From KCRW and Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

My guest's critic Marshall Fine has written a fascinating new book on the iconic independent film director, John

Cassavetes. The book is Accidental Genius. Marshall, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me, Elvis. What I like about the book, sort of principally, is the way you

show how he's divorced himself, Cassavetti's, from everything. And part of what explained his psyche, his temperament even as an artist, is that he was just sort of prone to fighting with everybody about everything.

He chose to oppose everybody.

I had people tell me that they'd get into arguments with him and they'd find themselves starting to agree with him and pretty soon realized that he had started taking the other side just because he liked arguing.

He was, I won't say he was confrontational, but he was argumentative.

He was kind of this manic, magnetic personality who just loved to get into it.

He loved to hash it out, everything.

And that was what made his movie so

interesting. One of the things you say that really fascinates me, because he's such a, as you say, magnetic

presence that you don't think about as being a small guy, but everybody talks about him as being

little. Well, yeah, he was always listed. His height was listed as about 5 foot 9, but really

from everything I came to know,

he was probably closer to 5 foot 7. But I think he had that sort of small man complex and just

made himself bigger. There are people who can do that, who just project so much that you think

of them as being larger than life, larger than they are. But he also had that enormous head, too,

and that great Greek profile.

Well, he was a really good looking guy. I think people don't recognize or realize just what a

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