by
Elia Kazan
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Months later, when I came back from Bavaria, I’d undergone an essential change. I was no longer defensive but was determined to reclaim my self-esteem and fear no cabal of old friends turned to enemies. I landed in New York, and the first person I sought was Budd. Despite the fact that Molly had sent me in Munich Bob Anderson’s beautiful new play, Tea and Sympathy, which he wanted me to direct, a stroke of good fortune indeed; despite the fact that I had long since agreed to direct Tennessee’s Camino Real, a lovely dramatic poem which I could immediately and most happily put on the stage, the project with Budd on the waterfront answered a need that was deeper. It was my reply to the beating I’d taken. The emotion I brought back from Bavaria was not a pretty one; it was a desire for revenge. I would turn the tables on those who’d said I’d lost whatever talent I had, that I would never again do anything bold and worthy, that I would now turn conventional and cautious. I was more determined than ever to make a film about the New York harbor and what went on there, thus to show everyone, including myself, that I hadn’t backed away from my convictions and wasn’t to be insulted or bullied again. I was also determined to show my old “comrades,” those who’d attacked me so viciously, that there was an anti-Communist left, and that we were the true progressives as they were not. I’d come back to fight.
lol
I PASSED from a film that dealt with the broadest possible scene, a panorama of human suffering, to a play that penetrated into the most intimate area of all, the soul of an artist. Camino Real is as private as a nightmare. No playwright except Eugene O’Neill in his last plays was as personal as Tennessee Williams. His collected dramatic works might be read as a massive autobiography, one far more truthful than the book he wrote and titled Memoirs. The plays, with a little discernment, prove to be as naked as the best confessions. They—and this play perhaps more than the others—are about great fears of the author, of distrust and betrayal: distrust of his own fate and of other humans and the betrayal he was certain would come, both from other men, even those close to him, and, because of its anarchy and cataclysmic speed, from time itself.
Already world famous in 1953, Tennessee lived like a fugitive from justice, always changing his whereabouts, ever moving. He traveled along an archipelago of culture islands that were congenial to him, places where he might feel, for a time, at liberty to be unobserved and totally himself—London, Paris, Rome, Sicily, North Africa, Key West. Only a few people knew where to find him. Their communications frequently reached him after he’d departed for a “destination unknown.” I was one of the privileged; we were in continuous touch by mail. The centers of civilization that he found agreeable were, of course, those populated by his own kind: artists, romantics, freaks of one kind or another, castoffs, those rejected by respectable society. He settled into these nests of outsiders to feel at ease. But it was never for long; he’d soon be off again. “I usually work best,” he explained, “when I’ve just come to a new place.”
The artist has his solution; Tennessee exemplified it. It was his way of self-restoration. In a letter I received from Williams, there was this: “For the past five years I have been haunted by a fear which has made it necessary for me to work like somebody running out of a house on fire.” Once when I asked him what his play was about, he answered, “It’s the story of everyone’s life after he has gone through the razzle-dazzle of his youth. Time is short, baby, it betrays us as we betray each other. Work, that’s all there is!” Then he went on: “There is terror and mystery on one side, honor and tenderness on the other.” Once, in a fruity mood, he described the play as “an encomium, despite all else, to the enduring gallantry of the human spirit.” I didn’t think it necessarily described the play, but it did the author.
I doubt that Budd was affected as personally as I was by the parallel of Tony Mike’s story. His reaction to the loss of certain friends was not as bitter as my own; he had not experienced their blackballing as frequently and intensely as I had in the neighborhood known as Broadway. I believe Budd regarded our waterfront story with greater objectivity, an objectivity I appreciated. But I did see Tony Mike’s story as my own, and that connection did lend the tone of irrefutable anger to the scenes I photographed and to my work with actors. When Brando, at the end, yells at Lee Cobb, the mob boss, “I’m glad what I done—you hear me?—glad what I done!” that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I’d testified as I had. I’d been snubbed by friends each and every day for many months in my old show business haunts, and I’d not forgotten nor would I forgive the men, old friends some of them, who’d snubbed me, so the scene in the film where Brando goes back to the waterfront to “shape up” again for employment and is rejected by men with whom he’d worked day after day—that, too, was my story, now told to all the world. So when critics say that I put my story and my feelings on the screen, to justify my informing, they are right. That transference of emotion from my own experience to the screen is the merit of those scenes.
It was with this play that I began to learn not to try to pin a play’s meaning down to a didactic theme. We used to do that in the Group; it was the essence of our work as directors. We were “teaching” the audience with each play. Clifford Odets felt it necessary in his third acts to grab the audience by their shoulders, shake them, and say, “Don’t you see what all this means? No? Well, I’ll tell you.” And he did. Now I preferred an opposite effort: to tell a story that was as human and, therefore, as ambivalent and as unresolved as life itself, so that the audience would leave the theatre asking, “I wonder what the hell all that means.” Which is the same experience one has in life, isn’t it? Or when reading a great novel. You can’t boil either down to a homily, motto, or slogan. Life is a puzzle, and you are generally left feeling: “How do people get through it?” and “If they’re both right, then who’s right?” and “God almighty, isn’t life awesome!” The emotion of wonder is better in the theatre than the emotion of recognition. Even Brecht in his so-called learning plays preserved an element of doubt unresolved. The audience should keep puzzling about a play long after they’ve left the theatre; when the play is worthy and the performance fine, an audience will ponder it for days. But if you sum it all up for them, they won’t. It’s precisely what happens after a dramatic experience in life—it unsettles you for a long time. You keep trying to puzzle it out.
So it went; there was always some crisis, and you never knew who was standing on the outskirts of the crowd, watching intently. Both Boris Kaufman and Charlie Maguire felt the tension, but they behaved magnificently; they knew that the rough circumstances within which we were making the film gave it the look it needed. I think Charlie minded the cold and whatever harassment he encountered on the set from the hoodlums less than what he had to take from our producer. Sam would call Charlie’s home, sometimes as late as two in the morning, most of the time from “21” or whatever other “in” place he patronized. Charlie felt that Sam must have had a girl with him, because he was trying to impress someone close by with the authoritative tone of his voice. (Sam’s young ladies were always kids—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—and easily impressed.) Sam would bawl Charlie out, demanding to know why he’d “let Kazan in scene number eight-four go for nine takes.” And why had Charlie let Kazan print three? This was Charlie’s first big picture, but he was learning fast; he’d say, “Well, if you don’t want him to do it, why don’t you call him and tell him yourself?”
lol
My guess is that it’s the theme, that of a man who has sinned and is redeemed. But how can that be? After all, Terry’s act of self-redemption breaks the great childhood taboo: Don’t snitch on your friends. Don’t call for the cop! Our hero is a “rat,” or for intellectuals, an informer. But that didn’t seem to bother anyone in the audience, not given our villains, those whom Terry was fingering. Which is proof that Budd Schulberg struck a deep human craving there: redemption for a sinner, rescue from damnation. Redemption, isn’t that the promise of the Catholic Church? That a man can turn his fate around and by an act of good heart be saved at last? There are gut reasons like that for the success of the great hits. They touch a fundamental hunger in people. Yes, that a man can, no matter what he’s done, be redeemed—particularly if he has a sympathetic young woman as his confessor. She’s better than a priest, but does the same job. That is why Budd’s insistence on the prominence of the love story was so instinctively correct. It was during those most tender moments that Marlon enlisted the audience in his favor. Is it possible that many more people than we imagine have a feeling that they’ve done wrong and yearn for forgiveness and rescue? Wasn’t Brando playing out the hopes of the audience? Something like that must have gone on, because people have told me that they’ve seen this film a dozen times; every night it’s on TV, they make sure to see it. Apparently it’s more than entertainment. Something central has been touched. And it’s bigger than anything Budd and I had devised. We didn’t know what we had or what we’d done. For instance, try and repeat a great success, and you’ll surely fail.
Yes, I believe all directors tend to be a little two-faced, just as I believe all writers are spies. Notice one of those bastards sometime, how they shift gears in the middle of the conversation. You go along talking to one of them, and suddenly they’re not gabbing with you, not spontaneously, not exchanging views freely. They’ve pulled back; they’re listening and recording what you’re saying, to use later. You can hear the clickety-click in their skulls where nature’s tape recorder spins. Probably what you’ve just said fitted into a scene they’re writing. That’s what I mean by spying. They may even encourage you to go on, despite the fact that they totally disagree with what you’ve said and resent it. I’ve seen writers sit still at a party, listening to a discussion that I know offends them, but they don’t respond or counter or demonstrate what they feel. Later they will report that conversation to home base, their notebook.
That meant a good deal to me. I am preparing to write about that time in my life when I was squeezed between conflicting tendencies which tightened around me, pulling and pushing me in opposite directions at the same time. For instance, I wanted to be an independent producer and director of films, going my own way without restriction or reservations, but I also wanted the power, equipment, and prestige of a Major Studio behind me. With the huge success of On the Waterfront, this seemed possible then. I also wanted to write my own screenplays, while I still valued and heeded the insights and talents of better writers. I wanted to write my own story and that of my family, but I also wanted to write about the social history that I’d witnessed in my time. I wanted to be in with the big shots of the entertainment world, but I also wanted to lead a quiet, reflective life. I wanted money, plenty of it, but I certainly didn’t want to pay for that money with onerous services. I wanted to be a bourgeois with a townhouse and a country home, a cook and a housekeeper, two cars, a regular winter vacation in the Caribbean; but I also wanted to keep my expenses down so I would never feel compelled to do a film or a play about which I was not enthusiastic. I wanted to be a member of the rough gang, the street people, like those I’d gotten to know in Hoboken, plain old “Gadg.” I wanted to be a lefty, a radical, certainly a socialist—at least that—but I also wanted to be a Democrat, sitting squarely mid-America, loyal and loving to the U.S.A. I wanted to lead an irregular life, wandering here and there around the earth as the impulse moved me, keeping my own hours; I also wanted to be the head of a nuclear family, a firmly established and respected Anatolian paterfamilias, with all household events on time, clean sheets every third day, heavy “Turkish” towels, linen napkins, and a good dinner served each night at seven. I loved Molly, my smart, immaculate, completely honest and absolutely trustworthy wife, but I also wanted adventures and to be, every so often, irresponsible and out of control. I wanted it all. But how did I shape these contradictions into the unit of contradiction that the actor from the Berliner Ensemble spoke of? The answer is, I didn’t. I wasn’t able to. What I did was give in to them all, and when they warred with each other, I yielded alternately but completely to conflicting devotions. I swayed back and forth, all the way at each end; I was unresolved.
ahh this makes me think of lost illusions
Molly’s work had a fault that is fatal in the theatre, one so deep in her character that it could not be corrected. There was no moment in that evening’s entertainment when it appeared that both sides might be right; only Molly, the author, was right. In the theatre, order, clarity, and goodness are not enough; to be correct is not a sufficient virtue. An audience wants to be shaken and for a time kept in doubt. That’s the fun of it. Molly, being absolute about her opinions, had no inner conflicts herself; she could therefore create conflicts only within a perimeter she’d set. The audience felt that she knew the solution to everything happening on stage and that she’d uncover these solutions when she chose to. This produced the one unforgivable dramatic fault: The conclusion was predictable. The conflicts were not genuine because they did not exist in the author, so were not felt as genuine conflicts by her. Her audience, good-natured and kind, may have agreed with her “positions,” but they were not interested in the confrontation—more like a school debate or a “fixed” fight—that she set up. In the theatre, there has to be a belly of chaos under the event. The audiences should be uncertain of the outcome until the end. Only then may a resolution be of dramatic interest.
i dont know if i agree fully with his perspective but this is interesting