Opening Night

In a 1978 television interview, Cassavetes said this was the best film about himself.

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Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel and Peter Bogdanovich take small roles in the opening night scene.

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Director John Cassavetes had great difficulty getting the film distributed in the United States. Its theatrical run was limited to a few seasons and it performed very poorly at the box office. After Cassavetes died in early 1989, the film was bought by a major American distributor for a 1991 re-release.

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The mothers of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes appeared in acting roles in the film: Lady Rowlands and Katherine Cassavetes, respectively. Both had also appeared in the Rowlands-Cassavetes collaborations Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) and A Woman Under the Influence (1974).

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The film competed at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival in 1978, where John Cassavetes was nominated for the Golden Bear. It won two awards in Berlin: Gena Rowlands took the Silver Bear for Best Actress, and the film won the Interfilm Award Otto Dibelius Film Award.

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It is the last film of actress Katherine Cassavetes, the mother of actor-writer-director John Cassavetes.

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It is the third of three collaborations between actor Ben Gazzara and writer-director John Cassavetes, after Husbands (1970) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), the only one in which Cassavetes did not act. The two also appeared together in a film written and directed by someone other than Cassavetes: If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969).

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It is one of eleven films John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands made together. The others are A Child Is Waiting (1963), Faces (1968), Machine Gun McCain (1969), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Two-Minute Warning (1976), Shadows (1958), Gloria (1980), Tempest (1982) and Love Streams (1984).

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Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes were married in real life. Both worked as actors on this film, and the latter was also its writer-director.

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The film was shown out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992.

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It is the ninth feature film directed by John Cassavetes.

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The film is part of the Criterion Collection as spine number 255.

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It is Laura Johnson's debut.

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John Cassavetes took on several roles on this film: he was an actor, writer and director.

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The film is included among Letterboxd's Top 250 Narrative Feature Films.

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Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara appeared alongside Uma Thurman and Juliette Lewis in Hysterical Blindness (2002).

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Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara appeared together in Opening Night (1977).

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