Watch the full program here on the American Masters Web site.

For Martin Scorsese, growing up in Little Italy, seeing On the Waterfront and East of Eden as a young man was a life-changing experience. Scorsese appears on and off camera throughout A Letter to Elia, taking us through Kazan’s life and through his own as well, and through his growing realization that there was an artist behind the camera, someone “who knew me, maybe better than I knew myself.” The film is about being exposed to the right movies at the right moment in your adolescent life, when you’re wide open and ready to connect, to be spurred on by the work up there on the screen, and then, maybe, to chart a course toward making your own movies.

Composed of clips, stills, readings from Kazan’s autobiography and his speech on directing (read by Elias Koteas), a videotaped interview done late in Kazan’s life, and Scorsese’s commentary on and offscreen, A Letter to Elia takes a close look at the life of art and its creation – the work, the distractions, the inspirations, the complications, the intersections between art and experience.

A Letter to Elia, written and directed by Scorsese and his longtime collaborator Kent Jones, is a deeply personal film, a frank portrait and self-portrait, and an equally frank acknowledgement of the closeness and the distance between artists and their art.

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“This is the Woody doc everybody has been waiting for, and I am delighted that this creative giant is finally assuming his rightful place in the American Masters library,” says Susan Lacy, series creator and executive producer of American Masters, an eight-time winner of the Emmy^® Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series. The series is a production of THIRTEEN for WNET, the parent company of THIRTEEN and WLIW21, New York’s public television stations, and operator of NJTV. For nearly 50 years, WNET has been producing and broadcasting national and local documentaries and other programs to the New York community.

“Woody Allen was always the big ‘get’ for me,” says Robert Weide, best known for his long-term directing/producing stint on Curb Your Enthusiasm, which earned him Emmy^® and Golden Globe^® Awards. “The prolific nature of Woody’s output has provided me with an embarrassment of riches. In fact, Woody will have made three features just in the time it’s taken me to make this one documentary.”

Beginning with Allen’s childhood and his first professional gigs as a teen — furnishing jokes for comics and publicists — American Masters – Woody Allen: A Documentary chronicles the trajectory and longevity of Allen’s career: from his work in the 1950s-60s as a TV scribe for Sid Caesar, standup comedian and frequent TV talk show guest, to a writer-director averaging one film-per-year for more than 40 years. Weide covers Allen’s earliest film work in Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper, and Love and Death; frequent Oscar^® favorites such as Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, Purple Rose of Cairo, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands & Wives, Bullets Over Broadway, and Mighty Aphrodite; and his recent globetrotting phase with Match Point, Vicky Christina Barcelona, and this year’s commercial success Midnight in Paris.

Exploring the ultimate “independent filmmaker’s” writing habits, casting, directing, and relationship with his actors, Weide traveled with Allen from the London set of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger — a major coup “considering Woody has never allowed so much as an EPK [Electronic Press Kit] crew on his sets,” claims Weide — to the Cannes premiere of Midnight in Paris this May. He also filmed Allen at home, in the editing room and touring his childhood haunts in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. New interviews provide insight and backstory: actors Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Penelope Cruz, John Cusack, Larry David, Seth Green, Mariel Hemingway, Scarlett Johansson, Julie Kavner, Diane Keaton, Martin Landau, Louise Lasser, Sean Penn, Tony Roberts, Chris Rock, Mira Sorvino, Naomi Watts, Dianne Wiest, and Owen Wilson; writing collaborators Marshall Brickman, Mickey Rose and Doug McGrath; cinematographers Gordon Willis and Vilmos Zsigmond; Allen’s sister and producing partner Letty Aronson; producers Robert Greenhut and Stephen Tenenbaum; longtime managers Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe; casting director Juliet Taylor; pal Dick Cavett; and Martin Scorsese; among many others.

American Masters – Woody Allen: A Documentary also touches on Allen’s contributions as a writer for the theater and his casual pieces for The New Yorker, as well as his frequent moonlighting gig as a clarinet player with a New Orleans-style jazz band. “He never refused a request and he never declined to answer a question,” says Weide.

Woody Allen: A Documentary is a Whyaduck Productions, Rat Entertainment, Mike’s Movies, and Insurgent Media production in association with THIRTEEN’s American Masters for WNET. Robert Weide is director, writer, producer, and co-editor. Michael Peyser, Brett Ratner, Erik Gordon, Fisher Stevens, and Andrew Karsch are executive producers. Susan Lacy is the series creator and executive producer of American Masters.

American Masters is made possible by the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding for American Masters is provided by Rosalind P. Walter, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, Rolf and Elizabeth Rosenthal, Cheryl and Philip Milstein Family, Jack Rudin, Jody and John Arnhold, Vital Projects Fund, The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation, Michael & Helen Schaffer Foundation, and public television viewers. Funding for this program is provided by Miriam and Sam Blatt.

Martin Scorsese

Kent Jones: We started this movie half a decade ago.

Martin Scorsese: We started talking about it a year or so after Kazan passed away. I wanted to make something that honored him and his place in my life and my approach to the work, but that was also honest, that reflected his honesty about himself, and I asked you to work on it with me.

KJ: You wanted to be able to express what you couldn’t express to him when he was alive…

MS: Which eventually became part of the subject of the movie.

KJ: Yes. It had to be.

MS: Exactly.

KJ: It started off as a very different kind of project.

MS: We were going to do interviews. And then it seemed like the right idea to go in a different direction.

KJ: There’s a very good film to be made about Kazan as a person, as the man who started with the Group Theatre, who acted in Waiting for Lefty, who went on to revolutionize Broadway, then started the Actors’ Studio, then became a friendly witness before HUAC and suffered the consequences, then made a string of great films, changed the face of acting in theater and movies, suffered through the trauma of his first wife’s death, reinvented himself as a writer, and so on. It would be a real epic. But that felt like someone else’s idea.

MS: The thing was to convey something about the relationship, and by that I mean my relationship to the films, and that meant going back to the way that I received them when I saw them as an adolescent.

KJ: And the distinction between your relationship with the films and your relationship with the man, and the way you saw the films when you were young and the way you see them now.

MS: Right.

KJ: I thought that was really interesting, because it doesn’t have anything to do with film aesthetics or official history. Actually, in a sense, it does – it’s the way you receive films when you’re young and wide open to them.

MS: Yes. You don’t know how it’s done or why, you just know that the picture is speaking to you and addressing something that can’t be addressed in your life, by anyone you know, because it’s private, embarrassing. You’re young and figuring out who you are in relation to everyone around you, the adult world around you, but you’re not on the adult wavelength yet.

KJ: Or maybe you don’t want to be, and it’s about finding a way to talk to yourself.

MS: Yes. Which is what a psychoanalyst is supposed to help you do.

KJ: But when you’re a kid, you’re trying to do it yourself. You need to. It does remind me of something Andrew Sarris said, that if you want to psychoanalyze someone, just ask them about the movies they’ve seen.

MS: I wouldn’t know where to start there. I’ve seen so many. So have you.

KJ: I received your movies in the way you’re describing when I was a little older, when I was 16, 17.

MS: And I was 12 and 13 when I saw On the Waterfront and East of Eden.

KJ: You weren’t really aware of the Actors’ Studio or HUAC or any of that when you were young, were you?

MS: Not at all. Of course, we knew about the red scare in general and the blacklist, we knew about the Army-McCarthy hearings, the Rosenberg case. But Kazan’s testimony and the reaction to it we never heard of. And the Actors’ Studio? Another world.

KJ: We talked quite a bit about HUAC and how to deal with that.

MS: I didn’t want to make a movie about the blacklist. It’s been done and done well.

KJ: The issue is: how do you talk about Kazan? Because, of course, you can’t not talk about his friendly testimony. But it’s just as important to not let his testimony overshadow everything else. I was fascinated by his autobiography, the way he circled around the topic over and over again – apologizing for it in a dream, rationalizing it, raking himself over the coals for it, moving past it, returning to it. It was completely unresolved.

MS: The important thing was to not judge him on the one hand, and to not lecture anyone on the other hand.

KJ: And obviously neither of us wanted to condemn him. I think it’s so strange when people do that, and then his movies along with him.

MS: The movies?

KJ: Sure. Like, “He was an informer so his movies were worthless.” I’ve read it over and over again. I always feel like asking them, “So you’re not going to watch Wild River because Kazan named names? Or East of Eden? Or Splendor in the Grass? They’re all bad a priori? Along with Celine’s novels, Ezra Pound’s poetry, and Heidegger’s writings, I guess.” And how about Robert Rossen? He named names, so I guess he’s out too. And Clifford Odets and Burl Ives and Jerome Robbins. And there’s a lot of confidence about what you or I would have done if we’d been on the stand. It’s interesting.

MS: We deal with it in the movie, but it doesn’t overwhelm the movie.

KJ: The amount of time we spend on it is relatively small, but in a way it colors the mood. It’s part of the melancholy. Along with the sense of the immense distance between the artist and their art.

MS: That’s a subject I’d looked at in No Direction Home. That equation between Dylan and his music was terrifying to him, when people called him a prophet and told him that he’d changed their lives and that kind of thing. You hear that, and it’s a wonderful compliment, and then it’s: “Okay – now what?” Can you have a simple conversation after that? Probably not. And ultimately, it wasn’t him, it was the songs. Of course, he’d written the songs, they were his, but then, in a way, they really weren’t anymore – they had a life of their own. Which is painful, and beautiful at the same time. Because ultimately, that’s what you want, for the painting or the movie or the novel to take on its own existence. That’s where the old adage to trust the tale and not the teller comes from.

KJ: We settled on a certain way of looking at the question of style. It’s encapsulated in the moment where we’re looking at Dean and Harris hidden by the tree and Davalos coming to confront them, and you say that at the time, you didn’t know anything about technique, you just responded to what was genuine and what wasn’t.

MS: That’s the key. You don’t get interested in films because of camera angles or editing choices. You get involved in them. You’re drawn into the world of the film and the emotional lives of the characters and the conflicts between them. You get older and more sophisticated, and you begin to understand the differences between the pictures that work and the ones that don’t, you start to understand the way films are assembled from so many elements, what direction and editing and lighting and sound design are, how they all fit together, and you develop a growing awareness that every movie is a series of choices. But then, when you make films, you come back to the understanding of what those choices are for. If you’re making narrative films, you’re dealing with emotions, conflicts, trying to build a world in which the characters come to life and the audience connects with them.

KJ: I remember you once telling me that you’ve been drawn, more and more, to simplicity, in your own work and in the movies of others.

MS: Sure, but that’s what you’re always striving for when it comes right down to it. The term “director” is kind of odd and even wrong in a way, but in one sense it’s on target: you’re directing the audience’s eye, their attention, from one moment to the next, through all kinds of means. And yes, when you look at something like the taxicab scene in On the Waterfront between Brando and Rod Steiger, you have the kind of absolute simplicity you’re aspiring to. Kazan, in his autobiography, says that he didn’t really “direct” the scene, he just allowed it to happen. He made some choices with Boris Kaufman, he let Brando and Steiger, who already knew their characters so intimately, interact, and it came alive. Sometimes, that’s what direction is – letting things happen, not interfering.

KJ: It’s a powerful experience to look at that scene with fresh eyes, after it’s been anthologized and clipped in so many award shows and montages. When I talked to Lois Smith about Kazan, she told me that one of the things she valued most about the Actors’ Studio was learning to “account for what happened right now,” being responsive to the moment. The look on Brando’s face when Steiger tries to put the blame on his manager seems to me to be a perfect example of that – staying in the moment within your character, and surprising yourself.

MS: That’s right, and only an artist as powerful and sensitive and concentrated as Kazan could create the conditions where that happens.

KJ: We mention Cassavetes briefly in the movie, and there is a real link there. Cassavetes admired Kazan greatly.

MS: Sure. They’re so different, but you can understand how one makes the other possible. And then John had an enormous effect on me, personally and professionally. And Kazan had a great effect on Francis Coppola, and so many others.

KJ: I’d forgotten that Coppola wanted to cast Kazan as the Jewish gangster in Godfather II, the part that Lee Strasberg played so beautifully. His work had a great effect on so many people.

MS: Right. I hope we did justice to that with A Letter to Elia.

About the Filmmakers:

MARTIN SCORSESE

Martin Scorsese is one of the most prominent and influential filmmakers of our times. He directed the critically acclaimed, award winning films Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed. In 2005, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan was broadcast as part of the “American Masters” series on PBS and released on DVD worldwide. Scorsese’s most recent film, Shutter Island, was released earlier this year. Scorsese is currently at work on documentaries featuring George Harrison and Fran Lebowitz. He is serving as Executive Producer on HBO’s series Boardwalk Empire for which he has also directed the pilot episode. He is currently in production on his latest feature film, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

KENT JONES

Kent Jones is an internationally recognized critic and filmmaker. His writing has been published in magazines, newspapers, websites and anthologies throughout the world, and he is the author of several books. He and Martin Scorsese have collaborated on several documentaries. Jones is now the Executive Director of The World Cinema Foundation. He lives in Manhattan.