Kazan On Directing

From A Streetcar Named Desire to Death of a Salesman, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to On the Waterfront, Kazan's list of Broadway and Hollywood successes are among the twentieth-century's most profound productions, and the insights into these and other classic works are essential reading for anyone interested in American movies and theater.

Elia Kazan was the twentieth century’s most celebrated director of both stage and screen, and this monumental, revelatory book shows us the master at work. Kazan’s list of Broadway and Hollywood successes—A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, On the Waterfront, to name a few—is a testament to his profound impact on the art of directing. This remarkable book, drawn from his notebooks, letters, interviews, and autobiography, reveals Kazan’s method: how he uncovered the “spine,” or core, of each script; how he analyzed each piece in terms of his own experience; and how he determined the specifics of his production. And in the final section, “The Pleasures of Directing”—written during Kazan’s final years—he becomes a wise old pro offering advice and insight for budding artists, writers, actors, and directors.

Originally published: New York: Collier Books, 1972.

In this collection of interviews, renowned Academy Award-winning director Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Gentleman's Agreement, Splendor in the Grass, Baby Doll, The Last Tycoon, A Face in the Crowd, and others) reveals with brutal honesty the joys and complications of production and his unique insights on acting, directing, and producing. 60 black & white movie stills and posters, Index, Filmography.

ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME • In this amazing autobiography, Kazan at seventy-eight brings us the undiluted telling of his story—and revelation of himself—all the passion, vitality, and truth, the almost outrageous honesty, that have made him so formidable a stage director (A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tea and Sympathy), film director (On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Gentleman’s Agreement, Splendor in the Grass, Baby Doll, The Last Tycoon, A Face in the Crowd), and novelist (the number-one best-seller The Arrangement.) “This is the best autobiography I’ve read by a prominent American in I don’t know how many years. It is endlessly absorbing and I believe this is because it concerns a man who is looking to find a coherent philosophy that will be tough enough to contain all that is ugly in his person and his experience, yet shall prove sufficiently compassionate to give honest judgment on himself and others. Somehow, the author brings this off. Elia Kazan: A Life has that candor of confession which is possible only when the deepest wounds have healed and honesty can achieve what honesty so rarely arrives at—a rich and hearty flavor. By such means, a famous director has written a book that offers the kind of human wealth we find in a major novel.” —Norman Mailer Kazan gives us his sense of himself as an outsider (a Greek rug merchant’s son born in Turkey, an immigrant’s son raised in New York and educated at Williams College). He takes us into the almost accidental sojourn at the Yale Drama School that triggered his commitment to theatre, and his edgy, exciting apprenticeship with the new and astonishing Group Theatre, as stagehand and stage manager—and as actor (Waiting for Lefty, Golden Boy) . . . his first nervous and then successful attempts at directing for theatre and movies (The Skin of Our Teeth, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) . . . his return to New York to co-found the Actors Studio (and his long and ambivalent relationship with Lee Strasberg) . . . his emergence as premier director on both coasts. With his director’s eye for the telling scene, Kazan shares the joys and complications of production, his unique insights on acting, directing, and producing. He makes us feel the close presence of the actors, producers, and writers he’s worked with—James Dean, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Vivien Leigh, Tallulah Bankhead, Sam Spiegel, Darryl Zanuck, Harold Clurman, Arthur Miller, Budd Schulberg, James Baldwin, Clifford Odets, and John Steinbeck among them. He gives us a frank and affectionate portrait of Marilyn Monroe. He talks with startling candor about himself as husband and—in the years where he obsessively sought adventure outside marriage—as lover. For the first time, he discusses his Communist Party years and his wrenching decision in 1952 to be a cooperative witness before HUAC. He writes about his birth as a writer. The pace and organic drama of his narrative, his grasp of the life and politics of Broadway and Hollywood, the keenness with which he observes the men and women and worlds around him, and, above all, the honest with which he pursues and captures his own essence, make this one of the most fascinating autobiographies of our time.

Now that directors such as Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola are celebrated along-side movie stars, it is hard to imagine that little more than a century ago the director was a nameless, faceless entity-an overseer of workflow in the shuffle of shadows offstage. In surveying the pioneers who transformed theater into the dynamic art form it is today, Directors on Directing presents a timeless collection of writings offering insight into what it means to direct and how to better appreciate theatrical performances.

Few figures in film and theater history tower like Elia Kazan. Born in 1909 to Greek parents in Istanbul, Turkey, he arrived in America with incomparable vision and drive, and by the 1950s he was the most important and influential director in the nation, simultaneously dominating both theater and film. His productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman reshaped the values of the stage. His films -- most notably On the Waterfront -- brought a new realism and a new intensity of performance to the movies. Kazan's career spanned times of enormous change in his adopted country, and his work affiliated him with many of America's great artistic moments and figures, from New York City's Group Theatre of the 1930s to the rebellious forefront of 1950s Hollywood; from Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy to Marlon Brando and James Dean. Ebullient and secretive, bold and self-doubting, beloved yet reviled for "naming names" before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Kazan was an individual as complex and fascinating as any he directed. He has long deserved a biography as shrewd and sympathetic as this one. In the electrifying Elia Kazan, noted film historian and critic Richard Schickel illuminates much more than a single astonishing life and life's work: He pays discerning tribute to the power of theater and film, and casts a new light on six crucial decades of American history.

In his powerful new novel, Elia Kazan takes up the life of the young Greek from Anatolia whose early years he chronicled in his first and highly acclaimed novel, America America, giving us the story of a man caught between two worlds and fighting to make a place for himself within them. We enter the story of 1909. Stavros Topouzoglou—Joe Arness to his American friends—is meeting the freighter that has brought his family to America. This day marks the culmination of a lifetime of responsibility. Steeled by his harsh life, proud and resourceful, he has nonetheless been governed by the age-old rules of filial duty: putting aside his own needs and desires, he obediently took on the fulfillment of his father’s dream of safety and salvation for their family. For a decade he has worked to bring his family to America—an America that has hypnotized and motivated him with its promise of money and power and privilege. But as the family disembarks there is one person missing: his father is dead. Suddenly, Stavros is caught between two powerful and opposing influences. On one side is his family: seven brothers and sisters and his mother look to him for guidance, strength, and support, drawing him back into the ways and tenets of the “old” country. On the other side, the bright-seeming, golden possibilities of the “new” world of America, possibilities that Stavros has only glimpsed from afar, but that he has determined to attain. Stavros is not prepared for this clash of cultures, nor for the emotional turmoil it produces in him. He has always believed that through sheer will and energy he could achieve anything, but now even his ferocious, unswerving drive cannot sustain him. And so we see him dutifully assume the patriarchal position in the family, only to witness the foundation of family devotion, respect, and love broken down by the terrifying yet heady exigencies of this new life. We see Stavros passionately drawn to Althea Perry, imagining her to be a key to his acceptance into the society he yearns for, but finding instead that she is a constant reminder of the obstacles he must continually face and the sacrifices of pride he must be prepared to make. We see Stavros slowly ingratiating himself with Fernand Sarrafian—the man he most admires, the man with the kind of power Stavros wants for himself—only to learn that Sarrafian’s power is tainted with greed, deceit, and an almost total lack of humaneness. We see how often Stavros must invoke the words his father said to him as a boy: “If you don’t allow yourself to feel it, the shame does not exist.” We see him confronted by his brother—just returned from fighting for a Greater Greece—whose words to Stavros reverberate with both love and accusation: “I’m thinking of you at night. What you were once, what you are now . . . When we first came here, I was so proud of you . . . Now all you care about is how to make money.” And it is these words that finally force Stavros to acknowledge the devastating impurities in his dream of an American life, to see how completely he’s lost himself in his blind attempt to attain that dream. And he is compelled to devise a plan by which he can redeem not only himself, his family, and the memory of his father, but also—even if only in the smallest measure—the love for his homeland that he begins to feel with renewed fervor and empassioned dedication. In the story of Stavros, Elia Kazan not only gives us a vividly wrought picture of one man’s struggle to understand his dreams, but he reveals, as well, what it has meant for the immigrant to confront America, and, more importantly, what it has meant for him to confront himself in this seductive, yet often inimical, culture.