Cassavetes: Antidote for a Dismal Time for Film : Movies: His intensely American films have stayed contemporary. His subject, always, was love.

“Seen any good movies lately?” has gone from a conversation-opener to a wail. I can’t, personally, remember any moviegoing period as dispiriting as the first five months of this year, but a great solution is at hand: the John Cassavetes collection, with us at least through the month of June.

They’re guaranteed to infuriate. Either because they remain the damnedest, most haunting and most confrontational movies ever made or because watching them we glimpse what’s missing from roughly 95% of our movies today and it’s almost too much to bear.

Cassavetes’ subject, always, was love. His gaze was resolutely inward, his attitude was profoundly compassionate. To believe, as some did, that he made movies only about men was as off-kilter as the persistent idea that his films were improvised. Cassavetes scripted rigorously, exhaustively, then cut his movies to cover any traces of artfulness. He also created an unrivaled gallery of women’s roles, each vividly different; women of every age were the prime moving forces of his films. Even in the moments when they weren’t being treated well, he created a protective feeling within us so that we felt what was being done was wrong--not an attitude much in evidence today.

Among the stories swapped at the Sundance Festival’s tribute to Cassavetes, a few weeks before his death in January of 1989, was the one of him as a young man, announcing to his father that he wanted to be an actor. His Greek-born businessman-father, already not happy that his son was leaving college, took the news gravely. “Well, John,” he said, “that’s a very important job. You will have a tremendous responsibility, because you are going to be representing the lives of human beings. “

Bless the Greeks and their historic sense of the essence of things. Has any American filmmaker ever acted so consistently on such sound advice? Cassavetes began as an actor--a powerful one--but quickly knew he wanted to direct even more. And from “Shadows” which he began when he was 27, through “Love Streams” in 1984, he represented the lives of human beings, as we’d never seen them before: fragmented, inarticulate, chaotic, painful, hilarious.

The chaos was absolutely intentional. As Cassavetes himself said: “It’s never as clear as it is in movies. People don’t know what they are doing most of the time. They don’t know what they want. It’s only in ‘the movies’ that they know what their problems are and have game plans to deal with them.”

Cassavetes radically changed the way American movies were shot, listened to, understood. The acknowledged father of independent filmmaking in this country, he wrote, produced, directed, co-edited, photographed, acted in and even--in some cases--distributed eight seminal, intensely personal features: “Shadows,” “Faces,” “Husbands,” “Minnie and Moskowitz,” “A Woman Under the Influence,” “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” “Opening Night” and “Love Streams.” In addition to their daring, what links these films is their absolutely contemporary and personal quality: We know these characters because their interior struggles are exactly the ones we wrestle with every day.

And still, as they have for 34 years, Cassavetes’ films can send audiences up the aisles and out the door before the first reel is over. I can empathize. “Husbands” still does that to me; I’ve seen a little more than a third of it three or four times and I’ve never made it past Peter Falk’s Archie throwing up in the men’s room. So I understand that especially television-raised audiences, conditioned for so long to conventional storytelling techniques, might be pushed beyond endurance by Cassavetes’ methods.

However, the real problem has been getting the chance to see a Cassavetes film, to slip into one for ourselves and find out where, or if, it fits. None of those eight cornerstone films have been on cassette, although there’s now talk of it before the end of the year, and they’re rarely on television. All of this makes the mini-retrospective now at Laemmle’s Royal (schedule below) the great chance that it is; a cross section of the freshest, most pertinent and relevant films anywhere.

There remains an extraordinary record of Cassavetes’ thoughts as he made his films: Cassavetes on Cassavetes, an unpublished manuscript of the filmmaker’s own, outspoken words taken from interviews, transcripts, private conversations and letters, and about 2,000 pages of unproduced plays, screenplays, novels and essays. They were painstakingly collected for the 1990 retrospective tour by Boston University Prof. Ray Carney.

Pungent and unsparing, these notes are the absolute manifesto by which Cassavetes lived and worked. Read these excerpts remembering the force of Cassavetes’ sardonic smile, his watchfulness, his palpable intelligence, his precise, mercurial shifts of mood--and his enveloping gusts of laughter:

After “A Child Is Waiting,” whose philosophy (about the institutionalizing of retarded children) he hated: ‘One thing I learned about the big studios: You can’t please them and yourself at the same time. I will never make another commercial film. People cannot be paid to care. It is unsanitary. It is unhealthy.”

“Comedy is more interesting to me than serious drama. There’s more life. More possibilities. It’s healthy to laugh at somebody. Do you know why people don’t laugh at people? They’re too high and mighty to laugh. They don’t like them enough to invest their time to laugh, because if you laugh at somebody, you know you’re going to have to be connected with them. . . . When friends get together, they laugh at each other. When enemies get together, no chance, baby. No laughter.”

“In the beginning of our marriage, I made a bargain. (Gena) would fight me to the bitter end and I would fight her to the bitter end and the bargain has never been broken. Together we lead a magnificent, unassembled, emotional and undisciplined life. I can’t think of anyone with whom I would rather argue or love than my wife. We fight and argue and kill each other off every single day, Gena and me. But that’s only surface, because we both have the understanding that when we don’t do that, it’s all over.”

“Our era is an age of disillusionment. But an artist has a responsibility to find hope for this age and see that it wins occasionally. The characters in my films may have a terrible time of it, but they will always keep hope and have it in the end.”

“I’m very concerned over the depiction of women on the screen. It has gotten worse than ever. It’s related to their being either high- or low-class concubines, and the only question is when or where they will go to bed and with whom or how many. There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of women as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her.”

Advice to young directors: “Say what you are. Not what you would like to be. Not what you have to be. Just say what you are. And what you are is good enough.”

* “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” through today. “Faces,” Wednesday - June 4. “Shadows,” June 5 - 11. “Opening Night,” June 12-indefinite. Laemmle’s Royal Theatre. 11523 Santa Monica Blvd; (213) 477-5581 .