David Thomson

Speaker OK, we’re going to start going.

Speaker So, David, let’s just help you understand. Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan in the early 50s or. In America, does anybody know who these guys are? Do that? Do they matter in any way?

Speaker Oh, I think they matter a lot. And I think that as far as Kisan is concerned. It’s hugely important. And gratifying to him. That he has made directors matter. You know, we we are at an age now in film history, film culture, where we take directors for granted. That was not always the case. And Hollywood in its golden age, had had directors as employees. Some of them were great directors. But America. Did not really know them as such because the studio system.

Speaker It just it’s so quiet.

Speaker The way in which Kisan matters, I mean, is he a normal director and in the early 50s.

Speaker No. No, he’s. He is the director. Who is absolutely determined that everyone will know that this was a directed show? And that’s partly his vanity, his ego. But it’s also, I think, truly his feeling that the director is the person who does this. He’s the person who pulls it in to being. And in the movies, while there had been great directors in the golden age of Hollywood, people like John Ford who were not without reputation. Lubitch, even they were still people who were overlayed by the studio system. They they work best advised not to talk too much about their power, their importance, their ego. The films did not belong to them. They belong to the studio, to the system and to the actors. Kazan. Is maybe the first. American, we can argue as to just how American he was, but the first American who says it’s the director. And it’s very important in that. That just as he is rising to his great work in theater and in film, which really no one had done as a double act before. Well, this is a man who is virtually within the space of the same couple of years. Winning the Oscar for best picture with gentlemen’s agreement, which is not his best picture, but still it wins best picture and he’s doing Death of a Salesman onstage, which I think is still one of the great American plays of all time.

Speaker No one. Had done that double act before. There were great directors in the theater, notorious flamboyant figures like Jed Harris, John Harris didn’t make films. There were directors capable of extraordinary movies like Howard Hawks. John Ford didn’t work in the theater. Here is Kazan, who moves from one to the other with. Ease. He’s learning about film. I would say. But still, he handles it beautifully. And at the root of it. There is this sort of almost theological notion. Look, I understand actors. I know what acting is, which goes back to Stanislavski has its roots in theory. A theory that had been around in America for 20 years, but never really taken root. But which he. Embodies not just as a theory that can turn into practice and make you give a better performance, but get you to Hollywood. And it’s an extraordinary crucible. To use that word where all these things come together and suddenly Kisan becomes this enormously dynamic pick figure in show business. Which would have pleased no one more than himself.

Speaker He commands not just attention, but he’s.

Speaker I don’t know how to describe it, it is it’s not just that he’s going from Broadway to theater. I mean, Broadway to Hollywood and Hollywood to Broadway, is that when he goes, he does the best work anyone’s doing in both, so to speak now.

Speaker You know, I think his films of the late 40s are actually. Not that great, though, gentlemen’s agreement wins the best picture, I think it looks a pretty old fashioned state picture. But he was learning and he was aware of that. But still, Hollywood loved it. And it’s top of the tree in both fields. And this is a man. Who can sit down and talk to Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and have their trust? Even to the extent of really allowing them and allowing Kisan in some cases to rewrite the text or certainly to urge the rewriting of the text, in other words, they trust the very identity of their place to him. They believe no one has got a better chance of pulling them off on stage. He’s also a man who can go and talk to Jack Warner. The classic Hollywood mogul, Harry Cohn, and get them to do something. I don’t know that there’s anyone to take Mike Nichols, probably. So I think we could do both. This is an extraordinarily rare thing we’re talking about.

Speaker What is it about him then? That is this force of nature. You know, you say things like force of nature. You say things magnetic personality. What does that mean? I mean, is he Oxford educated? Is he sort of prim and proper?

Speaker He’s certainly not prim and proper.

Speaker I think it’s enormously important that Elia Kazan. Laboured under the cloud of believing he was ugly. And he wanted to be beautiful. The extraordinary passages in his autobiography, where he talks about being the outsider at Williams, a sort of marginal Ivy League institution to which he was absolutely entitled to go because of his brains. He was a very smart guy. But he was Anatolian. He was small, dark. Hairy, ugly, this big nose, and I think those things obsessed him and it made the challenge, which he’s very frank about in his book, of winning over WASP girlfriends, particularly blonde WASP girlfriends, getting them away from the leader of the track team. That kind of thing. Tremendous drive on his part. Kisan was a man of enormous dynamism. You could bring together a group of people which included, let’s say, the cost of street car Brando. Tennessee Williams. Irene Selznick, the producer, enormously powerful woman, and Kazan would dominate the room. That’s that’s what it is about him and directing. It’s watch the director, please. The directors in charge. He’s the most powerful person here. It’s his show. And Kazan did that by strength of will, character, force and an ability to overpower people. There is no kind of scene. That Kazan does better. Onstage on film, then someone emotionally overpowering someone else. He loved it. He was a seducer and a high order. He put him in a room. He would gravitate towards the best person to seduce. And he would take it on as a challenge. There was a directing challenge as well as a personal challenge. It was just in him, in his body. You could say it was damaging and destructive. And I’m sure it was sometimes was also immensely creative.

Speaker You know, it’s funny as you’re talking, I’m thinking about what things that came Hunter said was that he could get you to give pieces of yourself away to him that you didn’t, which you would then use against you.

Speaker Extraordinary. But you could see the seduction, the attention that he paid. You know, that was it wasn’t that he was beautiful. It was that he listened.

Speaker So, yeah, I’m an amazingly greedy, attentive person. You can sit. I interviewed Kisan once, and I think he knew more about me at the end of the interview than I knew about him. He gobbled you up? Yeah.

Speaker And of course, with actors, I thought he actors are always, I would say, more insecure than we think.

Speaker We tend to think, oh, everyone knows these actors. They must be very. Confident they’re not there, Rex. And he would talk. To these actors, there was a whole generation of young. Insecure males, Brando, Clift, Dean. And he would talk to them, dig into their lives, take into their lives. And at a crucial moment when they were doing a scene, he would go up to them and whisper, great whisper on the onset. You know, this is like you and your grandfather. It was a kind of sinister, magical, enormously well organized power that counts a lot for why actors just revered him and why actors loved him not just as a director, but needed him as a almost a familial figure.

Speaker You know, you’re talking about somebody that seems to make instinctive connections. Arthur Miller, the same kind of personality. Because it’s so strange to me that they are so intimate and so close at this moment.

Speaker Well, I’ve never met Miller. I met Kisan. I know less about Miller. I’m tempted to say that maybe there’s less to know in Miller. I’m not sure that that’s fair. True. I think Miller was a much more straightforward man. My guess is that from the moment he could walk, if you met Kisan, you knew you’d got to be on your best Sharper’s behavior because he was going to manipulate you. You know, sometimes just sit down with someone and they have the charm with the devil. But, you know, it’s working. I think Miller was a much more tolerant, natural, relaxed man without the dynamism, but a much more inward man. I mean, Miller’s a writer. Kazama is a sculptor with human flesh. He wants to take bodies and put them together and photograph them or have you see them so that you see something, something he feels.

Speaker I think there’s a very real way in which every great Cezanne show is about Cezanne.

Speaker So that’s if we can just shift a bit to the child, but not a ton, but. Because it’s clearly in his childhood, in his folks mind, at least, his father’s not not really destined for greatness. How how much does his home define the man that we know? And it’s a big question, I know. But. He seems almost beaten down by his.

Speaker I don’t know. This is just invention, so off the top of my head, I have the feeling that he was the kind of kid about whom a father might say, if you keep beating that kid down enough, he is going to be all right. In other words, he’s like he’s one of those nails. You can knock him down and he’ll spring up farther, faster every time you knock him down. There was. There’s a there’s a retaliatory energy in him.

Speaker And. I think he needed to be the aggravation to people, he needed to be the force that stirred their drink.

Speaker He needed to be someone they couldn’t handle. And that, in his own mind, becomes a part of this ugliness thing.

Speaker So like it, Williams in other places, he’s almost silent. You know, people don’t remember.

Speaker He’s silent, but he’s like he’s like someone preparing to be Iago. He’s off in the shadows watching them all. He is the waiter at their parties, so they don’t even know he’s their classmate. But he’s a dark, sardonic spectator, watching them, learning about them, waiting to be the the Jago like figure who will manipulate them and turn on them.

Speaker One of the things that happens is that after college, after all this, is this, I think is essential to understanding our story is that he joins the Communist Party.

Speaker What is it that’s driving him to the party in your mind?

Speaker I mean, is he a revolutionary?

Speaker No, I don’t think so. I think.

Speaker I think there’s a funny way in which Kazan was not truly a very political figure in that. I don’t think, honestly, the political situation of the world or the balance between capitalism and its alternatives interested him that much tougher as I thought.

Speaker Yeah, yeah. Let’s just wait for.

Speaker Khorkina.

Speaker Let’s hold off whether he’s a political analyst for a second, because I think we start started that enough.

Speaker It’s not good for this, but so let’s just, you know, the point of fact where he becomes a party member. Why?

Speaker Well, I think it’s the self dramatizing thing to do. I think that. If you have self-respect and some idea of yourself as a thinking responsible person.

Speaker And flew a plane. It’s amazing.

Speaker Well, you know, and again, my question is not going to be there. So.

Speaker Police kisan, at least for me, in a million. That makes me during the party seem to be the normal thing. Right. It’s not an apparent. Revolutionary choice. No, no, go ahead.

Speaker Well, I think the big influence on. Kisan at this time is the group theatre. And these wonderful weekend or summer. Retreats. They had those glorious pictures of them all stretched out on the lawn, listening to Harold Clubman or someone like that explains some play to them. I think. That was the party. Kazan wanted to be a part of because I think by then he knew exactly what he wanted to do. He knew that drama and performance wise things. And this was the party where the best minds. The most attractive actresses would be found. Now, it turned out he discovered that a lot of those people were also playing around with flirting with in the Communist Party. And, you know, I think we should always remember. This general suggestion. To any young man or young woman, if you were awake, conscious, and had any sense of self-respect in the 30s, why weren’t you in the Communist Party?

Speaker Because the Communist Party was the only place to be when the fascist dictators of the world were building their various fortresses and their armies. When the democratic governments of the world were letting so many of their own people starve on the streets, be homeless. No, the the the the reasons to be a communist at that time, even if you allow that, people had a very romantic view of what was happening in the Soviet Union, which they did. They were suppressing at home. I mean, even a protected idiot like the future Duke of Windsor, the English prince who became Edward the eighth, said something has to be done. Now, this was a stuffed, idiotic self protecting a person, as you could think of in the world. And he knew the world was in terrible trouble, not just his world, the world, because it was pervasive and communism was a very natural it was not an aberrant revolutionary. It was it was a good, clear way to go. And I think that that’s why so many of the best young people in Britain.

Speaker In Europe, in America.

Speaker Flirted briefly with radical politics because it seemed like the only way you could answer these problems. That feeling may come back in world history.

Speaker It’s not going away either. You’re now. So Cezanne is OK. That’s great.

Speaker But, you know, I’ve seen him, so it’s not like you’re doing. John Wayne, you know, plays or or or you know what more.

Speaker Yeah. Yes, dear. How much more left now that they were. They were doing.

Speaker I mean, this just seems to me be so absurd about the conflict from which he breaks. Yes. You know, it. So self-referential. Yeah.

Speaker OK, so how does Kisan then experience the party?

Speaker Is he somebody who sops up all of that kind of proletariat lingo where they’re kind of, you know.

Speaker Workers struggle. No, he he hates the party. When it’s another, however, trying to flatten him because the parties tells him to be secretive and quiet. Well, there never was a man who was less capable of being secretive and quiet. He wanted to act everything out. They tell him to sort of go to meetings and obey. He gets these instructions, which she doesn’t understand from some headquarters, some remote headquarters in the Communist Party to bide your time and wait and say things you don’t necessarily believe in.

Speaker And they’re all against his brain, which is to stand up and shout. Stand up and sing. Stand up and shout. Strike, you know, very self dramatizing, somewhat adolescent, but totally understandable and natural. And if a young person is going to go into the Communist Party, why are they going if they’re not going to strike and demonstrate and march the streets? That kind of thing.

Speaker This is an matter of conformity that they’re asking the asking him to be a regular, secretive communist to attend cells where Marxist theory is discussed. It was not a Marxist theoretician. Not many people ever have been. But it was it was not the party he wanted. The party he wanted was where a group of lively young people produced a play that at its best, would outrage New York and be the hot play that everyone had to go and see. So what is it that the party finally asks him to do? It forces his break to be obedient, to be their person instead of his person, to sort of smother being Elia Kazan and to be a quiet agent, working towards some ultimate purpose which he can’t see or understand. OK, so he’s he’s he’s out nearly as soon as he’s in because he can’t be. Can’t stand it. It just doesn’t suit him, not his kind of people.

Speaker OK, I want to talk over this play, give you one of the things that seem Millerick is anything to share. A lot of they share the success. There are very few people on the mountain at the top of the mountain top in quite the same way there.

Speaker But the women whom they’re married to also seems to my mind at this surprisingly similar. And they share marriages from Cezannes perspective. Let’s just stick with him. Is kisan. Engaged in a good, healthy marriage. But the terms that you and I assume shared in terms of good, healthy marriages.

Speaker Validate that he would want his wife to believe that he is involved in a good, healthy, wholesome marriage such as we all attest to. In fact, he’s screwing everyone he can now.

Speaker You may have noticed there’s a lot of that in show business, and it seems to me that it’s not anybody’s job or duty to scold it.

Speaker I think. Molly.

Speaker The first wife must’ve been an extraordinary person because she is one of the few people you can find in his. Life story to whom he seems to have been in or even a kind of fear, and that may have been that she represented his family. They had children. The holding together of the family, which I think was important to him as a theory. But I think she had a mind. That means you’ve got to hear. She had Dosso person. Now she’s far from a DUSSEL person. She’s a person who I think you would have said was a dissatisfied person, a person who probably had much more creative energy than had ever been fulfilled. Maybe she’s living through him to some degree. Certainly, I think she was a genuine adviser to him in some ways, and he trusted her. And as a future, events will show at crucial moments. He let Sarah even become his voice. This is a man who would be a writer one day. Yet he lets her be his voice in very important letters to the paper, to the new, to The New York Times has a tremendous respect for her. But clearly. Could not keep his hands off other people, too. And you have to think that Molly knew about this. Molly does not strike me as a hoodwinked wife and some kind of pact had been made between them that. OK. That’s the way it is. You’re a director with actresses, but you’ll keep coming back. And he did keep coming back.

Speaker The keening sound of a plover is going over, right?

Speaker Yes. OK, so, you know, I’m also struck by her maiden name, not that the Malvika that we know, but Molly Day Facture, you know, for an hour, a Greek immigrant. Must be something of America in her, right?

Speaker Oh, yeah. I think that probably name. Yes.

Speaker I think when he meets her when he was her, she is, if you like, the epitome of the Williams wasp go that had been out of his reach once upon a time so that he he falls upon her with extra zeal because she was exactly what he couldn’t have. Once upon a time.

Speaker OK. All right. So let’s get to shift in.

Speaker Figure out what the bird is going to eat us or not even.

Speaker We’ll just live with it. That’ll come and go.

Speaker We’ll be fine. So help me understand.

Speaker The hook. Help me understand the world in Hollywood to which it is birthed. Miller and Kazan have had the success of Death of a Salesman and decide what.

Speaker They will do.

Speaker My question is not going to be there. So help me outside if you can just OK.

Speaker Miller and Kisan. Our blood brothers at this point, I mean, Death of a Salesman. One of the great events on the New York stage. They feel this closeness. They want to keep working together. Miller has this project, The Hook, which is about corruption on the New York waterfront.

Speaker And together, although with Kisan really taking the lead because Miller believe Kisan was better able to deal with Hollywood. They take this project to Hollywood and try to set it up. Now this is a project.

Speaker Which could have made.

Speaker A serious movie about.

Speaker Trade unionism about the importance and the role of unions in America. There aren’t many films like that now, let alone then. And it’s a film that could be about the way in which organized crime.

Speaker Has systematically and historically taken advantage of.

Speaker The New York waterfront and famously. The FBI at that time.

Speaker Hold on. Okay. All right. Five seconds. I’ll take you there. All right. So it’s it’s a film to be directed by you because I get himself written by you. It’s a prize winning playwright, Arthur Miller. Studios must be just falling all over themselves in order to make this picture, right.

Speaker I mean, good God.

Speaker Well, no, I think that’s a naive point of view. I think that and there I think you get into something very subtle and interesting, which is. Did Miller and Kisan believe equally that this was a viable project? As I read Cezanne’s book, Kisan is not surprised when Hollywood Harry Cohn, as I remember, finds this subject uncomfortable. Miller is more startled. Miller did not know Hollywood very well at that time at. You could argue that Miller never grasped Hollywood in the way that Kazan did.

Speaker I think Kazan knew enough about. The system to know that this was a difficult subject, granted that the.

Speaker The Use of Hollywood by Hugh ACQ House un-American Activities Committee had begun in 1947 to hold off.

Speaker All right. All right. Let’s keep it going. I think you’re making a very astute point up, because if they take it into these studios and people are really excited to make this picture, what?

Speaker Hollywood. Had had itself huge problems with the trade unions in the years right after the Second World War. Hollywood did not like trade unions. It’s still not crazy about them. And to say that you’re going to make a union hero in Hollywood is not what they’re looking for and waiting for. And. They particularly don’t like the notion. I think that the enemy, as Miller is depicting it absolutely accurately in terms of what had happened in New York, that the enemy is American. That it’s organized crime run by Americans. This is an age when America longs to believe that the enemy has to be on American. Outside, for God’s sake, don’t let’s examine ourselves. Let’s blame someone else. So, you know, in those fundamental ways, and I think Hussan knows enough about Hollywood. He knows these people. He’s been to dinner with them by now plenty of times. He knows this is going to be tough. This is gonna be tricky.

Speaker So Harry Cohn is the guy who says, you know, do about it because I want to work with you. I’ll make this picture because I’m going to make it for you.

Speaker It’s going to make some money, right? I mean, Kosner Schlup sort of a goof.

Speaker But now Cohn is the cause of one of Hollywood’s geniuses. And I mean, he had made a studio out of nothing.

Speaker So Combe miraculously says, I’ll make it. But, you know, before I make it, actually, I may have it checked out with the union right. Forever, and they pass it off to the FBI for their vetting, you know, Populaire image.

Speaker Even some of my image of it, of the mogul is the all powerful individual who says what goes on in his studio.

Speaker Having a script vetted by union leader is Roy Brewer more powerful than Denver studios? Roy brOh is a very powerful figure in Hollywood. In those days, did its own advanced focus surveys. They would send any script to the censorship office before they began shooting, not the film later. When done, before you begin shooting, you send the script and you say you volunteer yourself for this. You say any troubles in the script? Do you think you don’t act on the assumption that your free self expressing people in an art form? Therefore, of course, you can do what you want. You go to the authority and say, well, you smack us. If we do this and the censorship office therefore will send back reports saying we don’t like that, we don’t like that, we don’t like this, we don’t like that. And time and again, the studios would take those things out. This is pre censorship before you even begin to film. So, yes, there was a lot of that. There was a lot of taking counsel from the institutions of opinion in America that Hollywood was afraid of.

Speaker But traditionally, what they’re taking out is this is too serious. This is. She shouldn’t do this immoral act must be punished. It’s all about the sort of public morality. This seems to me mean.

Speaker When David Selznick is making go with the it has trouble with the last line, he’s not having trouble with the FBI.

Speaker No, although he did have trouble with the NAACP, remember?

Speaker Yes, too. But but but I’m guessing no, there is this new dynamic of the brain office is a self policing office. It’s in fact, funded and paid for. This is is this different? Is this unique? I don’t mean to place the hook in a unique position, but it seems to me telling that by this point, actually, Hollywood’s not sending its scripts just to the haze to be run through the Hays Code.

Speaker But to be one through there, through the FBI.

Speaker Yes, but that’s because we’re by now, we’re in the late 40s.

Speaker We’re into this period where the thing we call McCarthyism was beginning to take increasing shape and have increasing power. There were files being kept on people. I suspect. That long before his testimony. It was known to a lot of powerful people in Hollywood that Kazan had been in the party. There was a potential problem. It was known that Miller, though, had not been in the party, had real radical, simple sympathies. Those things were danger signals on a picture that Harry Cohn knew he couldn’t make a buck on a rack and he couldn’t make it back on. So, you know, you’ve got this weird situation where political fear and prejudice. Is backing commercial interest. He’s got double reasons. Quite opposite reasons for saying, I don’t think I want to do that. I don’t like that.

Speaker I don’t like that.

Speaker He he is now sitting outside the airport, but he decides I’ll go through with it because he asks for change that will make it okay for everybody.

Speaker And also, he doesn’t want to lose Kisan because that is this hot figure.

Speaker They talk to me about that, talk to me about what’s going on and how he’s going to wash the picture.

Speaker He he wants it every way.

Speaker He’d love to have Kazam as one of his directors in the way that Frank Capra had once been one of Harry Kahn’s directors, because the sooner or later those guys are going to make a lot of money for you. But couldn’t Kazam just make a few compromises? Couldn’t the villains on the waterfront becomings? Because then everybody relaxes a bit because it backs up this weird lunatic, unfounded prejudice. We have that all our troubles come from external forces and agencies and. I have a hunch that Kisan might have gone along with the shift. But Miller won’t. Miller makes it clear that and Miller acts in the miller like way. He just wants to withdraw. Completely familiar. It’s not. Well, let’s sit down and thrash this out and compromise. Kazam, I suspect might have compromise. Miller. I’m gone. Goodbye. This is not my kind of situation.

Speaker I retreated to New York. Yes. So, you know, Miller’s first foray into Hollywood is Biden.

Speaker Obviously, by no means can I get a bit of an old hat at this point is not only important because of the red baiting that goes on with the book. Arthur Miller and Chavannes also happened to on this journey, meet an individual. How is it that they come to me, if you can tell me a bit of a woman named Marilyn Monroe?

Speaker Well, it’s party going again of a slightly different party going. I don’t know that I could trace it exactly, but when because of the set of a fox picture.

Speaker Right. I think as young as you feel.

Speaker Yeah. And, you know, there was a there was a there was a grouping of people who were a little bit actors studio, the younger set in Hollywood, the more radical like thinking people. And Kazan is one of them. Norman Mailer is out in Hollywood a lot. At that time. And he’s involved in it.

Speaker And I guess my question may start this. Sorry. OK with you. OK, great. Is that correct? It’s not at that moment. Is she. Who is Monroe when Kazan and Miller.

Speaker She’s not the figure we question. Not there. So it’s just know when when. When Kazan and Miller. First, see her. Meet her. Marilyn Monroe is not the figure that we think of, the world famous, the icon. She is still a young Hollywood blonde trying to make it whether she knows what she’s trying to be. That’s a complicated question.

Speaker She’s notorious already for being beautiful and available.

Speaker I mean, she is somebody who was passed around a lot and she’s the sort of person. Who would go to a party with one person and probably leave with another? We’re talking about that sort of currency and God knows how many people had met Marilyn Monroe briefly and been with her briefly at that time.

Speaker She’s actually at a particularly vulnerable moment, right? Because her protector has just died.

Speaker Yeah, she was. There was a period in her life when she was very much cultivated. As well as sexually use by an agent named Johnny Hyde. And I think she was deeply fond of him. He dies of a heart attack and she’s she’s alone. And we’re talking about a vulnerability that is a real vulnerability, I think, for sure. And maybe a vulnerability even to the point of mental disturbance. But it’s a vulnerability also that Marilyn used as a ploy to attract people. I mean, she was famous for this vulnerability. I mean, can you believe anyone so gorgeous is so vulnerable kind of thing? And she was like a wet dream for everyone. That had a lot to do with, I think, the the reputation she had.

Speaker And Kisan.

Speaker I would say takes advantage of her in the way that many, many people did. And the reason I would say he takes advantage of her is that they have this affair. He seems never. To have thought of using her as an actress in a work. And that’s a very telling point for him. Not that Kazan was against having sexual relations with the actresses he was directing. Far from it. But I don’t think Hasan thought she was a great actress. I thought she. I think he thought she was a great lay. Miller, I think, finds a quite different person. And it’s a measure of the difference between Kazan and Miller that. God save him. Miller sees something like The Spirit of Lost America. And he has to rescue her. He obviously comes to regret that urge. But I think that he he makes moves on, Marilyn, of a very different kind from Cezanne’s. I think Kisan was a sexual opportunist with her. I think he was fond of her, but I don’t think he had. Artistic respect for her. And, you know, she was one and she was a person who notoriously went around complaining that no matter how many people she went to bed with, she didn’t get artistic respect. Miller. Made her not just in his mind, artistically respectful, but almost literally respectable image. You know, this is going to end in The Misfits where she is like she is the embodiment of American Beauty trampled upon. She is the wild stallion. She is Nevada. She is the desert. But at that moment, interestingly enough, he doesn’t come out now because he is because of me about that, because I don’t think Mila was a sexual opportunist. I think Miller was the kind of man who thought, well, she’s got a terribly complicated life. I don’t want to complicate it anymore.

Speaker I think. I think there was. But he was also I think. Oh, I think he was deeply drawn to her. He was unhappy in his own marriage. He was attracted to her. But I think he had great kindness, decency. I hate to raise these issues, but I think they sometimes have to be talked about and kisan a comparison I do not think exhibited those things. He thought that in Hollywood you didn’t have to. I’m very confused here.

Speaker Explain to me this weird triangle that if you can sort of parse out for me what is in fact going on. You’re talking about Miller and Monroe. You’re talking about Kisan at Metro.

Speaker What’s. What’s happening?

Speaker And just the most basic physical capital. What kind of language can I use, and I’m sure it’s a family network or at least pretends that it does occasionally.

Speaker I suspect this that Cezannes or Monroe.

Speaker Knew of the climate in which many people had had one.

Speaker And so I thought, I can’t ever had her. Great.

Speaker That wears off quite quickly. Then his friend, Arthur Miller.

Speaker Developes. Love.

Speaker For Monroe.

Speaker I think you’d have to call it that. And love is always weird and complicated and dangerous and. Kazaam, I think it’s crazy. Maryland’s not the kind of person you fall in love with. You couldn’t settle down with Marilyn Monroe. It’s not conceivable. But Marilyn suddenly becomes much more interesting to him because Miller wants her and he can always sort of say, I had a first.

Speaker I think it’s that I think there’s a real competitive edge to her, just as I think if you read Norman Mailer’s book. About Marilyn. He never got over the indignity that Arthur Miller had married and never did.

Speaker But if you can for me, just the most, I think that that’s absolutely accurate. One of the things I like to do is pull you towards, if I can. It’s just that simple, declarative description of what the hell is going on, who is with who and what.

Speaker Well, you have this extraordinary situation where. Kisan is Marilyn. And she’s talking about out there all the time and about how interesting and complicated there is, and I think there’s something in Gizab that’s laughing at her and him for it. And it’s the most weird triangular relationship. It it’s it’s fraternal. And yet it’s betraying its rivalry. I mean, I think there are some people in Cezannes position realizing what Miller felt who would have backed off. But Kazama seems to be drawn in all the more he’s all the more intrigued and. It’s the strangest Manaj, the strangest, and it’s almost as if Kazam. Thinks.

Speaker Marilyn might tell me something really interesting about Arthur. Well, it’s interesting you say that because I want to throw two ideas out. One is that they’re sitting in bed after they have sex and they’re talking about Arthur’s unhappy marriage. So, in fact, they’re sharing Arthur intimacies between them. It’s it’s quite extraordinary, I think.

Speaker And and, you know, you could if you wanted to be moralistic about it, you could you could easily make a case that nobody should have been there.

Speaker But they were. And I mean, what clearly what clearly, I think motivated Kazaam was this intense human curiosity.

Speaker Let me throw out another theory and just hear your thoughts. I think all three of them are in love with each other.

Speaker Well. That’s a fascinating idea, and I think that. I think there’s a lot to be said for it.

Speaker I think there is a moment in the Miller Kisan thing where fraternity is so close that you could argue that there is something latent in it that can’t be expressed. I don’t think either man could have expressed it, but that it’s there. And I think it’s very important in the way that Miller will later forgive. And in a way, you could argue that they’re both using Marilyn. I mean, Marilyn, time and again, it seems to me, is they used figure she’s the instrument that men use in the dramas. Right. And there there’s this. Yeah.

Speaker Each plaintiff outside of Marilyn to looking to the extent that you have Madonna whore. I mean. Yeah. What is touching a whore. The other one is perhaps. Absolutely. Absolutely amazing. Yeah. OK. So let’s move on from that really mondo bizarre moment.

Speaker Just before we get into here, back issues, Streetcar Named Desire, President Trump, I like to talk with you just a bit about street cars at Filmon is a political moment, not political move, but more of a moment. Let’s just start with the film itself. One of the things I’m. Kisan says in his memoir is that anybody could have directed Streetcar Named Desire. I think he actually at one point actually says, Bravo, Tennessee, when you watch a film like Streetcar. We’re going to deal with just the film for a second and not the stage play because I can’t recreate because it as a theatrical director. Do you buy that? I mean, is there you know, is there nothing of causalities at all?

Speaker Tennessee. Is it all. Brando is it all. Kim Hunt.

Speaker Talk to me. Well, I think you’ve got to go back to the play a little bit here to lay the story of this stop cut.

Speaker Street car.

Speaker Have any of cars, aname could, as he says, anybody directed that? No.

Speaker No, I think street car is. There’s a lot of triumph and street car to go around and a lot of people come out of it with enormously enhanced reputations. But I think it’s very important to note the way in which Kazan felt Williams had delivered a play that was too much about Blanch. And Kazan felt there had to be a slight redressing of the balance, which is the building up of Stanley. And it leads, I think, to the building up of Stanley and Stella. I think it was good for the play, but his hand was there from the beginning. And Williams trusted him, respected him enough to take his advice that would you know what I’m talking about his rewriting before the play came on.

Speaker That that made Stanley a more interesting figure, less villainous figure, and made Blanche a less complete romantic heroine. I think if Williams had directed his own play, that’s what it would have been like, and I think it would have flopped. You’ve also got the fact that Kazan is instrumental in going for Brando. Brando is initially Kazan’s choice. He knows that Williams has got to approve it, but he sends Brando up to see Williams to spend that time together. And it’s crucial. Williams is swept away by the beauty of Brando. But it’s it it’s it’s really Kazan’s choice. When Irene Selznick, the producer of the show, had wanted, had favored, definitely favored John Garfield or Burt Lancaster. Now, I’m sure that either one of those two would have been good in the past.

Speaker But.

Speaker Brandos different and defining the physical explosion onstage of Brando and of a new kind of American man is vital. And it has to do with Kisan because Kazam identified with him. So it’s there in the play.

Speaker So if they’re in the play, there’s a kind of immediacy to the emotions that Kazam brings in the theater. How does that then translate? You know, when you think of a director today, especially today, it’s about the special effects or flash. It’s about, you know, the camera wipes or all of that kind of trickery that one does with film stops and step printing and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker And that’s not really within Kazan’s vocabulary. So what makes Kisan then an important great director, if you can see it, if it’s possible to see it in the film version of Streetcar?

Speaker I give you two answers to it. Very interesting that when they begin to think about the movie of Streetcar, Cezanne’s first impulse is to do all those things you couldn’t do on stage to bring Belle Reve to life, to have flashbacks, literally flashbacks, to bring New Orleans into the play, into the action much more. He gets a script, which is. Based upon the idea, take the play out into the real world. There are signs of that in the film. At the very beginning, you get a little bit of New Orleans, you know, and you have the bus depot, things like that. He looks at the script.

Speaker And he’s good enough to say it’s wrong. This is a play about claustrophobia. It’s a play about being imprisoned.

Speaker It’s only going to work if what worked on stage is made to work on camera and he has this wonderful, simple idea.

Speaker He and Richard Day, the art director on the film, which is that subtlely as the film goes on, the apartment where Stanley and Stella live becomes a little small. It creeps in on the very filmic idea.

Speaker Can’t really do it onstage, but in film you can literally bring the set in closer. You can do it with lenses, too, maybe. And you feel the pressure on the people. And if you look at the opening scenes of that film and compare them with the end, with the save the rape scene and the scene where Blanche has taken off, it’s a different rope, but it has happened so magically, so slowly. You never saw the change, but you feel it emotionally. So that’s the one thing.

Speaker He he sees it as a film, something you photograph. Second thing is he.

Speaker Says to himself, and he’s very frank about this in his autobiography. I don’t think I could muster the interest to do it with exactly the same cast, because initially the thought was, we have this great cast from the play, use them. So he drops Jessica Tandy, who had the least box office. And he brings in Vivien Leigh, no matter that Vivien Leigh had in the meantime, been directed in the play in London by Laurence Olivier in a way he loved. Olivier did a production, the British debut of Streetcar with Vivien Leigh in a very different way.

Speaker You want to stop because I thought, OK, if I was up here, I don’t mean that’s all. All, actually.

Speaker But I’m looking for and asking is I go and I see the film now. So I see it projected and I’m lucky enough to see it in a theater, not on VHS.

Speaker What are they? Am I seeing it’s kazam? What am I seeing? Because you know. The director doesn’t seem to be calling attention to himself in the way that directors do today. You, me.

Speaker There’s a moment.

Speaker In the film. Where Stella and Blanch are alone. And they took. And you really feel that blanches? Recreation of their past. Is overwhelming, Stella. It’s reminding her. The sisterhood is being renewed.

Speaker She’s trashing STEM. Yes. And she’s she’s she’s winning. Stella back. It’s a very simple wrap it to shot of the two. Nothing flashy, nothing special about it, but it’s held a long time and it grows.

Speaker And you really feel it. And Stanley comes in. And. He gives.

Speaker Stellar, a grin. It is one of the knockout grins in film history. And she melts. And as if a magnet is drawing her, she drifts out of the two shot with bludge and embrace instantly. It’s very simple. It’s the kind of thing that Kazan was a genius. Which is the space between people, the way people hold and touch and look at each other. And what that says about the deepest things between them. And it was his ability to say this is about three people in a room.