Kazan, Borzage, Movie Speak and Instant Replay
By John Patterson
(Knopf Publishing, 368 pages, $30)
By Elia Kazan, edited by Robert Cornfield
Kazan on Directing is a deftly assembled collection of the great director’s instructions to his theater and film collaborators. Included are character biographies, costume suggestions and staging setups, as well as some often brutally frank postmortem ex- aminations of his work. The selections are mostly from his notebooks, but also from interviews and speeches. This is Kazan the professional speak- ing, a giant of the Method spilling his secrets. We are granted admission to the inner sanctum, and made privy to his creative process in the most intimate details.
Kazan, as editor Robert Cornfield notes, “would have been the first to protest [that] ‘directed by’ is a meanly limited, misleading term for his contribution to the plays and movies he commanded.” Kazan (the name means, essentially, and appropriately, “cauldron”) kept a tight rein on his collaborators—wardrobe people, production designers, editors—all of whom were favored with extended missives outlining the director’s vision of their contributions. He reshaped masterpieces by Williams and Miller, and ruthlessly manipulated his actors, even setting them against each other. He often “tricked” great performances from his cast, and wasn’t above slapping an actor to make the tears roll.
At the same time, Kazan could extend profound imaginative sympathy toward his actors and their roles, evident by his lengthy letter to Marlon Brando setting out his ideas on how to play Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. Part of it effectively summarizes Kazan’s Freud-inflected approach to character: “I really hope to be photographing the kid’s insides as much as exterior events.” As repre-sented here, Kazan’s theories of direc-tion are simple and brutal: “There is only one way of looking at this trade: The filmmaker is responsible for everything. To rephrase that thought: Everything is your fault.” Or more tersely: “It’s a question of power, nothing less.”
Although excerpts from many of the entries have appeared elsewhere over the years, Kazan’s workbooks and interviews collected in one volume are an indispensable resource for anyone hoping to understand the direction of actors (Brando, James Dean, and Lee J. Cobb among them), and the differences between stage and screen direction in the molten middle of the 20th century. One quibble, however: Cornfield’s decision to separate Kazan’s film and stage work deprives the book of a sense of the director’s chronological creative growth across both mediums. Styles may have changed, but Kazan still has plenty to say about directing that remains revelatory and instructive today.
(McFarland, 420 pages, $45)
By Hervé Dumont
As Martin Scorsese, a lifelong admirer, notes in his introduction, “[Frank] Borzage... was a romantic, and that’s one strike against him... I think I can safely say that there isn’t an ironic moment in any of [his movies]. He clearly believed in romance.” While making silent films, Borzage often sobbed as he directed his performers, throwing himself into the soaring emotions of his stories in a way that might seem overly sentimental to our cynical modern eyes. With his lyricism, luminosity and appetite for transcendence, Borzage is one of the great directors of Hollywood’s silent and early sound eras most in danger of vanishing into oblivion.
But with a new box set of his early work and the arrival of Hervé Dumont’s exemplary critical biography (it was written in 1993, but just recently translated), Borzage should finally get the credit he deserves. There was a time, after all, when critics spoke of “the Borzage touch,” which Dumont defines as including “his pictorial splendor and velvet-smooth images,” his “unsurpassed degree of sobriety in poignant, restrained emotion,” and his “naturalness in the supernatural.” Love reigns over his universe, tenderness is the presiding emotion, and nothing can destroy it, not even death. In movie after movie, including 7th Heaven (1927), A Farewell to Arms (1932), History Is Made at Night (1937) and Three Comrades (1938, partly scripted by F. Scott Fitzgerald), his belief in love as life’s driving force abides.
Dumont began tracking down Borzage’s missing works and fragments in the mid-’60s. Thus his biography is informed by a profound and sympathetic familiarity with a widely dispersed oeuvre. He writes rewardingly, for example, of The River (1929), which was considered a masterpiece on its release, but of which only some 40 minutes survive.
And Borzage himself, one of the founders of the Screen Directors Guild (the forerunner of the DGA), is rescued from obscurity to emerge as a fascinating character in his own drama. Dumont’s biographical sections detail a poor young man who, as a teenager, joined theatrical troupes crisscrossing the vanishing Old West. Landing in pre-WWI Hollywood, he helmed Westerns before finding his own style. Discussing transcendence in Borzage’s movies, Dumont points out the director’s dedication to the tenets of Freemasonry, reminding us that Borzage’s much-vaunted spiritualism was not really grounded in Christianity, but in a more generous, less judgmental romantic mysticism whose power can still move us to tears.
(Workman Publishing, $8.95)
By Tony Bill
When Peter and Bobby Farrelly walked onto the set of their first movie, Dumb & Dumber, they counted between the pair of them not one second of actual on-set experience, let alone direction. Things were touch and go, Peter later recalled, until they intuited that a good relationship with the assistant director was the fastest route to looking like they had a clue what they were doing. Today such rocky moments might be avoided by judicious consultation of director-producer-actor (and DGA member) Tony Bill’s handy and amusing compilation of on-set code words and film-speak.
Every profession has its own secret language, from accountancy to animal husbandry, from the Mafia to the market-trading floor, and success is often lubricated by fluency and ease in the adopted argot. As Bill says in his introduction, “Movie sets are another country with a language all its own, much of it fading or forgotten. It’s a largely oral tradition passed down over the last hundred years.” Well, it’s secret no more, and first-time on-set bluffers now have at hand the phrasebook to lead them into this strange and confusing universe. It’s also an educational and entertaining read for hardened veterans.
No longer will a neophyte mistake a “taco truck” for anything to do with Mexican food; in this context it’s a grip’s cart. He or she will learn that an “Obie” isn’t some Broadway award but a light developed by cameraman Lucien Ballard for his wife Merle Oberon to illuminate her splendid eyes. A “nine-iron” isn’t a golf club; it’s a long-handled pooper-scooper for horses in old Westerns, and “nine-iron it” has come to mean “clean that all up.” Likewise, a “mouse” has nothing to do with computers or cheese; it’s the eraser used on a slate. There’s one of these on every page, usually knowingly and wittily annotated by the author, who has been, to steal one of his own phrases “on more sets than a lot of rental equipment.”
What distinguishes this dictionary is Bill’s own voice, which appears in numerous extended discourses on subjects close to his heart, or bêtes noires that just burn his biscuits. Filled with reminiscences about Sinatra, Coppola, Malick and Spielberg, and wise words on the realities of the film set, he’s a smart and amiable guide for newbies—as well as old hands—to the arcane mysteries of moviemaking.
(Creative Book Publishers, 226 pages, $16.95)
By Tony Verna
This is not live, ladies and gentle-men—Army did not score again!” With those words, sports announcer Lindsey Nelson ushered in the era of instant replay in live TV sportscasting. It was such a startling innovation on that December day in 1963 that Nelson had to spell out for the audience what it had just witnessed.
The young man responsible for the tricky and demanding technical feat was Tony Verna, who went on to build a long career directing sporting events (five Super Bowls, the Rome and Los Angeles Olympics) and logistically demanding live events (Live Aid, Pope John Paul II’s TV special A Prayer for World Peace). He was presented the DGA’s Liftetime Achievement Award in Sports Direction in 1995. At the time of his historic breakthrough, Verna had been working piecemeal on the technical aspects of instant replay and was impressed by NBC’s handling of live action and replays of the Lee Harvey Oswald shooting just two weeks earlier. As he says in his lively memoir, “Well, if Army didn’t win, CBS certainly did, despite their failure to give me the acclaim.”
There’s quite a bit of energetic score-settling of this kind, and Verna’s frustration with CBS evidently still rankles. Less well-known is his subsequent success running some of the most complicated live broadcasts imaginable and making them work. The supporting characters in his memoir range form Mother Teresa to Presidents Reagan and Bush to Dick Clark. The book is loaded with firsthand anecdotes, both technical and personal. For those in the trade, it’s a revealing behind-the-scenes look at television during a transitional period.