Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and Block Cinema (Venue Partner)
40 Arts Circle Drive
Northwestern University
847 491 4000
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Film: Double Feature
I'm Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes — The Man and His Work (1984) and The American Dreamer (1971)
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I'm Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes—The Man and His Work
- When
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Friday Feb 17 (7–9:30pm)
- Where
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Directions: On the south end of Northwestern University's campus, just off Sheridan Road. Free parking at NU after 4 pm weekdays and all day weekends. Near the CTA Purple Line Davis and Foster stops and the Metra Davis stop.
- Price
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$6 / $4 for Block members, students, seniors
- Links
“LM Kit Carson (David Holzman's Diary) and Lawrence Schiller's under-viewed 1971 doc, The American Dreamer, captures the late Dennis Hopper in a state of deliciously date-stamped decadence. The actor/director occasionally deigns to post-production work on his post-Easy Rider train wreck, The Last Movie, although in general he seems more concerned with finding orgies and losing his production financiers. While scholars debate whether The Last Movie is reappraisal-ripe iconoclasm or the hubristic death knell of the movie brats' free reign, The American Dreamer plays like a more worthy, undiluted snapshot. This double feature also includes I'm Almost Not Crazy, a curtain peel on Love Streams by John Cassavetes, whose current ubiquity on the Chicago art-house circuit is a-ok with us.”
I'm Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes — The Man and His Work (Michael Ventura, 1984, USA, 16mm, 60 min.) When Cannon Films commissioned a "making of" doc for Love Streams, John Cassavetes responded by tapping journalist Michael Ventura to make it, because the writer happened to be around already, and not incidentally because he'd never directed a film. No mere promotional featurette, the result is a warm and thoughtful warts-and-all view of a turbulent family of artists that demystifies the director's celebrated, often-misunderstood methods of improvisation.
The American Dreamer (L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller, 1971, USA, 16mm to video, 90 min.) The American Dreamer documents Dennis Hopper's strange days in Taos, NM, while editing The Last Movie. Under the influence of his monster success with Easy Rider and a counterculture he had helped shape, Hopper shoots target practice, wanders naked in the suburbs, and gathers an ad-hoc harem of hippie girls, while dodging anxious producers from Universal Pictures for over a year. The film leaves it to the audience to sort out an iconoclast director’s ambition and inspiration from naïveté and unrealistic expectations — in both an artistic process and in his life. What it adds up to is an unflinching look at a mythologized slice of America — and its dreamers — circa 1970.
