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Author
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Topic: Elia Kazan dies at 94
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Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted 09-29-2003 10:00 AM
Elia Kazan, Influential Director, Is Dead at 94
By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN
Published: September 29, 2003 in The New York Times
Elia Kazan, the immigrant child of a Greek rug merchant who became one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.
Mr. Kazan's achievements in theater and cinema helped define the American experience for more than a generation. For Broadway, his legendary productions included "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Death of a Salesman." His movie classics included "On the Waterfront" and "East of Eden."
To many critics, he was the best director of American actors in stage and screen history, discovering Marlon Brando, James Dean and Warren Beatty and redefining the craft of film acting. In 1953 the critic Eric Bentley wrote that "the work of Elia Kazan means more to the American theater than that of any current writer."
Mr. Kazan was a founder and longtime co-director of the Actors Studio; a founder with Robert Whitehead of the first repertory theater at Lincoln Center; a member of the fabled Group Theater in the 1930's; the favorite director of a generation of new American playwrights, including the two most important, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller; and in his later years a best-selling novelist...[Continued on link below.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/obituaries/29KAZA.html?hp
[The obituary contains links to his filmography and much of interest on his life, works and influence.]
Gerard
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Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted 09-29-2003 10:39 AM
Leo,
The online link does mention it:
{Mr. Kazan also received an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1999. The lifetime achievement award was controversial because in 1952 Mr. Kazan angered many of his friends and colleagues when he acknowledged before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Communist Party from 1934 to 1936 and gave the committee the names of eight other party members. He had previously refused to do so, and his naming of names prompted many people in the arts, including those who had never been Communists, to excoriate him for decades.
Asked why he had identified others, he cited a "specious reasoning which has silenced many liberals" that ran like this: "You may hate the Communists, but you must not attack them or expose them, because if you do you are attacking the right to hold unpopular opinions."
"I'd had every good reason to believe the party should be driven out of its many hiding places and into the light of scrutiny, but I'd never said anything because it would be called `red-baiting,' " he wrote years later. "The `horrible, immoral thing' that I did I did out of my own true self."} [Emphasis mine--Gerard]
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Mitchell Dvoskin
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1869
From: West Milford, NJ, USA
Registered: Jan 2001
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posted 10-01-2003 11:04 AM
There seems to me to be a lot of purposeful mis-information about the House On Un-American Activates Committee being spread in recent years. The HUAC was originally created prior to WW2 to investigate foreign instigated subversion, specifically Nazi infiltration. They were rather successful, as indicated by the lack of domestic sabotage during the war. After the war, congress turned to committee toward the threat of the day, Russian Communism. While it is now clear that many innocent people were caught up in the hysteria of the time, the actual threat was non the less real. Soviet intelligence files that were made public in 1990's clearly show that they had an organized plan to infiltrate the entertainment business in Hollywood and use it for propaganda purposes. I'm not sure that many people today remember the violence in Hollywood in the late 1940's as communist sympathizers seized control of some of the craft unions, causing the writers guild to split into 2 competing unions, and car bombings outside of Warner Brothers during a communist lead strike. This was the environment in which the HUAC turned its eyes on Hollywood. Surprisingly, of all the craft unions, it was the IA which lead the fight against the communist infiltration.
While the number of people who were taking there orders directly from Moscow, or even aware that Moscow was directing the movement, was small, the HUAC mission was to find out who was a traitor and who was an innocent dupe. Elia Kazan like many others, got involved with the communist party in the 1930's as a result of seeing the failures of capitalism all around him. Twenty years later, he saw that communism was not the answer and had the courage to break with them. He learned from the inside that the communist party in America was not just another political party, but an external subversive organization. In spite of all criticism of him, nobody is saying his testimony was not accurate. His testimony, or anyone else's for that matter, did not end the careers of others. It was the others themselves, who by refusing to cooperate when called by the committee, who ended their own careers.
There is a mountain of evidence that the "Hollywood 10" were knowingly working against the interests of this county and for the interests of the Soviet Union that seemingly is ignored in the current media. Count how many times you have seen news stories about Mr. Kazan and other in Hollywood being called before the McCarthy Committee. The only problem is that Senator McCarthy was not yet on the committee. He did not join the HUAC until after the Hollywood investigations were completed and they had moved on to investigating communist infiltration of our government. The fact that Senator McCarthy discredited the HUAC by fabricating false evidence and abused his position of trust, does not invalidate the earlier work of the committee. Only evidence of mis-conduct by those earlier members could do that, and to date none has surfaced.
There is an excellent book called "Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s" by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley that is well worth reading by anyone interested in the topic. While I do not agree with all the authors conclusions, he did an incredible amount of well documented research that is easily verifiable, once you know what to look for.
/Mitchell
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