“You can do it!” roles. That’s what Gena Rowlands called the typical parts that came her way as a working actress throughout the late-1960s and early 70s. The country, it seemed, was on the brink of a revolution, with support for the ERA booming through 1972 and 1973, but that revolution had barely touched Hollywood. Inside the studio system, it wasn’t just as if time had remained frozen; it was as if it had regressed.
Gone were the days when grand dames like Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Bette Davis—Rowlands’ idol—ruled the screen. Most of the films with parts for a woman to really sink her teeth into were made outside the U.S. and given to a European actress before anyone else was considered. In Hollywood, Rowlands and her counterparts were stuck in lousy supporting positions, rarely the center of the story but, more often than not, the steady shoulder standing by their man, silent save for their offerings of encouragement. Rowlands hated these “you can do it!” parts with a passion. “I’ve said that line so many ways, I finally got to the point where I had to force myself not to look the hero squarely in the eye and say, ‘I’ll bet you can’t do it!’ or ‘Why don’t you try something else?’” she told The Baltimore Sun in 1969.
Rowlands was a hungry actress, but her hunger was driven more by necessity than love of the craft. She couldn’t afford to be overly-selective about material when she had a family with writer, actor, and director John Cassavetes to support. But by the early 1970s, after the birth of their third child and pushing 40, Rowlands’ return to work had been slower. She looked around at the landscape; the thin parts Hollywood had to offer her were only going to get thinner. “There’s not a woman’s part you can envy in America,” she once lamented. “Unless you’re lucky like me and your husband gives it to you.”
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I have nothing new or revolutionary to argue here, but rather a truth which many of us need reminding of from time to time. When it feels easier than ever to give in to doomerism; when it feels like we’ve uttered our last ‘We’re so back,’ and ‘It’s so over’ is all that’s left to say; when it feels like we’re at the mercy of billionaire powers that be, asking for permission or an invitation or even just a door to simply be left slightly ajar to jam a foot in—that’s when we have to suck it up and do things ourselves.
When we aren’t seeing or reading or hearing what we want to, we can’t wait for someone else to create it for us. We can’t wait for someone to approve of the stories we wish to tell, can’t allow a suit to tell us there’s no market for it. We have to take matters into our own hands, have to do the hard and unglamorous work, have to grin and bear it and just fucking do it.
I say this as if it’s easy, as if it isn’t an enormous investment of time and energy and soul that you will never get back and for which you will never be properly compensated. I say this as if it’s the smart thing to do financially. It’s not. It takes an artist who is a little mad, maybe even reckless, to take all this on. But if no one does it, where will we be? If we all wait for permission—wait for audience trends to align or a VP to decide there’s profit to be made—what art will we be left with?
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The thing you should know about John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974) is that no one with any real power wanted to make the movie.
Rowlands was lucky: Cassavetes was a sponge. Anything said to him in passing was never just heard and merely discarded. “You can spend an evening with John among friends and think he hasn’t noticed anything that’s going on or heard anything anyone has said. And then later you discover this amazing understanding in his writing,” Rowlands said around the time of the film’s release.
So when Rowlands lamented that there were no stories out there about women like herself—working mothers approaching middle age, grappling with the changing moment and their place within it, and struggling to balance it all—and mused that perhaps the answer was not in film, but on stage, Cassavetes listened. It wasn’t the first time he wrote an enviable role with her in mind, and it would be far from the last.
“See what you think,” he told his wife one day, tossing her a script for an early stage version of what would eventually become A Woman Under the Influence. She read through the story of Mabel (Rowlands) and Nick Longhetti (Peter Falk), a blue-collar couple—each from opposite backgrounds, and each with their own variety of mental instability—desperately in love and trying to raise their three children, and all of the strains and complications that arise from the distance and loneliness growing between them. She looked at the role of the unraveling wife—complex, all-consuming, intense—and loved it. She also thought, “I would be dead in two weeks if I played this on stage every night.” The short version of the long story: Cassavetes decided to make it into a movie instead.
Not that getting A Woman Under the Influence made as a film would be easy. According to Rowlands, “John showed it to somebody at one of the studios and he said, ‘John, who wants to see a movie about a crazy, middle-aged dame?’”
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The vultures are circling Hollywood. Tech moguls have been appointed to lead creative companies; studios lean on algorithms to minimize risk and maximize private equity backers’ returns; mega-mergers have consolidated a once-bustling ecosystem to just a few major corporate players (which will likely be reduced even further soon). The output is shrinking steadily—just 63 percent of available soundstages were rented in 2024, nearly half of the usual occupancy rates just a few years prior—as even the IP monoculture well runs dry. Streaming has decimated theatrical release windows; AI slop is everywhere; anti-intellectualism is what sells; can feature-length films even compete with TikTok-addled attention spans?
The crisis in Hollywood today is not too terribly different from the crisis it faced 50 years ago, when the rise of maverick filmmakers prompted a New Hollywood that forced studios to innovate in order to save their dying models. But even then, there was a limit to how much risk—and what kinds of risky stories—could be told.
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Cassavetes had a notoriously tough time with studios. While his crowd-funded 1958 debut, Shadows, is largely considered to be the birth of the American independent film movement, his following two films—Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child Is Waiting (1963)—were both directed, with varying degrees of unhappiness, under contract with Paramount. He returned to financing and producing all his films himself, with the exception of Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), produced under Universal Studios as part of their push to meet the New Hollywood moment, but subsequently recut after release.
Major studios, Cassavetes concluded, would always be the enemy. The faces may change, the trends may dictate a desire for something “young” and “daring” and “with it,” but it was all lip service. They’d take your film and cut it up however they like to please test audiences, or dump it into the wrong theaters with next to no publicity if it didn’t work for them. And what did those suits know about making a movie? What did they know about craft and creativity and storytelling? They were businessmen, not artists.
“I just couldn’t trust any studio to handle the picture correctly. I wanted no interference up front, in the writing, producing and directing, and I wanted no interference in promoting and selling it,” Cassavetes said of A Woman Under the Influence. “If anyone had interfered with my vision, I would probably have gone mad.”
Who wants to see a movie about a crazy, middle-aged dame? Maybe a lot of crazy, middle-aged dames, or maybe no one. But why should an audience dictate art? Is a movie about a crazy, middle-aged dame only worth being made if it can be profitable? Or is it enough to try and tell a story, to create a piece of art, and have it resonate with even one viewer, or possibly, with only the artists themselves?
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The irony, of course, is that viewing A Woman Under the Influence as a story of a crazy, middle-aged dame is to wildly oversimplify it. It’s a story of a modern woman, yes, but it’s also the story of a modern marriage, a modern family, and even—in its own way—of a crazy, middle-aged guy. Like all of Cassavetes’ films, it’s a story about love: loving others so intensely you lose yourself, loving an idealized version of someone else, loving the past, loving the idea of love. It’s also a story that asks if love alone can solve tremendous challenges; if love can grow and change over the years and still remain; if love can supersede outsiders’ judgement; if love can withstand betrayal. “I wanted to know,” Cassavetes said, “if anyone could believe in love anymore; or is it so far away that no one has ever felt a feeling?”
These are high concepts, told through Cassavetes’ roaming lens and Rowlands’ and Falk’s lived-in performances in relentlessly intimate and grounded terms. On the face of it, A Woman Under the Influence consists of two long acts set mostly in the cramped confines of a working class L.A. house: the prelude to Mabel’s mental breakdown and commitment, and the harrowing aftermath when she returns six months later.
Mabel strives to be the perfect wife, a woman who can make a full spaghetti dinner for Nick and a dozen of his dirty utility crew who show up without notice. She strives to be a perfect mother, a woman who throws her children a playdate party in the middle of the week for their enjoyment, telling them, “I never did anything in my whole life that was anything, except I made you guys.” But Mabel doesn’t match Nick’s vision of what a perfect wife and mother should be. She’s too friendly with his crew; she’s too welcoming to the father of her children’s playdates. Nick tells his mother (a ferocious Katherine Cassavetes) that Mabel’s insecure, gives him nothing, and is empty inside. Mabel’s not ‘right,’ but Nick can’t articulate what right is, other than a vague notion that it’s something she once was and is no longer. He’s erratically tempered, perpetually embarrassed, and wildly aggressive, all swinging fists and screaming threats that everyone relax, everyone be themselves, everyone have a good time, red-faced refusals that something is wrong—because it simply can’t be.
Mabel’s homecoming after six months away isn’t a happy celebration, though Nick tries to force it to be. After Nick’s mother is forced to dismiss the 60 eager guests crammed into the small home for a welcome party, Mabel arrives in the rain to a quieter group of close friends and family who watch her with wide-eyed, careful attention normally reserved for children. Nick yells at her to be herself; Mabel, her personality electroshocked away, sobs that she doesn’t know how. Their guests leave, and Mabel, terrified that she can’t meet anyone’s expectations, wrestles with Nick for a razor blade while her children scream. There are only two escapes from her domestic oppression: madness—escape into fantasy, pretend to be a dancer in a corps de ballet performing Swan Lake—or death. Unless, of course, the prospect of unconditional love can see her through to the next day.
A Woman Under the Influence is not an easy watch; I love it, yet rarely want to watch it. Rowlands’ performance is fully embodied in a way that feels dangerous, as intimate and unsettling as sitting in a stranger’s bedroom and helplessly bearing witness to their crisis. (Even the filmmakers worried, at times, whether or not Rowlands had inhabited her character so entirely that she herself was suffering a mental break.) Falk’s wild, unpredictable temper is flinch-inducing, lacing even moments of tenderness with unease, a feeling that at any moment the peace could break. The film is transcendently harrowing, beautiful in spite of and often because of the discomfort it causes a viewer. The brutality of A Woman Under the Influence is not that of gratuitous, glorified violence, nor does it approach trauma porn. Instead, it’s hyperrealistic, cinema not as entertainment or escapism, but instead as a mirror, reflecting reality without shying away from the parts that are ugly, stressful, traumatic, and uncomfortable. It doesn’t spoonfeed the audience answers: Nick’s behavior is not glorified as some kind of macho masculinity, but it’s not condemned as toxic, either; it’s never made clear if Mabel is suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness, experiencing fairly appropriate anxiety and panic in a stressful situation, or experiencing a total psychological breakdown. Film, like life, is not always a tender filet mignon—sometimes it’s a tougher cut of meat, nourishing yet requiring a great deal more effort to chew. And in the film business, a tough steak is not always an easy sell.
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There is freedom in having no interference, but it often comes with a steep cost. Cassavetes and Rowlands were both wise—or, to some, foolish—enough to risk it all, again and again, to tell the stories they wanted to tell in the way they wanted to tell them. They took shitty parts in shitty mainstream films for the paychecks and they owned it, rarely pretending they thought these were great pieces of art. They took the money and ran, funneling it all back into their own projects, stopping production when funds ran out and starting back up when they returned from another mercenary gig. They talked friends into putting up money—Falk, who was so notoriously cheap, Seymour Cassel once said he “would sit on a dime until it melted,” put up half the starting budget for A Woman Under the Influence—and cast them alongside their own family in parts. They often used their actual home as a filming location, remortgaging it time and time again to free up additional funds. (“When I bought this house,” Cassavetes said just 18 months before his death in 1989, “I owed $50,000; and now, thirty years later, I still owe $50,000. What does that tell you about my career?”). They enlisted a crew that knew in advance that they would be making next to nothing.
Integrity is often dangerous and expensive; it’s easy to forget, given Cassavetes’ current legacy as a filmmaking icon, that his work was not widely beloved in his own time. A Woman Under the Influence is the rare exception to a body of work that was often derided and ridiculed, rarely seen and rarely discussed. Making any kind of art that challenges the dominant monoculture is difficult, and rarely appreciated until a much later date. Optimism isn’t the first word that comes to mind when thinking about the Cassavetes canon, but watching his films, I see miracles: a body of work that stubbornly insists there will be a future where this kind of art is appreciated—and a body of work that insists on building it.
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I’m always fascinated by the narrative that’s taken hold in some circles critiquing Cassavetes as a misogynist when few other directors, particularly men—and they were almost all men—in the New Hollywood world were making features that centered women. Were Cassavetes’ depictions of women brutal? Could they be savage and scathing and selfish? Did the women drink and smoke too much, and possibly have a screw or two loose? Sure—but they were also lonely and wounded and big-hearted; terrified and prideful and regal; protective and honest and fearless. In short: real women, awarded the same complex humanity as their male counterparts, often with startling honesty rarely seen in American films.
And how was Casasavetes able to write women’s inner lives with such keen insight? “I have no idea,” Rowlands remarked, years later. “ I have tried to think about it…but he just did. He just did understand women, and he liked women. He liked women very much, and his own personal feeling was that he didn’t know how any woman could not be crazy in this society. The way society is set up is specifically to drive women crazy. He expressed that quite a lot. Where he got the depth of his understanding, I don’t know—but I was the beneficiary of his very great talent.”
A Woman Under the Influence endures as a statement on womanhood not because it is a film-as-time-capsule—a relic of the women’s lib era—but because it’s just as relevant now as ever, the bleak side of trad wife lifestyles you’ll never see on social media. Cassavetes was walking the walk long before it was a viral talking point to proclaim that “Women’s stories matter! They just matter!” in spite of how profitable or practical they may be to tell.
Not that Cassavetes would consider A Woman Under the Influence a political statement. It was an empathetic statement; Cassavetes understood what women left behind at home were going through. “I know when I was not working and Gena was working for me—because I was really in trouble in this business…I stayed home and took care of the baby and I was a pretty good housewife and everything else,” he explained. “But I didn’t have really the same reactions as a woman would have. Mainly because I didn’t have to be a housewife for the rest of my life. I didn’t have to think into the future of when I’d get older or when my attractiveness would fade or when the kids would grow up or when the baby would cease to cling to you…”
But all art is political, whether or not we outright intend it to be. When you make a movie about a crazy, middle-aged dame, you assert that that crazy, middle-aged dame is worthy of being seen and heard. “I hope and I think this film makes clear our views and our experiences,” Cassavetes said. “A film has to please us in this way, it has to reach people with what we think and feel.”
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I sense that the solution to all of our current troubles lies in a movement of independent productions led by stars with the kind of mid-level power that Cassavetes and Rowlands had. Perhaps this next era will be one in which the actors who are truly artists set themselves apart from those who are merely influencers. Perhaps in this next era we, the audience, will be more kind about the obvious for-a-paycheck parts, so long as those paychecks are funneled into something greater. They could be.
The thing is that anyone can make a movie today. We have more right at our fingertips to create with—and to create cheaply—than they did in the 1970s, hustling to bundle together a couple hours’ worth of leftover film stock to shoot with. The problem isn’t how will we get this made so much as how will we get this movie seen? Can we be okay with films reaching a smaller and more dedicated audience, or will stars desperate for box office reach make deals with streamer devils? Can we be okay knowing that we will not get rich from our art, that we will have to take other gigs to pay our bills while we create? It shouldn’t be like this—and it doesn’t have to be like this—but while it is, it’s up to us to adapt. Or, maybe: To change the system by opting out of it entirely. If enough people walk away, what kind of system is left?
In the end, we’re faced with the same questions Cassavetes was pondering decades ago: “Nowadays, the big question is: Can a picture make $100 million? Who the hell cares? If you’re thinking that way, you’re making money. If that’s what it’s come to, let the audience look at pictures of money. Put money on the screen, and then rape it, shoot it, defecate on it—because that’s basically what everyone is doing.”
No one wanted to make a movie about a crazy old dame, but Cassavetes wouldn’t take no for an answer. Thank god he made A Woman Under the Influence anyway; thank god he and Rowlands and their collaborators put in the work and then hustled to distribute and market it, pushing the movie to a modest level of success that seemed basically impossible (and was never again replicated in Cassavetes’ entire career). In the 50 plus years since its release, how many films have been indebted to A Woman Under the Influence—how many this year alone? If we’re feeling influenced by the content, we might do well to be inspired by the process, too.