Factfile
Name: Elia Kazan
Age: 89
Profession: Film and theatre director
Why in the news: Receives an honorary award at tomorrow's Oscar ceremonies. This is despite the disapproval of many of his Hollywood contemporaries who still remember his naming of friends as communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952
Least likely to say: I'm sorry
WHEN the Hollywood glitterati assemble tomorrow evening in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for their annual shindig, they'll be looking forward with some interest to what is normally the blandest and most innocuous part of a carefully stage-managed ceremony.
Honorary Oscars are usually reserved for those the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences has unaccountably ignored (Fred Astaire and Kirk Douglas) or whom the business has treated badly (Buster Keaton and Orson Welles).
In a town where "history" means last week's box-office grosses, they offer the opportunity for younger actors, directors and producers to look suitably awe-struck by the great tradition which they inherit.
It's a different situation for this year's recipient, a distinguished 89-year-old veteran director of some of Hollywood's most classic films, and not just because Elia Kazan already has two gold-plated statuettes (for Gentleman's Agreement and On the Waterfront).
Some 47 years since he testified as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Kazan remains the lightning rod for the strong emotions still stirred in the film business by the anti-communist blacklists of the early 1950s.
Kazan probably won't appear too bothered - he has always given the impression of relishing the role of outcast, despite the fact that his name has become synonymous with bending the knee to authority.
Born Elia Kazanjoglou in 1909 in what was then still Constantinople, Kazan was four when his Anatolian Greek parents emigrated to New York. His father, a rug trader, wanted him to follow the family trade but Elia, who went to Williams College before studying drama at Yale, had other ideas.
Joining the ground-breaking Group Theatre in the early 1930s, first as an actor and then as a director, Kazan, like many of his contemporaries, gravitated towards socialist politics and from 1934 to 1936 was a member of the Communist Party.
In the 1940s, he rose to prominence as the leading director of new plays by writers like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, while simultaneously establishing himself as a film director, first with rather conventional studio productions but then with a series of films which brought to Hollywood the new forms of naturalistic performance pioneered by the Actors' Studio in New York, and epitomised by actors such as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and James Dean.
His film version of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, which he had already directed on Broadway, won three Oscars in 1951. But, Yet, on the very night of Streetcar's success, Kazan was facing a crisis. He had already testified in private session before the HUAC, admitting to having been a Communist Party member in the 1930s, but refusing to name his friends, including the writer Clifford Odets. The committee was now planning to call him before a public hearing and if he didn't co-operate he risked blacklisting.
The decision to talk cost Kazan some of his closest working relationships. The playwright Arthur Miller, who had worked with him on the first stage production of Death of a Salesman, visited him at his Connecticut home as the director was moving towards testifying. In Kazan's account, Miller told him: "Whatever you do is OK with me because I know your heart is in the right place."
Yet once Kazan had testified, Miller swiftly broke off all contact. The two had planned to work together on a play about immigrant dock workers, a collaboration which never happened, and Miller went on to write A View from the Bridge, about a Sicilian waterfront worker who, out of jealousy, informs on his illegal immigrant nephew.
There is a story of how Miller sent a copy of the play to Kazan, who is supposed to have wired back: "I have read your play and would be honoured to direct it."
"You don't understand," Miller replied. "I didn't send it to you because I wanted you to direct it. I sent it to you because I wanted you to know what I think of stool pigeons."
Kazan went on to direct his own docklands drama, On the Waterfront, in which the agonising of prizefighter Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) over whether to inform on his criminal friends seems like a heavy-handed and thinly-veiled justification for his own actions.
As the political climate shifted in the 1960s, Kazan became the arch-villain of the blacklist era in the public mind. Ironically, given the accusations of moral flip-flopping levelled against him in 1952, he has refused to take the route of public recantation which many have urged on him.
"Anybody who informs on other people is doing something disgusting," he told an interviewer in the early 1970s. "It doesn't sit well on my conscience . . . But what I did was the lesser of two mean alternatives. The only other option was to remain silent and pretend I didn't know better when people said there's no communist conspiracy. Nonsense. There was a conspiracy." Most of the protagonists in the "red" scares of the 1950s are now dead but the wounds have not entirely healed. The film industry is still a huge presence in Los Angeles, and many of those now in positions of power are the children of those directly affected by the blacklist, which destroyed the careers of some of the most talented people in the film business.
Kazan may be one of the most significant directors of the century, and his story may be an archetype of the moral confusion of the period, but he has been ignored by many of his peers since the 1960s.
The decision to honour him has divided the movie community on predictably ideological lines: there won't be any noisy demonstrations inside the auditorium but in a town which prides itself on its political liberalism, many will observe the silent protest which has been called for by a number of blacklist victims.
Meanwhile, the award is supported by arch-conservative Charlton Heston, and right-wing groups like the Ayn Rand Institute will be cheering Kazan on outside the auditorium.
The shadow of the decision he made in 1952 will hang over Elia Kazan tomorrow, as it has done for the last 47 years.
Wilbert Rideau by Elaine Lafferty, Page 9; Michael Dwyer's Oscar predictions, Weekend.
