged in my search, I realised some time after I found the print that this was probably the last chance to find it for all eternity.
· Ray Carney is Professor of Film and American Studies and Director of Film Studies at Boston University. He is the author of books about John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, Frank Capra, Carl Dreyer, and many other film-makers, and manages a website devoted to Cassavetes: www.cassavetes.com
Ray Carney @'The Guardian'
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