Thoughts on Kazan's Letters

I bounce around a lot between reading books and articles, which means sometimes it takes me years to finish a given book.  (After three years, I finally finished Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I must be among the tardiest to recommend.)

The various platforms of Kindle have been a big help.  My wife, Kristine, recently gave me (and insisted I use) an iPhone 5 on which I installed a Kindle app.  I didn't expect to use it much.  Even when reading digitally, I like to look at something that looks like a page, and reading a paragraph or two at a time on a small screen struck me like trying to eat a bowl of soup with a tea spoon.  But it turns out that it works just fine for certain kinds of books.  It seems to be a good match with The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan, a bite-sized format for bite-sized communications.

I'm midway through it and haven't read the letter that excited the most comment when the book was first published, a letter he wrote to his wife Molly telling her he's slept with Marilyn Monroe and that he's unapologetic about it, but hopes Molly won't be so foolish as to divorce him.

I am as interested in the sex lives of the talented and famous as most other people, but what has grabbed me so far about the book is a chance to be exposed to his private voice.  I grew up admiring Kazan's movies.  I felt I'd stumbled on someone who spoke for me.  (I was a teeanger.)  Then I found out about his informing during the McCarthy era and went through a period of feeling betrayed.

Reading the letters, I am still very disappointed indeed by that chapter in his life, but what compels is the various voices that emerge from him depending on who is the correspondent.  In letters to Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck, he is filled with compliments about their wisdom; in letters to others he writes about what assholes Warner and Zanuck are.  He makes casual references to "fags," but he corresponds with Tennessee Williams with an intimacy and a rare sympathy for his friend's challenges and difficulties.

The letter which made a particular impression on me recently was one to his wife in which he talks about his dismay at looking at his film adaptation of John Steinbeck's East of Eden.  He has convinced himself that it's a bad picture and he goes into detail about what the thinks is a thematic muddle he should have caught.  The film, of course, was very warmly received and God knows the students I showed it to in the spring were caught up by it.

It is thematic muddle he's warning against in the letters I'm currently reading to Tennessee Williams in preparation of staging the premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  I knew, of course, that Kazan had pressured Williams to do some drastic surgery on Cat.  (In fact, Williams published Cat with two different thirds acts -- the one he had originally written and the one Kazan urged him to write.)  The correspondence, which reveals Kazan's considerable dramaturgical skills, illuminates the issues they had to resolve before Kazan was willing to commit to directing the play.

It seems that whenever I read a book, ancillary material drifts into view.  My friend, actor-journalist Gary Houston, sent along an old review of a Chicago production of Arthur Miller's After the Fall.  The review is by an old acquaintance named Larry Bommer, and it does much to explain why the play is a disaster.  The play is something Miller protested was not autobiographic.  The second act is his thinly-disguised version of what went wrong with his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.  The first act is about a friend who named names to Congress during the McCarthy era.  That friend is easy to identify as Kazan.  And, of course, he asked Kazan to direct it and Kazan did.

Teaching American Movies

Last semester, I taught a survey course in American film.  Of course, when you have maybe a dozen three-hour slots to show films, you're limited.  No Godfather II, for instance.

Aside from time limitations, I had a few guiding principles.  I wanted to sample as many genres as I could.  I was determined not to represent any director by more than one film.  I wanted the films to reflect changing values in American life.  And I decided not to show anything later than the Seventies.  I also decided to track one movie star through three films (I chose James Stewart).

So here's what I ended up picking:

One Week (Keaton)
The Kid (Chaplin)
Singin' in the Rain (Donen and Kelly)
Sullivan's Travels (Sturges)
Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch)
My Darling Clementine (Ford)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
It's a Wonderful Life (Capra)
The Asphalt Jungle (Huston)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)
East of Eden (Kazan)
The Apartment (Wilder)
The Graduate (Nichols)
Klute (Pakula)

I was surprised by what they hadn't seen already.  I hadn't initially chosen It's a Wonderful Life because I assumed that you couldn't be an American and not have seen it.  Turned out I was wrong and this was new to most of them.  And, of course, it's a law you show Citizen Kane and Vertigo.  Kane they respected rather than liked.  (Since the innovations Kane introduced have been thoroughly absorbed by the films that followed, they can't see Kane as the startling film it was when it first was released.)  Vertigo, on the other hand, they mostly succumbed to, though the slowness of the beginning was difficult for them.  Most of them knew who Chaplin was but had never seen his work.  Few knew who Keaton was.

Truth to tell, if it was in black and white, they probably hadn't seen it.  Nobody in the room had seen or heard of Sturges or Lubitsch.

The only film that seemed not to connect was Asphalt Jungle.  If I teach this again, I'd probably look for another noir, though it would have to be one not directed by Wilder (which knocks out some of the best).

Few of them had heard of James Dean, but they mostly responded strongly to him and were interested in exploring his other stuff.

A few who watch Mad Men saw its roots in The Apartment.  Also, The Apartment seemed to be the first of the films I showed that was part of a world they felt wasn't remote.

The Graduate went over like crazy.  Mostly they identified with Benjamin's sense of terror at what to do after college.  Curiously, the anti-materialist subtext and the hostility to the older generation didn't resonate much for them.  Given the economics of the time, I think they don't see their parents as prisoners of corrupt values.  (Maybe it's wise not to challenge your folks too much given how likely you are to end up having to live with them after you get out of college.)

Klute, aside from Fonda's startling performance, seemed most compelling to them because of its vision of Seventies Manhattan as a hellish, dangerous place.  Indeed, Manhattan has changed.  Well, much of it has.

And, yes, they seemed to be intrigued how a personality actor like Jimmy Stewart could shift from the naive romantic of Shop to the man contemplating suicide in Wonderful Life to the obsessive in Vertigo.

If I'd had extra weeks, I would have included Spike Lee's film bio, Malcolm X (I think it's a great American film), John Sturges's The Great Escape (my favorite popcorn movie), a Marx Brothers movie and something with Katharine Hepburn, Bogart, John Wayne, Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier and ...  No, I can't succumb to the temptation to list more.

I'd be interested in knowing the lists other people would make.  Remember, no repeating directors, no films later than the Seventies, nothing more than two and a half hours long, and try to represent a variety of genres.

Relaunch

I've decided to relaunch my blog with a slightly snappier title.

As my late friend Betsy Carpenter once noted, Stanislavski wrote books titled Building a Character and Creating a Role.  She thought he should have followed them up with one titled Making a Scene.  So, I modify her suggestion slightly and arrive at Making Scenes.  My expectation is talk about not only literally making scenes -- dramatic writing -- but also being on the scene and observing and commenting on it.

I am a sympathetic though not uncritical observer.  Even when I see theatre that I think doesn't come off, I am on the side of those who put time and effort into the attempts.  I've been involved in more productions than I can count.  Some were considerable critical and box office successes, some stumbled and expired, but I embarked on them all with the intention of making something worth the audience's time and attention. I assume the same of others.  Cynicism is too easily ascribed by some to many efforts, particularly in the commercial theatre.  In my experience, most people are trying to contribute.

Being a Tony voter, these weeks I'm running to the theatre a lot -- either seeing some things for the first time or revisiting shows in light of nominations.  It's been an odd season.  I generally have been disappointed by the new plays.  I think there has been a lot of interesting work in musical theatre, though not many clear successes.  On the other hand, this has been a season of extraordinary revivals -- productions that remind us what theatre can achieve -- Raisin in the Sun, No Man's Land, Betrayal, Twelfth Night, I Remember Mama, Middle of the Night, London Wall, Dead End, St. Joan, Hamlet, Measure for Measure and the marvelous concert versions of The Most Happy Fella and Little Me.

Well, I'll go on at greater length about some of these and some of the new stuff as I grab time and as stuff worth writing occurs to me.

Jeff