ELIA KAZAN

En 1970, Elia Kazan aceptó ser entrevistado para un libro que preparaba un joven director de cine, Jeff Young. Su única condición fue que el manuscrito no viera la luz hasta que se publicara su autobiografia. Casi dos años mas tarde, despues de mas de cien sesiones, Young empezo a adivinar que aquel extraordinario material no solo revelaba la metodologia cinematografica de Kazan, sino que ademas decia muchas cosas sobre los actores, productores y guionistas con los que habia colaborado, de James Dean a Marlon Brando, pasando por Tennessee Williams, Vivien Leigh, John Steinbeck y muchos otros. Fue por entonces, coincidiendo con la publicacion del volumen de Kazan, cuando empezo la ardua labor de convertir aquellas conversaciones en un libro. Finalmente publicado en 1999, precisamente cuando se otorgo a Kazan un Oscar honorifico por el conjunto de su carrera, el texto resultante es sobre todo un fascinante recorrido por la filmografia del director en cuestion, pero tambien una indagacion sobre sus metodos y procedimientos, asi como un documento inapreciable sobre la historia del cine norteamericano y su contexto politico, sobre todo en lo que se refiere a la epoca de la caza de brujas.

From Elia Kazan, the celebrated writer and director: a huge, stunning story of a word in tumult and an immigrants life redeemed. It is a pivotal moment in history. The First World War has barely ended. Greek forces are reclaiming Anatolia from the Turks. And Stavros Topouzoglouwho twenty years earlier, escaping oppression of Turkish rule, fled to America only to discover the venality of his dream of an American lifedisembarks to reclaim his homeland. Here he will recast his life and rid himself of his obsession with the elegant American woman who has become for him the ultimate symbol of success. He will marry an Anatolian girl who will treat him like and agha. He will have the life his father had. Stavross energy and arrogance propel him to an astonishing success in his war-torn country. Deep in the interior of Anatolia, he meets the woman who he thinks will complete this new vision of himselfthe fiercely independent Thomna. But he does not know that her passion matches his own twenty years beforeto get to America at any cost. His passion now is for Anatolia, and bringing his mother and sister back from America, he pursues his fortune further into dangerous areas, behind the lines of combateven when learns that the Allies have deserted the Greeks, even after he loses his brother to the Greco-Turkish war. As the novel unfolds, we see Stavros and his dreams of wealth and home becoming inextricably entwined with the Greek causecompelling him, at the risk of sacrificing his life with Thomna, to a level of selflessness and heroism he has never before imagined. Beyond the Aegean is a novel dramatically, historically, and emotionally powerful, a novel that both stands uncompromisingly on its own and brings to a close Elia Kazans commanding saga of one immigrant life.

In his powerful new novel, Elia Kazan takes up the life of the young Greek from Anatolia whose early years he chronicled in his first and highly acclaimed novel, America America, giving us the story of a man caught between two worlds and fighting to make a place for himself within them.We enter the story of 1909. Stavros TopouzoglouJoe Arness to his American friendsis meeting the freighter that has brought his family to America. This day marks the culmination of a lifetime of responsibility. Steeled by his harsh life, proud and resourceful, he has nonetheless been governed by the age-old rules of filial duty: putting aside his own needs and desires, he obediently took on the fulfillment of his fathers dream of safety and salvation for their family. For a decade he has worked to bring his family to Americaan America that has hypnotized and motivated him with its promise of money and power and privilege. But as the family disembarks there is one person missing: his father is dead. Suddenly, Stavros is caught between two powerful and opposing influences. On one side is his family: seven brothers and sisters and his mother look to him for guidance, strength, and support, drawing him back into the ways and tenets of the old country. On the other side, the bright-seeming, golden possibilities of the new world of America, possibilities that Stavros has only glimpsed from afar, but that he has determined to attain.In the story of Stavros, Elia Kazan not only gives us a vividly wrought picture of one mans struggle to understand his dreams, but he reveals, as well, what it has meant for the immigrant to confront America, and, more importantly, what it has meant for him to confront himself in this seductive, yet often inimical, culture.

This collection of nearly three hundred letters gives us the life of Elia Kazan unfiltered, with all the passion, vitality, and raw honesty that made him such an important and formidable stage director (A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman), film director (On the Waterfront, East of Eden), novelist, and memoirist. Elia Kazans lifelong determination to be a sincere, conscious, practicing artist resounds in these lettersfully annotated throughoutin every phase of his career: his exciting apprenticeship with the new and astonishing Group Theatre, as stagehand, stage manager, and actor (Waiting for Lefty, Golden Boy) . . . his first tentative and then successful attempts at directing for the theater and movies (The Skin of Our Teeth,A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) . . . his cofounding in 1947 of the Actors Studio and his codirection of the nascent Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center . . . his innovative and celebrated work on Broadway (All My Sons, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, J.B.) and in Hollywood (Gentlemans Agreement, Splendor in the Grass, A Face in the Crowd, Baby Doll) . . . his birth as a writer. Kazan directed virtually back-to-back the greatest American dramas of the eraby Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williamsand helped shape their future productions. Here we see how he collaborated with these and other writers: Clifford Odets, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, and Budd Schulberg among them. The letters give us a unique grasp of his luminous insights on acting, directing, producing, as he writes to and about Marlon Brando, James Dean, Warren Beatty, Robert De Niro, Boris Aronson, and Sam Spiegel, among others. We see Kazans heated dealings with studio moguls Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner, his principled resistance to film censorship, and the upheavals of his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. These letters record as well the inner life of the artist and the man. We see his startling candor in writing to his first wife, his confidante and adviser, Molly Day Thacherthey did not mince words with each other. And we see a fathers letters to and about his children. An extraordinary portrait of a complex, intense, monumentally talented man who engaged the political, moral, and artistic currents of the twentieth century.

Elia Kazan was the twentieth centurys most celebrated director of both stage and screen, and this monumental, revelatory book shows us the master at work. Kazans list of Broadway and Hollywood successesA Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, On the Waterfront, to name a fewis a testament to his profound impact on the art of directing. This remarkable book, drawn from his notebooks, letters, interviews, and autobiography, reveals Kazans method: how he uncovered the spine, or core, of each script; how he analyzed each piece in terms of his own experience; and how he determined the specifics of his production. And in the final section, The Pleasures of Directingwritten during Kazans final yearshe becomes a wise old pro offering advice and insight for budding artists, writers, actors, and directors.

ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTERS 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME In this amazing autobiography, Kazan at seventy-eight brings us the undiluted telling of his storyand revelation of himselfall the passion, vitality, and truth, the almost outrageous honesty, that have made him so formidable a stage director (A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tea and Sympathy), film director (On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Gentlemans Agreement, Splendor in the Grass, Baby Doll, The Last Tycoon, A Face in the Crowd), and novelist (the number-one best-seller The Arrangement.)This is the best autobiography Ive read by a prominent American in I dont know how many years. It is endlessly absorbing and I believe this is because it concerns a man who is looking to find a coherent philosophy that will be tough enough to contain all that is ugly in his person and his experience, yet shall prove sufficiently compassionate to give honest judgment on himself and others. Somehow, the author brings this off. Elia Kazan: A Life has that candor of confession which is possible only when the deepest wounds have healed and honesty can achieve what honesty so rarely arrives ata rich and hearty flavor. By such means, a famous director has written a book that offers the kind of human wealth we find in a major novel. Norman MailerKazan gives us his sense of himself as an outsider (a Greek rug merchants son born in Turkey, an immigrants son raised in New York and educated at Williams College). He takes us into the almost accidental sojourn at the Yale Drama School that triggered his commitment to theatre, and his edgy, exciting apprenticeship with the new and astonishing Group Theatre, as stagehand and stage managerand as actor (Waiting for Lefty, Golden Boy) . . . his first nervous and then successful attempts at directing for theatre and movies (The Skin of Our Teeth, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) . . . his return to New York to co-found the Actors Studio (and his long and ambivalent relationship with Lee Strasberg) . . . his emergence as premier director on both coasts.With his directors eye for the telling scene, Kazan shares the joys and complications of production, his unique insights on acting, directing, and producing. He makes us feel the close presence of the actors, producers, and writers hes worked withJames Dean, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Vivien Leigh, Tallulah Bankhead, Sam Spiegel, Darryl Zanuck, Harold Clurman, Arthur Miller, Budd Schulberg, James Baldwin, Clifford Odets, and John Steinbeck among them. He gives us a frank and affectionate portrait of Marilyn Monroe. He talks with startling candor about himself as husband andin the years where he obsessively sought adventure outside marriageas lover. For the first time, he discusses his Communist Party years and his wrenching decision in 1952 to be a cooperative witness before HUAC. He writes about his birth as a writer.The pace and organic drama of his narrative, his grasp of the life and politics of Broadway and Hollywood, the keenness with which he observes the men and women and worlds around him, and, above all, the honest with which he pursues and captures his own essence, make this one of the most fascinating autobiographies of our time.