Kazan on Directing

ALSO BY ELIA KAZAN

Beyond the Aegean

An American Odyssey

A Life

The Anatolian

Acts of Love

The Understudy

The Assassins

The Arrangement

America America

Robert Cornfield selected the contents, with the exception of

the section The Pleasures of Directing, and provided

commentary, notes, and chronology for this volume.

Contents

Foreword by John Lahr

Preface by Martin Scorsese

Introduction by Robert Cornfield

THE DIRECTOR'S NOTES

PLAYS

For the Group Theatre

Style and Spine, Style in the Theatre, Quiet City

Hot Nocturne

The Skin of Our Teeth

Dunnigan's Daughter

Truckline Café

All My Sons

A Streetcar Named Desire

Death of a Salesman

Camino Real

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

J.B.

Sweet Bird of Youth

Short Takes

The Young Go First; Casey Jones; It's Up to You;

One Touch of Venus; Jacobowsky and the Colonel

Deep Are the Roots; Tea and Sympathy

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs; After the Fall

The Changeling; The Chain

FILMS

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Boomerang!

Gentleman's Agreement

Panic in the Streets

A Streetcar Named Desire

Viva Zapata!

On the Waterfront

East of Eden

Baby Doll

A Face in the Crowd

Wild River

Splendor in the Grass

America America

The Arrangement

The Last Tycoon

Short Takes

Sea of Grass; Pinky; Man on a Tightrope

The Visitors

THE PLEASURES OF DIRECTING

On What Makes a Director

The Pleasures of Directing

Afterword by Robert Cornfield

Chronology

Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgments

Foreword

John Lahr

Elia Kazan was the first auteur of the American theatre: the first director to insist on having control of the entire production, the first to be billed above the title, the first to succeed both on Broadway and in Hollywood. A good director is part visionary, part showman, part critic, part father: Kazan was all these things, and more. In 1959, after the first rehearsal of Sweet Bird of Youth, Tennessee Williams wrote to Kazan, Some day you will know how much I value the great things you did with my work, how you lifted it above its measure by your great gift. I have been disloyal to nearly all lovers and friends but not to the one or two who brought my work to life. Believe me. I think I admire and value you more than anyone I have known in this profession. Kazan was the best actor's director I've worked for, Marlon Brando, himself the greatest actor of his era, said. He added, [He] got into a part with me and virtually acted it with me… He was an arch manipulator of actors' feelings, and he was extraordinarily talented: perhaps we will never see his like again.

We will certainly never again see so unique a career. Kazan seemed to be part of most of the major theatrical turning points of his time. In 1932, as a stage manager and aspiring actor, he began his theatrical life with the Group Theatre; as a sidekick of both Harold Clurman and Clifford Odets, he was part of the ruling elite who reconstituted the Group Theatre during its most influential years, between 1937 and 1940. For a while, along with some other unemployed Group Theatre folk, he lived in the director Lee Strasberg's railroad flat—nicknamed the Groupstroi—where Odets, working in a closet kitchen so small that he had to rest his typewriter on his lap, wrote his groundbreaking play Awake and Sing! (1935). (Kazan stage-managed the play, which was Clurman's directing debut.) In Waiting for Lefty, Odets's polemical agitprop'salvo, which defined the voice of protest among thirties' youth, it was Kazan, a middle-class cum laude graduate of Williams College and Yale Drama School, who shouted the plays rousing final lines: Strike! Strike!! Strike!!! The press dubbed him the Proletariat Thunderbolt, and he took to wearing a working-class cloth cap with a rabbits foot pinned under the brim. Luck was certainly with him.

In his eight years as a professional actor, Kazan appeared in Odets's biggest Group Theatre hit, Golden Boy, and his biggest flop, Night Music, the last production before the Group Theatre disbanded, in 1940. As a stage director, he made Broadway hits of the three most influential midcentury American plays: Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. As a film director, he brought the Group Theatre's emphasis on psychological realism to the screen, playing midwife to many iconic performances, including James Dean's in East of Eden, Andy Griffith's in A Face in the Crowd, and Brando's in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. In 1948, Kazan conceived the idea of the Actors Studio—he was also part of the triumvirate who ran it—a Stanislavsky-inspired school whose techniques brought new, far-reaching depth and nuance to performance. For his films, Kazan drew from a pool of Actors Studio alumni: Brando, Lee Remick, Jo Van Fleet, Geraldine Page, Karl Malden, Julie Harris, Eli Wallach, Eva Marie Saint, Carroll Baker, and Robert De Niro. Later, in 1963, when the idea of a national repertory theatre was mooted at Lincoln Center, Kazan was chosen, along with the producer Robert Whitehead, to be its first artistic director. The theatre's debut production was Arthur Miller's After the Fall (1964), a play that explored the debacle of Miller's marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Kazan was not only the play's director, he was also the man who, in 1951, had introduced Monroe to Miller.

Kazan's rise to directorial preeminence coincided with a crucial psychic shift in American culture. Between 1945 and 1955, the per capita American income nearly tripled, the greatest increase in individual wealth in the history of Western civilization. Having endured a decade of Depression, then a world war, Americans, who had postponed their desires, were now in a hurry to fulfill them. The hegemony of America's political and economic power was also played out on an individual level. The kingdom of self, not society, became the nation's obsession. Public discourse shifted from the external to the internal: from social realism to abstract expressionism; from stage naturalism to Williams's personal lyricism, from Marxism to Freudianism. This mutation in the collective imagination suited Kazan's particular directorial skill set, which understood about the subconscious and the power of the subtext. For Kazan, the greatest show on earth was the show of human emotions. In his actors and in the stories he told, Kazan's particular gift was to highlight and to release the interior drama of conflicting desires. Kazan's great contribution was to discover a theatrical vocabulary that turned psychology into behavior. My work would be to turn the inner events of the psyche into a choreography of external life, he said. He brought a new dynamism to the winded, baggy American theatre.

What books and photographs don't convey about Kazan is the force of his presence. Even in old age, he had a thrust and a focus that were palpable. He was small, compact, virile; it was easy to understand his talent for insinuation. He looked at you with avid eyes; he made a powerful connection. Although he spent his last years more or less housebound on the top floor of his Manhattan townhouse—he died in 2003, at the age of ninety-four—Kazan lived most of his life with the devil's energy, as Miller called it.

Kazan, who walked on the balls of his feet, projected himself through the world with the outcast's desire for revenge. From 1926, when he entered the WASP enclave of Williams College, his own position in American society was clear to him. I remember thinking, what the hell is wrong with me, anyway? Kazan said, who referred to himself then as a nigger. I knew what I was. An outsider. An Anatolian, not an American… Every time I saw privilege from then on, I wanted to tear it down or to possess it. For his entire life, Kazan was a creature of envy; fame was the only defense against his sense of humiliation. As an actor, he carried his chippie swagger onstage. ‘Fuck you all, big and small!’ I used to mutter onstage during those years—to myself, of course, secretly, he wrote in his autobiography.

Kazan's particular appetite for vindictive triumph—his compulsive ambition and his habitual, unrepentant womanizing, which was another aspect of it—stems, in part, from one inescapable childhood wound: he was not handsome. Don't you look in the mirror? his father, George, a first-generation Anatolian Greek carpet salesman, said when Kazan announced that he was going to acting school. Kazan's gnarly mug, with its large jagged nose, telegraphed both his foreignness and his ferocity. It made Kazan credible in the edgy tough-guy roles, such as Kewpie (in Paradise Lost) and Fuseli (in Golden Boy), that he played for the Group Theatre; it also made his Hollywood film career a nonstarter. As a director, however, Kazan was always on everyone's mind. I was where I wanted to be, the source of everything, he wrote.

As a child Kazan had been the undisputed darling of his mother, Athena, the special child she adopted as confidant and husbandly stand-in. We entered a secret life together, which Father never breached, Kazan wrote of his relationship to Athena, who was betrothed at the age of eighteen in an arranged marriage. He added: That is where the conspiracy began. Directing allowed Kazan to re-create the triumphant feeling of the original maternal conspiracy. His rehearsals had the hushed air of conspiracy, according to Miller, not only against the existing theatre but society, capitalism—in fact everybody who was not part of the production. Miller went on, People were always coming up to whisper in his ear. In time, Kazan's plays and films put him at the center of the nation's consciousness.

Of Kazan's many gifts as a director, perhaps the most crucial was the ability to cast with intuitive brilliance by decoding his actors' core. Their life experience is the director's material, Kazan said. They can have all the training, all the techniques their teachers have taught them—private moments, improvisations, substitutions, associative memories—but if the precious material is not in them, the director cannot get it out. That is why it's so important for the director to have an intimate acquaintance with the people. In this area of investigation, Kazan was forensic. Kazan's capacity to objectify actors' personalities was really an exercise in clinical psychology, Miller wrote in Time-bends. For Miller's All My Sons (1947), for instance, Kazan cast Ed Begley as the father not only because Begley was a good actor but because he was a reformed alcoholic and still carried the alcoholic's guilt. He insisted on casting Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, over Williams's objections, because, Kazan said, I'd known her when she was a plump young girl, and I had a theory … that when a girl is fat in her early and middle teens and slims down later, she is left with an uncertainty about her appeal to boys, and what often results is a strong sexual appetite, intensified by the continuing anxiety of believing herself undesirable. He added, In every basic she resembled Maggie the Cat. I trusted my knowledge of her own nature. Kazan was not above exploiting the unpleasantness of an actor's personality—the surliness of James Dean, for instance—in service of his story. Raymond Massey, who played Dean's father in East of Eden, was scornful of the sullen young star. This was an antagonism I didn't try to heal; I aggravated it, Kazan wrote, adding, The screen was alive with precisely what I wanted: they detested each other.

In addition to his technical virtuosity, Kazan was able to pay proper attention to his collaborators. He worked by insinuation not command; he understood that to force an interpretation on an actor was an exercise in futility; the idea that was easily imposed could just as easily be forgotten. Stimulation and dissimulation were his twin talents. He would send one actor to listen to a particular piece of jazz, another to read a certain novel, another to see a psychiatrist, and another he would simply kiss, Miller recalled. During rehearsals, according to Miller, Kazan grinned a lot but said as little as possible. Instinctively, when he had something important to tell an actor, he would huddle with him privately rather than instruct before the others, sensing that anything that really penetrates is always to some degree an embarrassment…A mystery grew up around what he might be thinking, and this threw the actor back upon himself. Kazan's trick was to make his own ideas seem like the actors' discoveries. He let the actors talk themselves into a performance, Miller said. He allowed the actors to excite themselves with their own discoveries, which they would carry back to him like children offering some found object back to a parent.

And, like any good parent, when things were going in the right direction, Kazan knew how to stay out of the way. A case in point is the famous scene in On the Waterfront, in which the two brothers played by Brando and Rod Steiger—one longshoreman determined to do good by informing, the other determined to stop him—face off against each other in the backseat of a car. (I coulda been a contenda, Charlie.) Brando and Steiger knew who they were and what the scene was about—they knew all that better than I did—so I didn't say anything, Kazan wrote. Sometimes it's important for a director to withdraw a little. If the characters are going right, to begin to talk about who they are and motivation and so forth may result in the actors' becoming concerned with satisfying you instead of playing the scene. You can spoil a scene by being too much of a genuine director—call it showing off.

The weird alchemy of Kazan's interpretive genius comes down to a highly developed understanding of structure and of psychology. (He was much analyzed.) Like a ghost in the fun machine, Kazan's distinctiveness is hard to pin down and even harder to see. For a new generation, he may not be a household name, but he is present in the stories and in the performances that, for fifty years, showed the nation its Gorgon's head. He is there in Willy Loman's exhaustion, in Stanley Kowalski's recklessness, in Big Daddy's ruthlessness, in Baby Doll Meighan's hungering heart, in Terry Malloy's divided loyalties. In the panorama of twentieth-century popular culture, Kazan's contribution must be judged the most far-ranging and the most influential of all the modern theatricals; he alone among his peers could lay claim to Walt Whitman's boast in Leaves of Grass: I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there.

Preface

Martin Scorsese

Elia Kazan, a great American artist, born one hundred years ago this year.

He is one of the most important figures in the history of movies. Its that simple. His documentary eye, his ability to home in on the subtlest behaviors and interactions, his sense of surprise and beauty within the frame, his remarkable ear for sound, his astonishing sensitivity to atmosphere … these were just a few of his gifts as a filmmaker.

For me, Kazan is beyond important, central, or influential. I grew up watching his pictures, and they were instrumental in forming my ideas of cinema, what it was and what it could be. They were equally instrumental in helping me to understand myself, I think. And as I watched and rewatched them over the years, my experience of them evolved. It still does—every viewing of On the Waterfront or East of Eden or Wild River or America America yields something new.

This volume of notes and memories offers us an invaluable look at Kazan's working methods and personal approach to his craft—his thorough analyses of character and plot, his relentless judgments of his own finished work, his meticulous attention to every aspect of filmmaking. And it gives the reader a wonderful sense of his development as an artist, the way his understanding of theatre and his experience as an actor affecting his fimmaking, his growing confidence as a director, his growing dissatisfaction with the studio system followed by his arrival as an independent filmmaker with America America.

And, of course, there is the man himself. I got to know Kazan in the last twenty years or so of his life, and I recognize him within these pages, as I do in A Life, his extraordinary autobiography. The sense of humor, the brutal honesty (about himself most of all), the complete lack of sentimentality, and most of all the immersion in the work itself … they're all vividly present.

For students of Kazan, this book is invaluable. But it's just as invaluable to anyone interested in the creation of movies. Because, after all, these are selections from the notebooks of a master. A master named Elia Kazan.

Introduction

Robert Cornfield

In soft-covered composition notebooks, master stage and film director Elia Kazan studiously penned and penciled preliminary notes for his productions. He capitalized sentences, triple-underlined key words, sketched the sets, and sought resemblances in the characters to people he knew. But his most searching quest was to uncover the works particular relevance to his own life.

What impelled him to do his best work was his need to find in the play clues to his existence; working on a script engaged him in the most trenchant matters of life and death. He ferreted out in Arthur Millers or Tennessee Williams's or John Steinbeck's works—whether it be a play about Blanche DuBois or Willy Loman, or a film telling the story of Cal Trask or Emiliano Zapata—the drama of self-revelation, taking via the script a perilous and demanding trek in discovery and intimate revelation. To an important extent, this accounts for the power of his work; in Kazan's productions there are no irrelevant moments, all is dynamic, all surges with vitality. Most times, there was a match of the director's and author's conceptions; yet sometimes Kazan, well, went his own way. Playwrights were (mostly) grateful for Kazan's clarifications—So this is what I was meaning!—for the best American playwrights of the twentieth century trusted Kazan to give the performance of their plays vivid reality, to expose their poetry, to better their work.

In the late 1940s, Kazan directed virtually back to back the first major American dramas (A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman) since the works of Eugene O'Neill. And he was the American theatre's most sought-after director of actors. As Stanley Kowalski in Kazan's production of Streetcar, Marlon Brando signaled the triumph of the long-prepared-for revolution in American acting. And two years later Lee J. Cobb's performance of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman was heralded as a pinnacle of American theatre. Brando and Cobb set the terms for all subsequent interpretations of these roles, just as Elia Kazan's mark is on all subsequent stagings of these plays. Without having contributed a word (though some suspect that he contributed quite a few), Kazan is in the weave of Tennessee Williams's and Arthur Miller's best work.

As director and teacher, Kazan was the most renowned American exponent of the American adaptation of The Method (though Lee Strasberg garnered the publicity), an acting discipline based on the innovative ideas of the early-twentieth-century Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky, whose early goal was naturalistic acting through a psychological identification of role and performer. Stanislavsky's overarching belief was in Theatre as an art equal to painting or literature or music, a Total Theatre that would encompass all arts (an aspiration derived from Richard Wagner's concept of music-drama); by example he encouraged other theatre theorists, including Gordon Craig, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Vsevolod Meyerhold. It was theatre conceived of as a joining of play, performers, designer, music, environment—and the chief manipulator, the master choreographer, the dictating shaper of all the elements was The Director. It was a role, in all its diverse responsibilities, that Kazan relished.

After graduating from Williams College in 1930, Elia Kazan attended Yale's School of Drama for two years, working his way through productions with hammer and nail. His backstage adeptness at set construction and lighting, at all aspects of stagecraft, caused him to be dubbed Gadg, for someone handy with gadgets. But he found the significance and purpose of drama in his apprentice years with the Group Theatre, a collective organized in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford; in the mid-1920s Clurman and Strasberg had studied with Maria Ouspenskaya and Richard Boleslavsky, former members of Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, at the American Laboratory Theatre. The Group based its teachings on Stanislavsky's principles, but its aspirations were to reform acting by the application of rigorous discipline and methodology; to create a theatre of excellence that was relevant and of consequence to an American audience; and to produce the work of American playwrights only. It was a nationalistic enterprise, shaped by and steeped in the social tensions of the 1920s and 1930s. With only one exception, for the whole of his career Kazan devoted himself in theatre and film to the work of contemporary American writers (including himself) and themes.

Kazan's staging techniques—how he elicited a performance, his conception of drama—were developed under Clurman and Strasberg's tutelage. In achievement and celebrity and power, he would outstrip his teachers, having a better intuitive grasp of movement, a stronger ability to motivate actors, and a rigor in working to a plays strength. The acerbic Clurman was never ungrudgingly pleased with his student's productions (lecturing and hectoring Kazan in his theatrical reviews), and the bitter Strasberg later regarded him as an upstart, ingrate, and traitor; but throughout Kazan's career they remained his artistic consciences. Like fraternal rivals, they were competitive, jealous, and contemptuous of each other, yet were bound by enduring affection and the deepest reverence for their common artistic aspirations. In the 1940s Kazan formed a producing partnership with Clurman that lasted only three years, but Clurman's critical opinion was the one Kazan most valued throughout his life. In the early 1950s Kazan delegated the training arm of the Actors Studio to Lee Strasberg, but ten years later denied him participation in the training and artistic program in the first incarnation of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center.

Though allied with the radical theatre movement, the Group's prime purpose was theatrical, not social, revolution. Some of the Group's members, including Kazan, joined the Communist Party, but when the party demanded a stronger voice in the Group's policies, Kazan was reprimanded for noncooperation, and in 1936 he quit. Kazan's two-year membership would have a contentious and transforming effect on his personal and professional life when in 1952 he volunteered the names of former fellow party members to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Paradoxically, though all of his work was motivated by his interest in social issues and though he thought of himself as a liberal, Kazan was at heart apolitical, an artistic loner determined to actualize his artistic vision. In his autobiography he ruefully reconsidered his HUAC testimony: How is the world better for what I did? It had just been a game of power and influence, and I'd been taken in and twisted from my true self. I'd fallen for something I shouldn't have, no matter how hard the pressure and no matter how sound my reasons. The simple fact was that I wasn't political—not then, not now.

His early Broadway successes, Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth and a Helen Hayes vehicle, Harriet, brought him Hollywood offers, and in 1944 he accepted the proposal of producer Louis Lighton to direct for Twentieth Century-Fox the film version of Betty Smith's best-seller A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But Kazan wasn't a total novice to moviemaking. In the 1930s he had contributed to documentaries, usually in the cause of unionization; served as an assistant to Hollywood director Lewis Milestone; and in 1940-41 acted in two Warner Bros. movies, as a gangster in City for Conquest and a jazz musician in Blues in the Night, both directed by Anatole Litvak.

From then on his Broadway and Hollywood successes were concurrent. In the mid- to late 1940s he directed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (movie), All My Sons (stage), Boomerang! (movie), A Streetcar Named Desire (stage), Gentleman's Agreement (movie), and Death of a Salesman (stage). And in a spare moment he established the premier workshop for theatre professionals, the Actors Studio. In the 1950s and 1960s he gave us, among other works, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (stage), the classic film of A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata! (film), Tea and Sympathy (stage), On the Waterfront (film), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (stage), East of Eden (film), the films Baby Doll, A Face in the Crowd, Wild River, and Splendor in the Grass; onstage, Sweet Bird of Youth; and then his film masterpiece, America America. There is no directorial achievement in America to equal his.

By the 1940s, the best young American actors had been trained in the method-derived discipline by such teachers as Harold Clurman, Phoebe Brand, Joe Bromberg, Morris Carnovsky, Mary Morris, Lee Strasberg, Robert Lewis, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner, all former members of the Group Theatre. The Group had been dissolved in 1941 after years of financial brinkmanship and internal division; its true successor was the Actors Studio, formed by Kazan and producer Cheryl Crawford in 1948, whose approach to character analysis was primarily Stanislavskyan. For his stage and film work, Kazan employed a virtual repertory company of ex-Group Theatre and Studio actors, including Eli Wallach, Karl Malden, Julie Harris, Jo Van Fleet, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Lee J. Cobb, Eva Marie Saint, Geraldine Page, Paul Newman, and Robert De Niro. He cast to type—requiring that the role be within the emotional and imaginative range of the performer: You have to start from the actor, and you have to find out where the part is alive for him. Somewhere within them the part must exist. You've got to find out before you cast them that the element that you need in the performance is there. He thrashed his actors and writers with the same rigor of self-excoriation to which he subjected himself. His program for Studio members, which he designed originally with Robert Lewis, was to expand on the Stanislavsky method, developing the senses, developing imagination, developing spontaneity, developing the force of the actor and, above all, arousing his emotional resources.

The play and the actors were the starting points, but Kazan was after Total Theatre—the maximal effect from all elements, a sense of expansive grandeur. A form more congenial to that ambition was the movies, and from the early 1930s he aspired to be a filmmaker. The first movies that sparked his ambition were the agitprop and quasi-poetic Soviet docudramas of the 1920s and 1930s, films like Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a reenactment of the brutal suppression of a 1905 navy revolt in Odessa, and Dovzhenko's Arsenal and Aerograd, the latter set on the Far Eastern borders of the Soviet Union. These were epic-scaled movies, typically propagandistic, yet using a mix of amateur and professional actors for both trenchantly real and archetypical performances, filmed on location, stressing the impact of city and natural landscape. He later remembered an episode in Aerograd that was transformative: There's a conversation in the woods between two old men. They are many hundreds of yards apart. They have to yell at each other. I never forgot that. Its one of the great moments in film for me. Man's fate shaped by his environment is the grand subject of Kazan's movies: the mountains and villages of Mexico in Viva Zapata!; the waterfront in On the Waterfront; the South in Baby Doll and Wild River; the terrain of Turkey in America America (filmed in both Turkey and Greece); Salinas, California, in East of Eden.

His working methods remained the same throughout his career. Once he discovered what a play meant for himself, once he found the clue to self-identification with the theme and the characters, or determined their resemblance to people he knew, he decided upon the style of presentation, how to cast and to direct, and what instructions he would give the set designer and costumer. He studied the stage and filmscript to find the single encompassing motive that powers the work, its core sentiment, what he terms its spine. Next, he sought the spine of the character. He imagines a backstory to the characters that would provide a base for improvisations for the actors before they turned to the actual text. In Streetcar Blanche DuBois has to find a safe haven—that is the spine of her character. She glances at Stanley with either terror or lust—her beat, the telling response. Stanley Kowalski's anal-compulsive habits are indicated by his chewing on a cigar, his constant eating or drinking. All these traits are general guides for the actors, meant to stir their imagination, and they are points of reference for the mise-en-scène, the positioning, movement, and arrangement of the performers. Kazan's mastery of placement and choreographic movement he regarded as instinctive, which is why he writes about it so infrequently. Arthur Miller said that Kazan does not direct, he creates a center point and then goes to each actor and creates the desire to move toward it. All my actors come on strong, they're alive, they're all dynamic—no matter how quiet, Kazan said.

Kazan's first notes are not his ultimate interpretations, but they exhibit his early and most consequential struggle with the material. At times, these notes are unsparing self-examinations, evidencing the same ruthless and exculpatory candor that dismayed many when his autobiography was published. His understandings here underpin not only the staging but the demands he would place on the actors—pushing them in private sessions to similar recognitions. During the rehearsals he constantly reread his initial formulations, adding to, underlining, and rewording his insights.

A compulsive teacher and didact, he worked sporadically throughout his life on a book on acting and directing, sometimes in the form of lectures (given at the New School for Social Research and for fellow Group members), and he developed with Strasberg and Joe Bromberg an acting course for the New School. He attempted a textbook in 1940 and 1945 (probably in collaboration with Clurman), and in 1947 he prepared a syllabus for the Actors Studio. In the late 1980s he began serious work on what was to be his final book, mostly, in its general section, on film directing. He made a selection of his writings over the course of his career, and the first chapters of this book, dealing with his Group Theatre years and his early commercial productions, consist of writings that are substantially his own choice.

The remainder is drawn from his notebooks, journals, and scraps of manuscript; from interviews; from his autobiography, A Life; from letters and criticism; and from reminiscences of the actors and playwrights he worked with. His notebooks for his film work are slighter than those for his theatre work, because conception and revisions were worked into preliminary treatments and script revisions. Because this book is drawn from material composed over six decades, there are immense contradictions and reconsiderations, providing only proof of Kazan's compulsive vitality.

The format of this book is modeled on Harold Clurman's On Directing, a work that Kazan greatly admired. The plays and films represented have been chosen for continuing interest and to exemplify Kazan's approaches and involvements.

The Pleasures of Directing includes material from his unfinished book on directing, which had been commissioned by Katherine Hourigan, who was his last editor at Knopf. Kazan's manuscript is informal, conversational, provocative, and combative—a wise old pro telling the kid what to watch out for. But he instructs best by his manner, passion, dedication, and conviction that art is essential to existence. For Kazan, bringing life to a play or film was as risky, painful, and rewarding as giving birth. Some of his productions disappoint him, some are favorites, but all are embraced.

THE DIRECTOR'S NOTES

PLAYS

For the Group Theatre

EDITOR: With an impassioned determination to create an American theatre that would emulate the commitment and artistic conscience of Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre and that would foster new drama responsive to American life, Cheryl Crawford, a manager at Broadway's most prestigious producing organization, the Theatre Guild, and two brazen and self-assured intellects, Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, formed a collective of actors called the Group Theatre in 1931. For a decade the Group Theatre members argued and fought among themselves, broke into factions that hated and admired, despised and adored each other, but their approach was at base steadily coherent enough to revolutionize American theatre and consequently American film. The most notable acting teachers of the 1940s had been associated with the Group Theatre: Sanford Meisner, Stella Adler, Robert Lewis, and Lee Strasberg. And almost all significant new American drama of the 1940s through the 1950s was directed either by Harold Clurman or Elia Kazan; the succeeding generation of preeminent directors—Sidney Lumet, Martin Ritt, Arthur Penn, Daniel Mann, Joseph Anthony—were trained under the auspices of the Group Theatre or its successor, the Actors Studio.

In 1932, after two years at Yale Drama School, Elia Kazan came to New York and was taken on, with some hesitation, as an apprentice for the Group's second summer boot camp. But he was extraordinarily ambitious, adept, and enthusiastic, so quick to understand and often even challenge the Group's goals, that within three years he was lecturing at the New School and at the New York Drama League on drama and acting and theory. After Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg resigned in 1935, Harold Clurman re-formed the Group with a governing advisory committee, chief among whose members was Kazan.

Kazan acted in the Group's most notable productions, making a personal splash in Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy. In 1938 he made his Broadway directorial debut with the Group Theatre's production of Robert Ardrey's Casey Jones, and the next year he prepared two workshop performances of Irwin Shaw's Quiet City.

Kazan, with his arms raised, as Agate Keller in Waiting for Lefty

What follows are two excerpts from his lectures, which Kazan intended to include in a textbook on acting that he worked on intermittently from the late 1930s through the 1940s, a confidential memo to Clurman assessing the actors, and an assessment of his problems directing Shaw's Quiet City.

Style and Spine (1938)

Directing is fundamentally the central effective agency in a production. The direction is the core of the production, and all decisions, choices, and discriminations come from what we call the direction.

The first problem of the director then is to determine what his direction is to be. And as this direction is to give organic unity to the whole production, his first job is to find a center or core for the work and for the production. The more integrated this center is, the more integrated will be the production. Once it is established, the base decision has been made. All else devolves from this.

The director has to restate succinctly the play, its meaning and form, in his own terms; he has to reconceive it as if he had created it. What does it mean to him? What does it arouse in him? How does the manuscript affect his soul? In short, what is his relationship as an artist to this document, this manuscript?

It is not necessary that the directors reaction match the author's intention. Different periods have different values and meanings. And a director might want to produce a work for reasons other than the writer's. Examples abound; the clearest is Shakespearean productions from Shakespeare's time to ours.

Therefore, the director's first question in approaching a script is not what the author intended, but what is his own response as an independent artist. A script might give a director simply nothing more than a feeling, an impression, as Casey Jones meant to me primarily the loneliness of American life. Here is where the director's work starts: he examines all the resources of his personality, reading and rereading the script to find out just what in the subject has significance for him.

As his study of the script intensifies, the director explores the meaning of the theme for the author. This becomes more active, as he supervises the author's rewrite, guiding the author to best express his intent. But the focus of the director as he prepares his direction (as opposed to working on the script) must be his own feeling and thoughts on the theme, subject, the story and characters.

The study of the script should result in a simple formulation that sums up the play in one phrase, a phrase that