On What Makes a Director by Elia Kazan

On the Waterfront (Directed by Elia Kazan)

In the view of Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan's career, from March 1943 through 1954, was "without a doubt the most astonishing epoch any American director ever experienced."  Co-founding the Actors Studio in New York in 1947 and winning two Tony Awards for outstanding theatre director (for Arthur Miller's All My Sons in 1947 and Miller's Death of a Salesman two years later), Kazan increasingly focused his artistic energies on cinema. 

Kazan was approached by producer Louis "Bud" Lighton of Twentieth Century Fox who gave Kazan Betty Smith's award-winning novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, launching a five-film deal with the studio. Kazan found various points of personal attachment in this story of Irish immigrants living in early twentieth-century Brooklyn. (Kazan was born to Greek parents in what is now Istanbul, Turkey, and relocated with his family eventually to New York).

In Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis' adaptation of Smith's story, Kazan was drawn to themes linked with immigrant ideals of American potential, “the first piece of material offered me that made me think about my own life and my own dilemma.”

Kazan is hailed as one of the greatest theatre directors-turned-filmmakers of all time while also being roundly rebuked for his infamous testimony against former colleagues and associates during the House Un-American Activities Committee's witch hunts in 1952. Many people have questioned if the voice of an unsettled conscience can be heard in Kazan's films, particularly On the Waterfront (1954). 

None, however, have questioned the strength, daring, and subtleties of Kazan's greatest and most enduring films, from A Face in the Crowd (1957)'s still-potent critique of media-made politics to the defiantly sordid vision of debased sexuality in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Baby Doll (1956). However, Kazan considered the United States to be his greatest and most intimate topic, which he examined with an intense sensitivity to American culture's contrasts. 

Indeed, such masterpieces as East of Eden (1955), Splendor in the Grass (1961), Wild River (1960), and America, America (1963) are marked by an insatiable search for the deeper spirit of the American experience. 

In the fall of 1973, after a two week retrospective of his films at Wesleyan University, Elia Kazan delivered a timeless speech on directing for film which can now be found in Kazan on Directing. 

It should be noted that at the Yale Drama School and elsewhere I had a valuable time as a backstage technician. I was a stage carpenter and I lit shows. Then there was a tedious time as a radio actor, playing hoodlums for bread. I had a particularly educational four years as a stage manager helping and watching directors and learning a great deal. And, in between, I had a lively career as a stage actor in some good plays. All these activities were very valuable to me.

In time, I was fortunate enough to have directed the works of the best dramatists of a couple of the decades which have now become history. I was privileged to serve Williams, Miller, Bill Inge, Archie MacLeish, Sam Behrman, and Bob Anderson and put some of their plays on the stage. I thought of my role with these men as that of a craftsman who tried to realize as well as he could the author’s intentions in the author’s vocabulary and within his range, style, and purpose.

I have not thought of my film work that way.

Some of you may have heard of the auteur theory. That concept is partly a critic’s plaything. Something for them to spat over and use to fill a column. But it has its point, and that point is simply that the director is the true author of the film. The director tells the film, using a vocabulary, the lesser part of which is an arrangement of words.

A screenplay’s worth has to be measured less by its language than by its architecture and how that dramatizes the theme. A screenplay, we directors soon enough learn, is not a piece of writing as much as it is a construction. We learn to feel for the skeleton under the skin of words.

Meyerhold, the great Russian stage director, said that words were the decoration on the skirts of action. He was talking about Theatre, but I’ve always thought his observations applied more aptly to film.

It occurred to me when I was considering what to say here that since you all don’t see directors—it’s unique for Wesleyan to have a filmmaker standing where I am after a showing of work, while you have novelists, historians, poets and writers of various kinds of studies living among you—that it might be fun if I were to try to list for you and for my own sport what a film director needs to know as what personal characteristics and attributes he might advantageously possess.

How must he educate himself?

Of what skills is his craft made?

Of course, I’m talking about a book-length subject. Stay easy, I’m not going to read a book to you tonight. I will merely try to list the fields of knowledge necessary to him, and later those personal qualities he might happily possess, give them to you as one might give chapter headings, section leads, first sentences of paragraphs, without elaboration.

Here we go.

Literature. Of course. All periods, all languages, all forms. Naturally a film director is better equipped if he’s well read. John Ford, who introduced himself with the words, “I make Westerns,” was an extremely well and widely read man.

The Literature of the Theatre. For one thing, so the film director will appreciate the difference from film. He should also study the classic theatre literature for construction, for exposition of theme, for the means of characterization, for dramatic poetry, for the elements of unity, especially that unity created by pointing to climax and then for climax as the essential and final embodiment of the theme.

The Craft of Screen Dramaturgy. Every director, even in those rare instances when he doesn’t work with a writer or two—Fellini works with a squadron—must take responsibility for the screenplay. He has not only to guide rewriting but to eliminate what’s unnecessary, cover faults, appreciate nonverbal possibilities, ensure correct structure, have a sense of screen time, how much will elapse, in what places, for what purposes. Robert Frost’s Tell Everything a Little Faster applies to all expositional parts. In the climaxes, time is unrealistically extended, “stretched,” usually by clasps.

The film director knows that beneath the surface of his screenplay there is a subtext, a calendar of intentions and feelings and inner events. What appears to be happening, he soon learns, is rarely what is happening. This subtext is one of the film director’s most valuable tools. It is what he directs. You will rarely see a veteran director holding a script as he works—or even looking at it. Beginners, yes.

Most directors’ goal today is to write their own scripts. But that is our oldest tradition. Chaplin would hear that Griffith Park had been flooded by a heavy rainfall. Packing his crew, his stand-by actors and his equipment in a few cars, he would rush there, making up the story of the two reel comedy en route, the details on the spot.

The director of films should know comedy as well as drama. Jack Ford used to call most parts “comics.” He meant, I suppose, a way of looking at people without false sentiment, through an objectivity that deflated false heroics and undercut self-favoring and finally revealed a saving humor in the most tense moments. The Human Comedy, another Frenchman called it. The fact that Billy Wilder is always amusing doesn’t make his films less serious.

Quite simply, the screen director must know either by training or by instinct how to feed a joke and how to score with it, how to anticipate and protect laughs. He might well study Chaplin and the other great two reel comedy-makers for what are called sight gags, non-verbal laughs, amusement derived from “business,” stunts and moves, and simply from funny faces and odd bodies. This vulgar foundation—the banana peel and the custard pie—are basic to our craft and part of its health. Wyler and Stevens began by making two reel comedies, and I seem to remember Capra did, too.

American film directors would do well to know our vaudeville traditions.

Just as Fellini adored the clowns, music hall performers, and the circuses of his country and paid them homage again and again in his work, our filmmaker would do well to study magic. I believe some of the wonderful cuts in Citizen Kane came from the fact that Welles was a practicing magician and so understood the drama of sudden unexpected appearances and the startling change. Think, too, of Bergman, how often he uses magicians and sleight of hand.

The director should know opera, its effects and its absurdities, a subject in which Bernardo Bertolucci is schooled. He should know the American musical stage and its tradition, but even more important, the great American musical films. He must not look down on these; we love them for very good reasons.

Our man should know acrobatics, the art of juggling and tumbling, the techniques of the wry comic song. The techniques of the Commedia dell’arte are used, it seems to me, in a film called O Lucky Man! Lindsay Anderson’s master, Bertolt Brecht, adored the Berlin satirical cabaret of his time and adapted their techniques.

Let’s move faster because it’s endless.

Painting and Sculpture; their history, their revolutions and counter revolutions. The painters of the Italian Renaissance used their mistresses as models for the Madonna, so who can blame a film director for using his girlfriend in a leading role—unless she does a bad job.

Many painters have worked in the Theatre. Bakst, Picasso, Aronson and Matisse come to mind. More will. Here, we are still with Disney.

Which brings us to Dance. In my opinion, it’s a considerable asset if the director’s knowledge here is not only theoretical but practical and personal. Dance is an essential part of a screen director’s education. It’s a great advantage for him if he can “move.” It will help him not only to move actors but move the camera. The film director, ideally, should be as able as a choreographer, quite literally. So I don’t mean the tango in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris or the High School gym dance in American Graffiti as much as I do the battle scenes in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation which are pure choreography and very beautiful. Look at how Ford’s Cavalry charges that way. Or Jim Cagney’s dance of death on the long steps in The Roaring Twenties.

The film director must know music, classic, so called—too much of an umbrella word, that! Let us say of all periods. And as with sculpture and painting, he must know what social situations and currents the music came out of.

Of course he must be particularly into the music of his own day—acid rock; latin rock; blues and jazz; pop; tin pan alley; barbershop; corn; country; Chicago; New Orleans; Nashville. The film director should know the history of stage scenery, its development from background to environment and so to the settings inside which films are played out. Notice I stress inside which as opposed to in front of. The construction of scenery for filmmaking was traditionally the work of architects. The film director must study from life, from newspaper clippings and from his own photographs, dramatic environments and particularly how they affect behavior.

I recommend to every young director that he start his own collection of clippings and photographs and, if he’s able, his own sketches.

The film director must know costuming, its history through all periods, its techniques and what it can be as expression. Again, life is a prime source. We learn to study, as we enter each place, each room, how the people there have chosen to present themselves. “How he comes on,” we say.

Costuming in films is so expressive a means that it is inevitably the basic choice of the director. Visconti is brilliant here. So is Bergman in a more modest vein. The best way to study this again is to notice how people dress as an expression of what they wish to gain from any occasion, what their intention is. Study your husband, study your wife, how their attire is an expression of each day’s mood and hope, their good days, their days of low confidence, their time of stress and how it shows in clothing.

Elia Kazan: From Theatre to Film

A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan)

With his films and stage works in the 1940s and 1950s, Elia Kazan established himself as a leading proponent of psychological realism. His works are both a reflection of societal struggle and personal anguish. 

Kazan was born in 1909 in Istanbul into an Anatolian Greek family. Kazan's family emigrated to the United States when he was four years old, and he grew up in New York City's slums and suburbs. He was a solitary youngster who read incessantly. Determined not to follow in his father's business, the young Kazan studied English literature at Williams College from 1926 to 1930. This is where he first gained an interest in theatre. 

Kazan condidered a career in cinema and determined that more theatrical training would assist him in accomplishing that aim. He was admitted to Yale's School of Drama despite his lack of practical experience. Between 1930 and 1932, Kazan engaged himself in all facets of theatre creation. He discovered that he shared an interest in social drama and the formation of a left-wing alternative to Broadway theatre. Kazan left graduate school before finishing his degree to work as an apprentice with the Group Theatre, a subsidiary of the Theatre Guild. 

Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman developed the Group Theatre, modelled after Stanislavski's renowned Moscow Art Theatre. The company's works sought to balance social awareness with aesthetic brilliance. Kazan served in a number of  capacitirs for the ensemble, including press agent, stage manager, and performer, earning himself the nickname “Gadge”, short for gadget. In 1934, he helped recruit new writers, including Clifford Odets, whose play Waiting for Lefty, was a great success and in which Kazan also appeared. 

Kazan remained a member of the company until 1941, performing in Odets' Golden Boy and other productions. Kazan started focusing exclusively on directing and throughout the decade's first few years, he directed a number of plays, most notably Thorton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, starring Tallulah Bankhead, for which Kazan received the 1942 New York Drama Critics' Award for Best Director. By 1945, Kazan had been approached to direct both on Broadway and in Hollywood. He proceeded to have success in both areas, with the film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the play All My Sons, which was written by an unknown young writer called Arthur Miller.

His first full-length feature was a film adaptation of Betty Smith's best-selling novel "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." Though it did not fare well at the box office, the film received positive reviews for its realism and performances. 

Two years later, Kazan's passion for social concerns led him to create a landmark picture on the plague of anti-Semitism, "Gentleman's Agreement," about a journalist assigned to pose as a Jew in order to see prejudice firsthand. The film earned eight Academy Award nominations and took home three, including Best Picture and Best Director for Kazan. 

Kazan was now in demand and flourishing on both the stage and screen: from 1947 to 1951 he directed the original productions of two enormously influential plays: Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" and Arthur Miller's "Death Of A Salesman," as well as directing the film adaptation of "Streetcar," as well as "Pinky" (1949), another taboo-busting film about racism, as well as "Panic In The Streets" (1950). 

Kazan formed the Actors' Studio in 1947 with Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis as a kind of resurrection of the Group Theatre, with an emphasis on actor instruction rather than production. Kazan returned to theatre with Miller's Death of a Salesman, starring Lee J. Cobb. The play was a spectacular success, running for more than 700 performances and winning several prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize. 

Then, in 1952, shortly after filming "Viva Zapata" with actor Marlon Brando (whom Kazan had propelled to popularity in the stage and screen adaptations of "Streetcar"), McCarthyism finally caught up with him, and Kazan made a fateful decision. After first refusing to identify names with HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), he eventually agreed to fully participate. Kazan became a pariah overnight in the eyes of many of his friends and acquaintances. Kazan never expressed regret publically  for his conduct, thinking Communism to be a danger to American values. This only served to intensify anger against him. 

Ironically, it was at this point in his life that he became most inspired as an artist. He often reflected on how the films he created after the HUAC experience were his most powerful — and personal — works. His creativity was motivated by a deep-seated sense of self-justification. 

His undisputed masterwork is 1954's "On The Waterfront," which was scripted by Budd Schulberg and starred Brando in his third and last cinematic collaboration with Kazan. Terry Malloy is played by Brando, a retired prizefighter who works for his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger). Charlie is second-in-command to mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), who commands the waterfront via intimidation and brutality. Terry's journey from cynical, indifferent punk to heroic crusader, who ends up reporting on - and finally dismantling - the Friendly machine is chronicled in the film. 

"Waterfront" was Kazan's response to those who criticised his HUAC performance: the unmistakable message is that speaking up against evil is a worthy endeavour. The storyline and performance are stunning, while Boris Kaufman's austere photography and Leonard Bernstein's evocative soundtrack complement the action. The film received 12 Academy Award nominations and won eight, including Best Picture, Actor (Brando), Actress (Eva Marie Saint), Writing, Cinematography, and Editing, as well as another Best Director award for Kazan. 

Kazan next took a risk on an unknown young actor called James Dean to adapt John Steinbeck's book "East of Eden" for the big screen. Kazan would film in widescreen and in vibrant, rich colour this time. The narrative, set in California in 1917, is a modern retelling of the Cain and Abel legend. This success earned both Kazan and Dean Academy Award nominations. 

Kazan next founded his own film company and produced Baby Doll (1956), A Face in the Crowd (1957), and several additional films, all of which failed to find a mainstream audience. In 1957, Kazan returned to the stage, directing William Inge's Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Archibald MacLeish's J. B., and Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. 

Kazan temporarily reconciled with Arthur Miller in 1963, directing the latter's play After the Fall. While the play was a triumph, Kazan's second production of The Changeling was a failure, prompting his resignation. Kazan then chose to film America, America, a fictitious account of his family's relocation to the United States. His subsequent picture, The Arrangement, was semi-autobiographical and a commercial flop. 

Kazan subsequently switched to writing novels and directed one more picture, 1976's The Last Tycoon. Elia Kazan: a Life, his 1988 autobiography, was a colourful and frank account of the people and works that shaped a remarkable life.

In the following extract from an interview with Cahiers du Cinema in 1966, the great Greek-American director Elia Kazan discusses his transition from theatre to film, and how this influenced his conception of character and artistic realism.

CAHIERS: Shall we begin with the actors? It seems that, little by little, you have guided them from exteriorization toward a certain interiorization.

ELIA KAZAN: I believe that that is true. In the films that I was making twenty years ago, I had, I chose, more flamboyant actors. They were the engines of the film, and the film was the vehicle of their expression; it was always a question of expressing, of exteriorizing what there was ‘in’ them, and the free course that I left to this flamboyance made me tend sometimes almost toward opera. But, little by little, I lost interest in this expression as such, and in fact I almost turned against it. I began, too, to restrain my actors, in proportion as I saw things in a truer, calmer fashion.

At the same time, I became more and more interested in what happened to them, to the actors, human beings, characters—in the way in which they reflected or reinforced something, be it unconsciously, in the way in which they let something grow in them, come out from them. Now, ten or fifteen years afterward, I see the gap that separates me from the first manner, when my actors were moved by the most violent feeling of life, which they rendered directly and unconsciously. Now I no longer ‘feel’ people through an acting technique. Life is not like that. People ordinarily do not know or realize the why and the how of their beings, whence they originate and whither they lead them. In any case, very few people know exactly what they want, and there are fewer still who can go straight to what they want. That is why I direct my youngsters in a more supple, more complex way. I abandon myself more to imprecision, to the nebulous, and I accept more readily the ways of contradiction. I believe that that is the only way to approach the truth.

A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan)

CAHIERS: Your films themselves are made more and more on the complexity and contradictions of life.

ELIA KAZAN: At the start, my films were always written by scenarists, sometimes theatre men [Tennessee Williams, William Inge]. Even then I worked on them myself, but little by little I collaborated more and finally I began to write my stories myself. I was present at the birth of the film, instead of being, as before, the conductor of cadences and solos. In A Streetcar Named Desire, there are entire scenes that I would do differently today. I would have them happen much more calmly, unconsciously, and that would take much more time as well. I still think that dramaturgy is essential in theatre, but one must rethink the thing completely when one approaches the screen. That too is why, as I grew older, I felt more and more acutely the difference between theatre and film. and, little by little, I lost interest in the theatre.

CAHIERS: But the fact is that you originally acquired much from the theatre. Perhaps something of it still remains today in your films?

ELIA KAZAN: I agree absolutely. I took something from the theatre and that something is still there. But, regarding that, let me be more specific about some points. The essence of the Stanislavsky method, and the fundamental interest that it had for us, in the way in which we learned it as students and used it later, dwelt in the action. That is to say, when someone felt, experienced something, our feeling—and our theory—was that this emotion would never become ‘of’ the theatre, unless it were expressed as a need, a hunger. And it is of this need, of this hunger, that such-and-such a precise action sprang incarnated as expression of this hunger. The play became a series of progressions, each of which consisted of the fact that a person did a certain thing that responded to a certain want. We stressed the word ‘want’. and we did our best to emerge on the word ‘do’. In short: To do. To want. To do.

Wild River (Directed by Elia Kazan)

We sought to attain the infinitive: To conquer, to love ... infinitives emerging on ‘To want’ and ‘To do.’ The result was that our performances in the theatre, especially in the form in which I expressed myself at the start, were extremely violent, violent and amusing. But today, when I observe life, I see it takes much less direct paths, circuitous paths, subtle and subterranean. Moreover, when the actor is aware of his aim—because the director has pointed it out to him or he has analyzed it himself—he cannot but distance himself from life to the extent to which, in life, people are uncertain ultimately as to what they want. They oscillate, wander, drift, in relation to their aim—or they change their aim. In short, they want this, then that, but... but that is life, and it is there that the poetry of life dwells, in these contradictions, these sudden deflections, these aspirations that spring up and disconcert. In short, while I once had a unilinear approach to life, I now interest myself more and more in the complexity of things.

– Interview with Elia Kazan. By Michel Delahaye 1966. From Cahiers du Cinema in English. March 1967.

Elia Kazan: Writing for the Theatre, Writing for the Screen

A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan)

Kazan recalled in his autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life (1989): "In 1934, when I was in the Party, we helped start a left-wing movement in a very conservative Actors' Equity Association. Our prime goal was to secure rehearsal pay for the working actor and to limit the period when a producer could decide to replace an actor in rehearsal without further financial obligation... I was working on reforming Equity with a fine man named Phil Loeb... Our cause was so just that now, looking back, it's hard to believe there was any opposition to what we were proposing. Still it wasn't an easy to fight to win."

Kazan had appeared as an actor in two films: City for Conquest (1940) and Blues in the Night (1941). In 1947 Kazan, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford established the famous Actors Studio, where they developed the idea of Method Acting (a system of instruction and rehearsal for actors which founds a performance upon inner emotional experience).

Kazan directed All My Sons, by Arthur Miller, followed by Death Of A Salesman which featured Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. Kazan also worked with Tennessee Williams on the Pulitzer Prize winning, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). At this time, Kazan developed an interest in cinema and directed several films that dealt with social issues: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), Gentlemen's Agreement (1947), The Sea of Grass (1947) and Boomerang! (1947).

Kazan was known for his socialist views and he was eventually called to appear before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Infamously, Kazan decided to name names. As a result of his co-operation, Kazan was allowed to continue working in Hollywood. He went on to direct Viva Zapata! (1952) and Man on a Tightrope (1953). On the Waterfront (1954), was widely seen as an attempt to justify the morality of informing on friends to those in authority. Budd Schulberg, the writer and the actor Lee J. Cobb, who had both testified before the HUAC, also worked on the film. Other movies directed by Kazan followed, including East of Eden (1955), Baby Doll (1956) and Splendor in the Grass (1960).

Elia Kazan’s The Pleasures of Directing is a fragment from an unfinished book that the great director began writing as he was approaching his eightieth year. His aim was to show readers the process of directing a film or a play, and the technical aspects were to be spliced with observations on the character and talents of the writers and artists he worked with and the way their collaboration evolved.

In the following extract Kazan draws on his experience as a groundbreaking director in the mediums of film and theatre to contrast the art of writing for the theatre to the process of writing for the screen:

A director should know everything about playwriting and/or screenplay writing, even if he is unable to write, is incapable of producing anything worth putting before an audience. He must be able to see the merits but also anticipate the problems involved in producing a script. The director is responsible for the script. Its faults are his responsibility. There is no evading this. He is there to guide the playwright to correct whatever faults the script has. At the same time he must respect the merits of the playwright’s work during the tensions of production. He is responsible for the protection of the manuscript.

Note that the word is not ‘playwrite,’ it’s ‘playwright.’ A play for the theatre is made as much as it is written. A film is made, not written. They are both constructions. The construction tells the story more than the words.

On The Waterfront (Directed by Elia Kazan)

In the movies, the director should be co-author (ideally) because that is what inevitably he is. He should work on the screenplay with the writer from the very beginning. The manner in which the story is developed tells more than the words do. The problems that arise during production are almost always problems of construction. Since so much of the story of a film is told by visual images, the director is the co-creator. A screenplay is not literature – a film is constructed of pieces of film joined together during the editing process. The most memorable films are not usually treasured for their literary values. But in film as well as in works for the stage, story construction is a major component.

A filmscript is more architecture than literature. This will get my friends who are writers mad, but it’s the truth: The director tells the movie story more than the man who writes the dialogue. The director is the final author, which is the reason so many writers now want to become directors. It’s all one piece. Many of the best films ever made can be seen without dialogue and be perfectly understood. The director tells the essential story with pictures. Dialogue, in most cases, is the gravy on the meat. It can be a tremendous ‘plus,’ but it rarely is. Acting, the art, helps; that too is the director’s work. He finds the experience within the actor that makes his or her face and body come alive and so creates the photographs he needs. Pictures, shots, angles, images, ‘cuts,’ poetic long shots – these are his vocabulary. Not talk. What speaks to the eye is the director’s vocabulary, his ‘tools,’ just as words are the author’s. Until Panic in the Streets, I’d directed actors moving in and out of dramatic arrangements just as I might have done on stage, with the camera photographing them mostly in medium shot. My stage experience, which I’d thought of as an asset, I now regarded as a handicap. I had to learn a new art.

Baby Doll (Directed by Elia Kazan)

A true artistic partnership between a writer and a filmmaker is an excellent solution, but it’s rarely arrived at. The dialogue remains an adjunct to the film rather than its central element. What can be told through images, through movement, through the expressiveness of the actor, what can be told without explicit and limiting dialogue, is best done that way. Reliance on the visual allows the ambiguity, the openness of life.

In the work of the best playwrights there is a mysterious, surprising quality. This play is unlike that of any other playwright. You may realize that the author is dealing with a strongly felt personal concern so important to him that it has been able to arouse the degree of energy necessary to produce a total manuscript. He has something to say; it is his message. The director of a screenplay has to appreciate what the writer is trying to say and stand up for it as surely as if he wrote the words himself. He is responsible for the writer’s theme and must ‘realize’ it, make it come to life for an audience. In film this consists of the choice and arrangement of images.

Most screenplays are adaptations of novels, stage plays, stories, news items, history. But the most interesting scripts verge on autobiography. The writer speaks to you, through the screen, using all the means of this form that are special to it, the succession of images as well as words. The best screen work has this element, even if the story appears to be objectively observed. The story is molded by the writer’s beliefs and feelings.

Splendor In The Grass (Directed by Elia Kazan)

The subject of writing for the theatre or screen defies easily formulated rules. The best rule of screen and play writing was given to me by John Howard Lawson, a onetime friend. It’s simple: unity from climax. Everything should build to the climax. But all I know about script preparation urges me to make no rules, although there are some hints, tools of the trade, that have been useful for me.

One of these is ‘Have your central character in every scene.’ This is a way of ensuring unity to the work and keeping the focus sharp. Another is: ‘Look for the contradictions in every character, especially in your heroes and villains. No one should be what they first seem to be. Surprise the audience.’

It is essential that the viewer be able to follow the flow of events. If you keep trying to figure out who is who and where it’s all happening and what is going on, you can’t emotionally respond to what’s being shown to you. But keep in mind that the greatest quality of a work of art may be its ability to surprise you, to make you wonder.

Another rule I have found useful is: Every time you make a cut, you improve a scene. Somerset Maugham, a wise old man, said that there are two important rules of playwriting. ‘One, stick to the subject. Two, cut wherever you can.’ Another wise man said: ‘If it occurs to you that something might be cut, it should be cut.’

Paul Osborn, an experienced and smart playwright and screenwriter, invited me to a screening of a movie made by the producer Sam Goldwyn. Sam asked Paul his opinion. ‘Needs cutting,’ said Paul. This made Sam frantic because he thought the same but didn’t know what to do about it. ‘But where?’ he asked. Paul answered, ‘Everywhere.’

America, America (Directed by Elia Kazan)

There’s no such thing as realistic theatre. The very presence of the audience, the fact of selection of any kind, the very taking off of the fourth wall, makes it not realistic. I’m not interested in what’s called realism. I don’t believe I’ve worked ‘realistically’ or ‘naturalistically’ either. What our stage does is put a strong light on a person, on the inner life, the feelings of a person. These become monumental. You’re not seeing the characters in two dimensions. They’re out there living right in your midst. It puts a terrific emphasis on what’s said too. You can no longer pretend a character is talking only to the partner he’s playing with. He’s talking in the midst of eleven hundred people and they’re there to hear him. They can hear his breathing, so right off the bat, the theatrical exists. You can’t duck it.

Stage operates through illusion. There’s nothing between the actor and the audience. Only he – without help – can project the idea to the audience. In movies, the camera helps out – moves the idea along. Sometimes it can talk, as it closes in or backs up, helps express emotion, what a character is thinking; or it can anticipate action. The more words, usually the lousier a movie script. Movies must be the real thing. Camera gives the plot an assist, helps the story get there.

– Extract from ‘The Pleasures of Directing’ in Elia Kazan: Kazan on Directing (Vintage Books, 2010) 

Budd Schulberg: Waterfront Memories

On the Waterfront (Directed by Elia Kazan)

Budd Schulberg was born in New York in 1914, son of B.P. Schulberg, production chief at Paramount Studios. Schulberg grew up in Hollywood becoming a script reader and then a screenwriter after completing his education at Dartmouth College. He began to write and publish short stories in the 1930s and became a member of the Communist Party after visiting the Soviet Union in 1934. He would later recall his decision to join the party: ‘It didn’t take a genius to tell you that something was vitally wrong with the country. The unemployment was all around us. The bread lines and the apple sellers. I couldn’t help comparing that with my own family’s status, with my father; at one point he was making $11,000 a week. And I felt a shameful contrast between the haves and the have-nots very early’.

His commitment to the Communist Party ended after it insisted that his first novel be written to reflect Marxist dogma. He eventually published What Makes Sammy Run (1941), about an unscrupulous Hollywood studio mogul, to great critical acclaim.

During World War II, Schulberg worked in the OSS, the intelligence-gathering forerunner to the CIA. Working with director John Ford’s film unit, he documented the atrocities of the concentration camps, then personally arrested the Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl at her Austrian chalet.

After the war, Schulberg published The Disenchanted (1950), his semi-fictionalized account of collaborating with F. Scott Fitzgerald on a screenplay.

In 1951 Schulberg was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during its investigation of the Communist Party’s alleged influence on the film industry. Having been named himself Schulberg acknowledged his former membership, offering his full cooperation. In his testimony before the Committee, Schulberg claimed he left the party because it refused to break with the Soviet dictatorship, and had tried to influence his work. He publicly named eight other Hollywood figures as members, including the screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. and the director Herbert Biberman – two of the Hollywood Ten who claimed the First Amendment gave them the right to silence before the committee. Schulberg’s testimony was seen as a betrayal. The liberal consensus in Hollywood was that Lardner had acquitted himself with more dignity before the committee when asked if he had been a Communist: ‘I could answer it, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.’

In a 2006 interview with the New York Times, Schulberg claimed that in hindsight he believed that the attacks against Communists in the United States were a greater threat to the country than the Communist Party itself. But he said he had named names because the party represented a genuine threat to freedom of speech: ‘They say that you testified against your friends, but once they supported the party against me, even though I did have some personal attachments, they were really no longer my friends... and I felt that if they cared about real freedom of speech, they should have stood up for me when I was fighting the party.’

After his testimony Schulberg worked on the screenplay for On the Waterfront which grew out of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles written for The New York Sun about the influence of organized crime on the New York docks. The film was directed by Elia Kazan who had also testified before the Committee. Marlon Brando played the washed-up boxer, Terry Malloy, who turns against the power of the mob.

The allegorical parallels between the film and the McCarthy hearings are a subject of continuing controversy. The issue has been played down by Schulberg and Kazan. In his autobiography Kazan claimed he had wanted to do a picture about the waterfront long before the HUAC hearings. For Schulberg the film is a tragedy in which the system comes up against the little guy, a fixed fight in a world where ‘the love of a lousy buck’ and a ‘cushy job’ were ‘more important than the love of man,’ in the words of Father Barry, the crusading priest in On the Waterfront played by Karl Malden.

‘It’s the writer’s responsibility to stand up against that power,’ Schulberg later said. ‘The writers are really almost the only ones, except for very honest politicians, who can make any dent on that system. I tried to do that. And that’s affected me my whole life.’

In the following interview from 1998, Budd Schulberg recalled the making of On the Waterfront after a screening in New York.

Budd Schulberg: When I saw the other day on a list that our old movie was in the top ten... as one of the best pictures of all time, I thought again about travelling to Hollywood - Kazan and me. Kazan who directed this film, who already won an Academy Award for A Gentleman’s Agreement – all the way out telling me what a great script we had. He was saying we were so lucky because [he] had Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar and that [On the Waterfront] is one of the best three scripts [he'd] ever had. And I was worried... I told him I was worried about coming back [to Hollywood]. I told him I didn’t think they would like it out there.

Kazan was annoyed with me. I’ll try to make it brief, but we got off the train and there was no one to meet us and I said, ‘Kaz, there’s no limo’. Now Kazan is a very down to earth guy and he said ‘we don’t need a limo, I hate limos’. So we went up to the Beverly Hills Hotel and got there, checked in and no invitations from Daryl Zanuck – it was a film to be made for Zanuck – no invitation to come down to Palm Springs and play croquet. I said ‘there’s no invitation to play croquet’. Kazan says ‘I HATE croquet!’

And we went up to the room, we had a little suite, and there weren’t no flowers. I looked around and didn’t see no flowers. And I said, ‘Kaz, we have no flowers’. Kazan says, ‘What it is with you, I don’t need flowers. To hell with the flowers.’ And I said, ‘Kaz, you come from New York, I come from Hollywood. And I know the unspoken language of Hollywood and Zanuck is telling us something’. Kazan didn’t believe me.

But the following Monday, when Daryl Zanuck met us, raving about Cinemascope, he said ‘I’m so excited, I’m so excited, we have this great new medium, Cinemascope’. He said ‘that’s the great thing about our business. First it was flickers, and the films jumped, and then we learned how to make them more smoothly. And then we had colour and then we had sound and now we have the Cinemascope. 

Kazan and I looked at each other because we had written that this film should be something in flat black and white. As he went on about what could be done, he said, ‘Can you imagine what Prince Valiant would look like in Cinemascope?’ And finally Kazan said, ‘Daryl, what about our picture?’ There was a long, pregnant pause and Mr. Zanuck said, ‘Boys, I’m sorry, but I don’t like a single thing about it’. And I think I was quiet and Kazan said not a single thing.

He said, ‘Whatta ya got except a bunch of sweaty longshoremen’. And that stabbed me in the heart because when Kazan came to talk with me about doing this movie, I went down on the Lower West Side, in the Chelsea area – you’ll see some of that experience up here in the movie – and I got involved with an amazing man, one of the most amazing I ever met, the waterfront priest – Father John Corridon.

I mean, we’ve learned now that the ILA – the International Longshoreman’s Association – was totally in the hands of the mob. They were killers and thieves. Corridon was really filling the vacuum and trying to guide the rebel longshoremen into making some effort to win back their young and make a real living. This went on for several years and I hung in with these people. I love these people and when Zanuck said that all you got is a lot of sweaty longshoremen... my heart was broken. After that, every studio in town, had the same reaction.

We went to Warners, Paramount, MGM, every single one said no. They wouldn’t make the picture. And as I said... what we were talking about a few minutes ago... one thing that really warmed me to Kazan... and I tried, I really tried... and I turned on him. Back at the hotel... I was so mad. I had spent about two years, I had actually mortgaged my farm, I was going broke doing this movie... and I turned on him and I said, ‘Goddamit, I told you they weren’t going to make this movie’. And Kazan said, ‘Budd, I promise I’ll make it. I have to get on the docks with a handheld IMO and use the actual longshoremen – the rebel longshoremen who were working with Ed Xavier and some of the actors out of the (Actor’s) Studio and make this movie. And that’s pretty much how it was made. It really was the longest of the longshots. It was almost accidental that the movie ever got made at all. It was a longshot.

It was all shot in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the river from the Manhattan West Side docks. It was made for 800,000 dollars and it was shot in 37 days. And every single night, every single night, twelve o’clock, one’o clock, two o’clock my phone would ring and it would be our producer, Sam Speigel and he would say, ‘Budd, you’ve got to make them go faster, you’ve got to make them go faster’. So, the film was a film that was almost like our own film, that nobody would like so we would say to each other, ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter that nobody likes it, at least we like it’. And so, I’m really pleased that you’re here to see the movie and that there’s still that much interest in it after all these years.

Question: What were the initial reactions after the film was made?

Budd Schulberg: Our producer, Sam Speigel, was still very worried. Columbia had looked at it and they didn’t like it. So Sam Speigel got the idea that maybe it needed some kind of lift, and he got Bernstein to do the score for the film. It was the only one that he ever wrote and he did a terrific job. And when we got all those Oscar nominations and we won... all those Oscars, we were really amazed that Bernstein was left out completely. But the score wasn’t left out, it’ll always be there. Occasionally it’s played in philharmonic programs and it was the only one he did and he did one hell of a job at that.

Question: In most modern films, the score fades into the background, but in your film the score is right up in front. Was that Speigel, or was that your choice?

Budd Schulberg: That was in the mixing. As the writer of the picture, as much as I admired the score, there were times that I thought it was maybe it was a little bit... too loud. (laughter)

Question: I know it’s a general question, but how do you approach writing dialogue. Is there a certain method that you use?

Budd Schulberg: One thing you do in writing dialogue is that you make up as little of it as you can and you listen as much as you can. Watching it this evening, I was reminded how many times something in there was not really written by me, I simply wrote down what they were actually saying. The scene in the hold, after Doogan gets killed, Father Barry comes down and when he talks about Christ and the shake-up, that was something that I actually heard. When I heard the real waterfront priest talk about that Christ is here and he carries a hook and he sees the men who get passed over and who gets the jobs and the wine and I was just so amazed by it that I just had to try and put this old sermon, or whatever you call it, in the film.

Dialogue, you try to build your characters... if you try to get an idea about who you’re writing about, then you listen to that person or those people. When Charlie gets killed, the ordinary cliché for Terry would be ‘I’ll get ‘em’ or ‘I’ll kill ‘em’ or something like that, but I actually heard a longshoreman say ‘I'll take it out of their skulls!’ And it just rang a bell, a loud bell, that that’s the line I should use.  I’ll say what I heard my friend the longshoreman say, ‘I'll take it out of their skulls’. So a lot of dialogue comes out of listening, carefully, to the characters and getting an ear for how they talk and plus, you have to shape your scenes and build your scenes on all of that. I find it very, very valuable, I think. 

– Interview transcript with Budd Schulberg in ‘New York Conversations’, by Mikael Colville-Andersen.