Cassavetes: Man Behind the Myths : Movies: Five members of late director’s inner circle shared stories, remembrances at UCLA retrospective.

A lot of myths about John Cassavetes were aired and punctured by five of Cassavetes’ inner circle as UCLA’s retrospective of the late director’s films wound down toward its final weekend. Five of the 12 films in the program remain to be shown Saturday and Sunday in the Melnitz Theater on the university’s Westwood campus.

The myths about Cassavetes, who died early last year of liver disease at the age of 59, will surely grow in coming years and new generations of filmgoers come to know and appreciate his impact on American film. But his old cronies prefer to remember the man.

“I remember when he threw Pauline Kael’s shoes out of the taxi and wouldn’t let the driver go back for them,” actor Seymour Cassell says. “She had to go to a reception in her stocking feet. John laughed his butt off at that.”

“John has to answer for one thing,” says screenwriter Ted Allan, “all the hacks who’ve been improvising ever since, thinking they were following in John’s footsteps.”

Peter Falk, who co-starred with Cassavetes in “Mikey and Nicky,” which closes the retrospective Sunday night, described the spirit with which the film maker dealt with his mortal illness: “John was really sick when he went to the wake for his friend, Mike Lally, an Irish union guy from Chicago who’d worked in pictures for years. As they got to the funeral home, where Lally was laid out, John whispered, ‘If Mike grabs me and starts to pull, Peter . . . you pull the other way.”

Boston University professor Ray Carney, who seems intent on assuring Cassavetes his rightful place in the history of American independent film, cites as one of the myths surrounding Cassavetes the notion that he was an “improvising maniac.” Carney says that because the 1957 “Shadows,” Cassavetes’ first picture, had a tag at the end saying the film had been improvised, and because his subsequent films had a free-form quality, people assumed that they were also improvisations.

Cassavetes’ two “Husbands” co-stars, Falk and Ben Gazarra, say that except for a bar scene in “Faces,” none of his later films were improvised. “John was not an improviser at all,” Gazarra says. “It’s the way he shot film and cut film; he gets inside in a way that people are not used to.”

“John set new standards of immediacy and spontaneity in acting that had never been seen before,” adds Falk. “He wasn’t just a writer, not just a screenwriter; John was an extraordinary writer with a facility and an accuracy and a grace with words. He always kept me off-guard.”

Elaine May, who directed “Mikey and Nicky,” says Cassavetes “liked to shock you. It’s such a tight corporate world now, where people take a poll to decide what they think. With John, if people liked anything too much . . . he’d change it.”

Some of the people who knew him best say he is not easy to describe, that he was complex and full of contradictions. Allan and Cassell say they never saw Cassavetes open a book, yet he could discuss anything as if he’d read everything. “I think we have lived and worked with a genius,” says Allan.

Five of Cassavetes’ most important films remain for the last weekend of the retrospective, including some that cannot and may never be rented in a video store.

The schedule:

Saturday: “Opening Night,” 7:30 p.m., followed by “Love Streams.”

Sunday: “Shadows,” 2 p.m., followed by “Too Late Blues.” At 7:30 p.m., “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” followed by “Mikey and Nicky.”