During the 1980s and 1990s, Barry Levinson was one of Hollywood’s most prominent directors: the man behind films such as The Best, Good Morning, Vietnam, Rain Man, for which he won the Oscar, Disclosure, and many others. He later faded a bit from public memory and devoted himself more to television productions. His latest cinematic release, The Alto Knights, didn’t attract a warm reception, but now the 84-year-old American veteran gives it another try with a highly ambitious project, A Life, a biopic drawn from the autobiography of the director of On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan, published in 1988.
The Controversial Life of Elia Kazan Brought to the Screen by Barry Levinson
Undoubtedly, Elia Kazan is one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema, having signed works such as A Streetcar Named Desire, East of Eden, Viva Zapata!, up to The Last Fires. He passed away in 2003; this Turkish-born immigrant from a Greek family was also a writer and has gone down in history as the “traitor,” after, before the House on American Activities committee chaired by Senator McCarthy, he named several of his colleagues who were affiliated with the Communist Party. In 1999 the Academy awarded him the Career Honor Oscar, when Kazan was 89 years old (he had already won two Oscars for his films), and half the theater remained seated without applause in protest, especially given that at the time there were still people ostracized by Hollywood for their political beliefs, left out of work for a long period. The screenplay for the film about his life was written by Levinson with Jina Umakanthan. And there is no doubt that this is a fascinating story that traverses the golden age of American cinema and theatre, with supporting figures such as Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Vivien Leigh, Natalie Wood, and Warren Beatty, among many others he worked with. One of his most celebrated theatre productions was Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, whose friendship with the director ended after Kazan’s testimony. Speaking of him, of whom Levinson is a great admirer, Levinson told Page Six: “There’s nobody at his level. He has always engaged with human complexity, in a sense, the imperfect nature of man.” But there is more: the director had the chance to meet his idol during a celebratory dinner at the end of the Nineties, and he recalls his nervous reaction: “We were seated at the table facing each other. I was completely in awe of him. I couldn’t speak. I was intimidated, to be honest. At one point he looked at me and said, ‘You have the look of a director,’ to which I could only nod, too nervous to utter a word.”
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