Author: Brenda Murphy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521400954
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This is a book-length study of the intense creative relationship between Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan.

Author: Brenda Murphy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521035248
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This is a book-length study of the collaboration between Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan. Their intense creative relationship, fuelled by a deep personal affinity that endured until Williams's death, lasted from 1947 until 1960. The production of A Streetcar Named Desire established Williams as America's greatest playwright and Kazan as its most important director; together they created some of the most influential theatrical events of the post-war era. In this book Brenda Murphy analyses this artistic partnership and the plays and theatrical techniques the artists developed collaboratively in their productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Sweet Bird of Youth. In addition, Murphy suggests alternative ways to examine the working relationship between playwright and director which can be applied to other practitioners in twentieth-century drama. The book contains numerous illustrations from important productions.

Author: Elia Kazan
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307959341
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 1387

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Book Description
ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME • In this amazing autobiography, Kazan at seventy-eight brings us the undiluted telling of his story—and revelation of himself—all 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, Gentleman’s 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 I’ve read by a prominent American in I don’t 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 at—a 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 Mailer Kazan gives us his sense of himself as an outsider (a Greek rug merchant’s son born in Turkey, an immigrant’s 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 manager—and 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 director’s 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 he’s worked with—James 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 and—in the years where he obsessively sought adventure outside marriage—as 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.

Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811217224
Category : Dramatists, American
Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Book Description

Author: Valerie Hurst
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640537939
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 25

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,8, University of Tubingen (Englisches Seminar), course: Introduction to Literary Studies, language: English, abstract: "'The marvelous performances in [this] great movie [...] [are] only slightly marred by [a] Hollywood ending.' Tennessee Williams" (cf. Yacowar). Tennessee Williams' play "A Streetcar Named Desire" from 1947 was often staged and interpreted. It was also the base of Elia Kazan's famous and remarkable movie from 1951. Since a book allows for interpretation, the movie features a different realization. This paper will contrast the written form with the film version. To illustrate the different realizations there will be a closer look at the two special and important scenes, ten and eleven, which are exemplarily for the differences in the general conversion. The decision for exactly these scenes is founded in the striking differences in conversion and adaptation and by reason of plenty of content rapidly beat down in these scenes. Due to many influences, the film departs in places completely from Williams' original. These influences and differences will be described in the following first part. Particular attention will then be paid to the music and noises, and the moods and emotions caused by these. And, due to being close linked to the adaptation of the whole movie, the effects of censorship will be explained. The impact is to work out in which ways the movie is adapted to the play and where it distinguishes from it.

Author: Elia Kazan
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385350414
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 674

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Book Description
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 Kazan’s lifelong determination to be a “sincere, conscious, practicing artist” resounds in these letters—fully annotated throughout—in 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 (Gentleman’s 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 era—by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams—and 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 Kazan’s 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 Thacher—they did not mince words with each other. And we see a father’s 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.

Author: Henriette Plienow
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640340051
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 19

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2.0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, course: Proseminar Tennessee Williams, language: English, abstract: This paper compares Tennessee Williams's text with Elia Kazan's movie version from 1951 as well as with the so-called 'restored version' from 1993 which contains additional scenes that had been removed by the censors in the 1951 version. It examines the differences between text and film, considering changes which were made for merely artistic respectively medium-typical reasons, as well as changes which were made due to censorship, and it analyses which effects those changes had.

Author: John Lahr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393247120
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 736

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Book Description
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography Category National Book Award Finalist 2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award A Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014' USA Today: 10 Books We Loved Reading Washington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014 The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen. The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Author: Elia Kazan
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307277046
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Elia Kazan was the twentieth century’s most celebrated director of both stage and screen, and this monumental, revelatory book shows us the master at work. Kazan’s list of Broadway and Hollywood successes—A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, On the Waterfront, to name a few—is a testament to his profound impact on the art of directing. This remarkable book, drawn from his notebooks, letters, interviews, and autobiography, reveals Kazan’s 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 Directing”—written during Kazan’s final years—he becomes a wise old pro offering advice and insight for budding artists, writers, actors, and directors.

Author: Dominique Sipière
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782842742553
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
A Streetcar Named Desire connut, dès sa première à Broadway, un succès prodigieux, au point qu'il faut s'interroger sur la nature de la réussite internationale de la pièce et de son pendant cinéma tographique. Sa nouveauté tenait - entre autres choses - dans le sentiment qu'avait le public d'être traité en adulte. Le soldat Kowalski et ses amis, la sexualité de Blanche et de sa sueur, l'univers du Vieux Carré, proche en apparence du néo-réalisme italien de la même période, sont ici le matériau d'une tragédie hors du temps et d'une ambition poétique puissante et originale qui voulait assumer pleinement la complexité humaine. Quand Kazan parle du cinéma, il pense aussi au théâtre : " Sitting out front or before your screen, you realize you're witnessing a real event, une more real than life, for in "life" there are the limits of civilization - the police, for instance. In art, there should be none. " Ici, l'art - sans limites - se veut plus vrai que la vie, car il peut montrer la vérité, dans sa complexité et ses excès.