by
Elia Kazan
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Which is when I certainly should have quit. Here’s a story Bud Lighton told me; I recalled it as I sat there in the flickering light. It’s about Victor Fleming, the director whom Lighton held up to me as a model. He’d agreed, Fleming had, to direct a film to be made from the novel The Yearling. He approached the job as he did every job, intensely; he knew the emotion he wanted to capture for the audience. He searched all over the South for the right locations, selected a fine cast (including Spencer Tracy), got the best technicians, and prepared to give the project the kind of devotion for which he was known, the kind that made him worry so painfully that sometimes he’d throw up his lunch. He shot scenes of the film for three days on that far-off location, then suddenly left and went back to Culver City. “How can I make a picture,” he explained to the outraged executives, “whose essence is that people love each other, when no one in the cast loves anyone or loves being down there or loves making the picture? They only love themselves. The kid wants to be a goddamn star and thinks of nothing except his vanity. Tracy is only thinking how he can get away for a few days to go up to New York and see Hepburn. And the mother part is always between a shit and a sweat about something, but never about the goddamn picture.” So Fleming said the hell with it and quit. He was fighting what it seemed to me I was up against, organized indifference—but he had more experience and more guts than I had; he walked away.
I stopped unreeling the ten thousand feet of the greatest stuff Pandro had ever seen and sat in the dark. This was it, yes or no, on or off, stay or go, now or never. But it took more courage than I had at that time to walk away. Molly was coming out in a couple of weeks with the kids; they were all looking forward to it, California, Malibu, the house on the beach, and so on. And so on!
Smart friends, however, made smart appraisals. One of them said that my stars looked as if they were dressed for a Beverly Hills costume party: “Come as Mr. and Mrs. Cattle Baron.” In New York, the New Republic critic wrote: “They wander through a lavish production like thoroughbred somnambulists.” It’s the only picture I’ve ever made that I’m ashamed of. Don’t see it.
lmao
I am bitterly disappointed that you and Mrs. Selznick have still not come to an agreement. I am wondering what has been the primary trouble, the script itself or your unwillingness to tie up with another producer.… I am sure that you must have had reservations about the script. I will try to clarify my intentions in this play. I think its best quality is its authenticity or its fidelity to life. There are no “good” or “bad” people. Some are a little better or a little worse but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts. Stanley sees Blanche not as a desperate, driven creature backed into a last corner to make a last desperate stand—but as a calculating bitch with “round heels.”…Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition—all such distortions within our own egos—condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our own egos, the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts. Such cases seem purely theoretical to me.
a letter about streetcar
WHEN I finished work on his play, I was full of admiration for Tennessee, especially because he’d found his story in his own life’s struggles; the man had used his personal contradictions and the memory of his pain to make it. When I considered him, I saw that the true artist must have the courage to reveal what the rest of mankind conceals. I’d not forgotten and would never forget his word “fidelity,” and that he thought it an artist’s duty to deny nothing and avoid self-favoring. He should not apologize for anything, never beg for pity, be pitiless with himself. After this experience, I saw every play and every film that I worked on as a confession, veiled or partly exposed, but always its author’s self-revelation.
In time I had to confront some facts. I am a mediocre director except when a play or a film touches a part of my life’s experience. Other times my cleverness and facility will not overcome my inadequacies. When I rely on mechanics, I do only what a good stage manager should be able to do. I am not catholic in my tastes. I dislike Beckett—his work. I am not an intellectual. I don’t have great range. I am no good with music or with spectacles. The classics are beyond me. I enjoy humor and the great clowns, but I can’t make up jokes or amusing bits of byplay and visual humor. What I need I steal. I have no ear for poetry. I have a pretty good eye but not a great eye. I do have courage, even some daring. I am able to talk to actors; I don’t fear them and their questions. I’ve been able to arouse them to better work. I have strong, even violent, feelings, and they are assets. I am not shy about ripping the cover-guard off my own experiences; this encourages actors to overcome their inhibitions. I enjoy working with performers; they sense this and have been happy as well as successful with me. This is useful.
Molly used to say that I was too hard on myself. But I don’t feel the above is inaccurate. I prefer this measure to the pumped-up state of fame I had after Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire. It took me some years to face what I was as a director; in fact, it took a painful defeat at the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre. At the time I’m writing about, I was mired in media mud; I’m afraid that for a time I believed what I read. When I see my photographs from that period, I don’t like what I see. For three years I was on the very top, then life twisted, as it will; by surviving a great deal of pain and trouble, I became a different person. But that’s looking too far ahead.
THE PERSON most affected by the success of Death of a Salesman was the author. It did fine things for him, altering his life in more ways than he realized then or perhaps—excuse the presumption—knows now. Nothing was the same for him after that play opened in New York. It even made Art reckless—albeit in a cautious way—with certain constraints on his personal life and curious about experiences that lay outside the bounds of his behavior up until that time. His eyes, to speak of externals, acquired a new flash and his carriage and movement a hint of something swashbuckling. He was at his best during this time, still searching, still unsure of himself, not yet Lincolnesque. Always an amusing man, with a lively sense of humor and a “country” gift for storytelling, he released these talents broadside and enjoyed their effect—which was seductive. It was at this time that I had a first premonition of danger coming, that particularly domestic peril which results when certain ties of restraint that a middle-class man has always lived within are snapped. Art was entering a period of personal drama, and my secret opinion was that it could do him nothing but good. I watched and waited. A writer is a spy.
The avalanche of praise and the absolute nature of the respect Art received everywhere had another result. He’s still a companionable and amusing man when you’re alone with him, but it began to develop and to be noticed that when he was in his public-behavior, on-view phase, he sounded a bit pompous. I can only guess that like so many other “left of center” heroes, he’d been invited to stand on too many platforms of honor and asked to answer too many reverential questions. Perhaps, like many others, he began to try to live up to what people were saying about him, trying to be the “Arthur Miller” they were writing about, an ideologue to be trusted, a trailblazer, and so on. That kind of reverence and praise is hard to resist, a danger for us all. Art began to relish the joys of being right. A supposed rebel, he lived the life of an establishment god, and he liked it. There is a danger for an artist of becoming a man who sees his role to be teaching others and pronouncing judgment on one and all.
One weekend during a gathering of intellectuals for political deliberation, Art did something his wife Mary thought he should not have done. Considering the boredom that hangs like a fog over these events, perhaps his wife might have excused his “sin.” But he told me Mary was unyielding. What astonished me was that Art appeared to agree with his wife. He paid for his “lapse” without resentment strong enough to cause a rebellion. If we are to judge solely from his next play, The Crucible, we would have to say that Art did think of himself as a sinner; the central character in it expresses contrition for a single act of infidelity. I had to guess that Art was publicly apologizing to his wife for what he’d done.
maybe i need to read this
I believe Mary looked on me as a “womanizer.” It is a word I dislike, a prim, stuffy, frightened, middle-class word, and it demeans women. What it means to the people who use it is inaccurate in my case. I have been with a number of women outside my marriages. That number has been exaggerated. Was I “promiscuous”? Hell, no! The relationships I remember have been mostly with actresses with whom I had a strong bond of interest—the production of a film or a play. It was in most cases, believe it or not, a natural part of the work—so it seemed to me—happening as the problems of the production brought us closer. I became emotionally, then physically, involved with an actress because, for the span of a production, we had the same concerns and hopes. We relied on each other: I depended on her, she on me; that bond is as close as any imaginable. I became, for the time of that production, her all-powerful father figure, believing in her, supporting her through her bad hours, adoring her for her gifts. She was to depend on me for her security—who else is as close during those days?
I believe it is inevitable for a director and his actresses to connect in this way, the affairs arising out of interdependence and a need for each other. These “affairs” are not casual; they often amount to a kind of temporary marriage. They rarely endure past the course of the production, and in this sense, they don’t endanger other, more lasting, human bonds.
ick but also i kinda get it
As the years pass—and I’m braving the wrath of my women friends—men always begin to look elsewhere for rejuvenation, poor things. Their penises, barometers of their continuing vitality, become less cooperative. This awakes anxiety. Men also search elsewhere for fresh entertainment—we have our geishas too. And for spiritual reassurance—remember wife number one, the oldest queen, in Anna and the King of Siam? But perhaps what they come to need most of all is hope. Desire, Tennessee Williams said, is the opposite of death. In desperation we do what we can.
It’s more difficult for women. They have the same needs—rejuvenation, entertainment, reassurance, hope—that men have. Most women have not been able to find relief and help as readily or as easily. I’ve noticed the faces of wives who, impelled by their notion of duty and even more by their fear of being abandoned (so many middle-class wives have confessed to me that they fear their husbands will find out what they really think—an unguarded mumble in their sleep—and quit them), do their duty all their lives through, preserving their real thoughts in silence and their deepest desires unfulfilled. The faces of these good creatures acquire a wistful aspect, a dreamy look, as they fade back permanently from life and the hope of solution. They live in a fog of neglect and longing. An experienced hunter can always tell when women like that are on the slippery edge and ready to tumble off. They are equally ambivalent with men. In time their children become more important to them than their husbands, but the day comes when the children leave home too. Then they face the final fact: They are alone.
i believe that he understands something about the dark side of desire but i dont think he really understands women tbh