Remember the art, forget the politics
Ten years after the Oscar audience snubbed him for naming names in the McCarthy era, it's time to forgive Elia Kazan, argues his friend and screenwriter, Budd Schulberg
At the Oscar ceremony of 10 years ago, which usually follows an all-too-familiar procedure, there was one unexpected and unruly event. Usually when one is singled out for a Lifetime Achievement award, there is unanimous approval and a standing ovation. But when Elia Kazan received his well-earned award, the TV cameras picked up any number of attendees who pointedly did not rise. These were liberals who were making a public political point. They were objecting to Kazan's appearance as a "friendly witness" in the proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952.
There had been a time when Kazan occupied a place of honour in the liberals' artistic activities. All the way back to when he scored as the lefty in Clifford Odet's breakthrough dramatic hit, Waiting for Lefty. But Kazan fell dramatically from the liberals' pantheon when he surprisingly named names in testifying to HUAC. He had his reasons. He had joined the Communist party while a member of the Group Theatre, the first time in the American dramatic experience that a community organisation with a clear social agenda had functioned on Broadway. But he had come to feel that the party was manipulating and damaging the Group's broader agenda. That was his motive for testifying against it and naming the names of those he thought were guilty of damaging the Group by making it subservient to the subversive agenda of the Communist party. He considered himself still a man on the left, defending the purer ideology that had inspired the Group and isolating the party members who were seeking to politicise.
From the beginning, Kazan had been a maverick, too individual to fit in accommodatingly to anyone's political programme. He did not at all fit the American stereotype. A Greek born in Turkey, and coming to the US as a child, the son of a traditional rug dealer, Kazan was the quintessential outsider. At fashionable Williams College he was the unattractive little guy who paid his way by waiting on tables and doing odd jobs. The aristocratic Williams student body was unaware of his existence. They had no idea that within that unassuming human being so invisible to them was a little dynamo ready to move in and take over. He was like a secret agent placed in the midst of an unsuspecting organisation. He didn't even go out for dramatic activities. It wasn't until he got to the Yale drama school, where he met his wife, the aristocratic Molly Day Thacher, that his dramatic instincts were aroused.
Considered not good-looking enough to make it as an actor, he eagerly took on any subservient theatre job that came along. At the Group Theatre's summer camp, he mostly did the volunteer small chores that kept the community going. Kazan was like a hidden time bomb set to wait its time and then explode. No one had thought of him as an actor - actors looked like Franchot Tone - but I'll never forget seeing him in Irwin Shaw's The Gentle People with Tone and Sylvia Sidney. From the moment Kazan bounded on stage, the very able and attractive Tone and Sidney disappeared. It's been seven decades but I still remember his remarkable impact. He was the little engine that could. There was something fierce about that performance. It wasn't theatrical. It was organic. He was wound up from the inside.
When he turned to direction, the same informed energy was at work. He knew exactly the effects he wanted to achieve, and what's more, he seemed to know implicitly how to get from each actor what he was looking for. While he had been trained as a Group Theatre performer using the Stanislavski Method, he was also refreshingly eclectic. I once saw him slap an actor to make him cry and then call "Camera!" "I always wondered how that Method really works," I joked to him. Kazan just shrugged and said: "You take it any way you can get it." I always think of that line when I watch his work.
Watching Kazan's productions on film and in the theatre, you think of the energy, the strong emotive effect. It seems spontaneous. But read Kazan's notes at Wesleyan University and you realise how much planning and preparation preceded that spontaneity. He had it all mapped out in advance. What made brothers of us was our affinity for research. It became much more than research for us. Research is dry and academic but this was active involvement with the particular cause we were following. For instance, I didn't "research" the New York waterfront. I involved myself deeply in it. I followed the guidance of the waterfront priest, Father Corridan. I wrote articles supporting the cause of the rebel longshoremen, exposed the notorious shape-up for the New York Times and even joined their picket lines. While Kazan was not as active as I was, he did come down to the docks and participate in demonstrations. And since I reported to him everything I was seeing and learning he was able to keep au courant of the dramatic developments down there.
When we made A Face in the Crowd, the first film to deal with the impact of television on presidential politics, Kazan joined me in the painstaking research. We spent months sitting in on meetings of leading advertising agencies, and even went to Washington to discuss the impact of the new medium with presidential candidates Stuart Symington, Al Gore Sr and Lyndon Johnson. The senators were taking this so seriously that they set up a TV studio in the basement of the old senate office building to practise their new wares. And LBJ confessed to us that: "You have to watch your eyes now. That TV camera is right in your face. We never had to face that kind of challenge before. For instance, if you don't hold your eyes steady, people will say, 'He's shifty.'" No way was shifty LBJ going to be caught looking shifty.
For the Puerto Rican film in the streets, which our producer Sam Spiegel pulled out of and was never made, we spent three months in Puerto Rico doing research. It was more than research. Very much hands on. We scoured Puerto Rican Harlem together. We had the Puerto Rican hero light heavyweight champ, the late José Torres, as our guide. We became so immersed that we were thinking in Puerto Rican. When Spiegel imperiously decided that "the public would not be interested in a lot of poor Puerto Ricans", we were devastated. We had came to love these people. They were softer than the Cubans, thoroughly beguiling.
No top director would have done what Kazan did: spend months of his own time trying to develop a social film that no major studio would touch. Each of us appreciated in the other the willingness to devote an enormous amount of time without compensation to a project that had no industry appeal. We saw eye to eye - often I would cut Kazan off in the middle with: "Yes I know what you mean. You don't have to go on, I agree."
In spite of holding strong impressions, Kazan was surprisingly pliable. On one occasion he was surprised to read that I had not followed his suggestions. I had said:"OK, I'll think about it." When the manuscript came back to Kazan unchanged, he hadn't expected it. When I said: "Gadg, I did think about it, and I disagreed," he did not protest it. But he said: "When I first met you, you seemed so passive that I thought to myself, he'll do whatever I ask him to do." "Gadg," I said, "I didn't say I'll do it, I said, I'll think about it. So I did. And decided I liked my way better." And Kazan said: "OK, now I'll know. You're soft on the outside and hard on the inside. I can live with that." Kazan was just the opposite, hard on the outside and soft on the inside. He liked to come on strong but there was a tender spot in there. He just didn't like to reveal it. I think there was that sense of his being a little guy outnumbered by the big guys.
It is an extreme statement but it is safe to say that there will never be a figure in theatre or film as dominating as Kazan. In the very beginning he had a dramatic hit in A Street Car Named Desire and a film hit with On the Waterfront. I can think if no other director who could move back and forth so effortlessly and effectively from theatre to film as Kazan. He seemed both to the boards and to the camera born. He was equally artistically tuned to both worlds. It is hard to imagine John Ford in the theatre. But for Kazan, the combination was seamless.
I believe there should be a clean break between politics and artistic endeavour. And whatever is thought of Kazan's politics, what he'll be remembered for is his unequalled devotion to the directing of films and plays, the crossover command of both mediums he achieved. Has there ever been another director who could use the cinematic vocabulary as well as he did, and at the same time display such mastery in the theatre? Home run after home run in both mediums? No matter what opprobrium may be attached to the political statements regarding HUAC, the bottom line is artistic achievement. That's what Elia Kazan should be remembered for. Some very good men have suffered some very bad mistakes. But when you add up the plus columns and the minuses, the plusses comes out ahead. That is what you go with. You go with Elia Kazan, the impeccable artist. And forget the pecabble politician.
• Budd Schulberg and Stan Silverman's stage adaptation of On the Waterfront is at the Haymarket Theatre, London
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered