Go Into The Story Interview: Chris Parizo

My interview with 2023 Black List writer for his script Kazan.

Chris Parizo has made the annual Black List two times: In 2020 for his script Viceland, then in 2023 with Kazan. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Chris about his creative background, the craft of screenwriting, and the challenges associated with writing a biopic like Kazan.

Here is the complete interview with Chris.

Scott Myers: I want to talk about your journey into screenwriting and filmmaking. First, let’s talk about the music thing. After high school, you joined a band and did that for several years. Could you talk about that?

Chris Parizo: Sure. I broke my mom’s heart. It was her dream for me to go to college. And I went because I felt like that’s what you were supposed to do. All my friends were goind. I think within three months of my freshman year, I was done with it, and I wasn’t mature to do it anyway.

I was wasting a lot of people’s money.

I wanted to be a musician. I grew up in Burlington, Vermont, the home of Phish and all these incredible bands that were huge locally and regionally in the ’90s. The Pants, Wide Wail, Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello had a band called The Fags there at that time. Great bands. One of those was this band called Chin Ho!. I adored them. Had their poster on my wall in high school.

If you had asked me, “Name your top five favorite bands,” I would have been like, “Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Tragically Hip, and Chin Ho!.” They were in that group.

When I got to college, I descended on the radio station. Became the local music director, and I booked them immediately because I knew they did a great live show. And it ends up that their bassist had quit and they had some New England shows lined up they had to cancel. I was like, “I’ll do it! I play bass!” They’re like, “Are you serious?” I was like, “Yeah, I know all your songs! Let’s do it.”

I was lying. I had never played bass before, but I learned and played the shows with them, played 10 songs. Then they invited me to join, and play with the Tragically Hip and Jewel and Counting Crows and all these great bands and performers at the time. So I quit college. Much cooler.

So I called my mom up and told her, “Look, I’ve got this opportunity and I don’t want to lose this. I don’t know if it’s going to go anywhere, but I don’t want to live my life wondering what if. I want to do this.” My mom said, in her very sort of strange wisdom, “Go do it, but your life is mine again when you’re 25. When you’re 25, I start making the decisions.”

Deal! I quit the band and decided to go back to college before I was 25. But I got to spend my late teens and early twenties on tour. Playing The 40 Watt and CBGBs in the late 90’s, and meet my music heroes. It was a wild time.

Scott: You recorded several albums with them.

Chris: Yeah, they had three albums out before I joined, then we did three albums together. One of them was with this Canadian producer named Glenn Robinson, who had worked with everybody from Tori Amos to Voivod, if anybody out there knows who Voivod was. And he worked with Corey Hart, which was funny, such a Canadian thing.

We went up to Montreal, recorded a demo for Elektra Records in ’97 that they ended up passing on, but we got to keep the master tapes. We released it as an EP on an indie label.

We just did our reunion gig. It’s been 25 years since I played with those guys. We sold out the show. We were like, “People remember us. This is so cool.” It was good closure for me because I quit on pretty bad terms. Felt really great to play with those guys one last time.

Scott: Somehow you ended up down in Georgia, went to college, then got a master’s degree.

Chris: The whole band was supposed to move to Atlanta because our booking agent was down there, and we already toured the northeast regularly. We thought we could tour the southeast and go up and down the East Coast forever, and make a living out of it.

My girlfriend at the time decided to follow us to Atlanta. She transferred from Northeastern in Boston to Georgia State. And then the band backed out of the move.

My girlfriend is looking at me going, “I dropped out of college! I’m going to Atlanta, and now you’re not?” So, I quit and moved to Atlanta with her. Then we got married.

And I wanted to go back to college. It was so much cheaper down there. At the time if you were a Georgia resident and maintained a 3.5 GPA or higher you’re tuition was paid for. It was called “Sonny Money” after Sonny Purdue — The Hope Scholarship. I desperately needed it.

And to be Atlanta in your early-mid-20s, when you’re double income with no kids is a pretty great place to be. We stayed there for 13 years. Got our undergrads and our masters degrees. Our four-year plan went for 13 years and then headed back to New England when we decided to have kids. We needed our moms closer to us.

Scott: Literary analysis and then English education. What was going on there?

Chris: I was reading books in the tour van back in the Chin Ho! days. They were cheaper than drugs. I decided to read all the books my high school teachers told me were great, but I thought they were shit at the time (the teachers and the books). I reached an age where I was thinking, “Why does everyone like ‘Of Mice and Men’? I should probably read that on my own for myself.”

I would bring “Moby Dick” with me or I’d bring “Huckleberry Finn” on the road with me. And I was falling in love with them. And found myself not just reading the books, but reading the books about the books, the books about the writers and the books about the analysis of the books. I was falling down a literary analysis rabbit hole.

That triggered in me this idea of, “Wow, you can become a writer by writing about other people’s writing.” That sparked a need to learn more about critical reading and literary analysis as a whole. That led to teaching high school English. I wanted to be the teacher who knew the students hated what we were reading, but wanted to teach the importance of why we read, and what we can learn about ourselves and the human condition from a book like “Catcher in the Rye.”

Scott: You enjoyed that?

Chris: Yeah, I loved it. Loved teaching at Decatur High School and loved Atlanta. I had a great time. The further away from Atlanta I taught though, the less I enjoyed teaching. Boston and Vermont.

In Atlanta, my fellow teachers were my tribe. We were all around the same age. It was an international baccalaureate school. It was very progressive. Being in a progressive school in the South is a phenomenon. Decatur High School was that. It was magical at the time.

There was a music, food, and art scene in this city of Decatur, Georgia. If you watch The Watchmen on HBO, those strange blue pylons are actually the subway station about a block away from the high school. I busted kids smoking weed on those. [laughs]

Scott: You got into writing about music when you were in the band.

Chris: Yeah.

Scott: How did that happen?

Chris: I had to pay my rent! The singer and I published a magazine of Vermont music called “Good Citizen.” We were writing about our friends and bands that we really enjoyed. Trading ads with the local burrito place for free food so we could eat!

When Chin Ho! toured, we’d take the magazine out with us. That and CD compilations. I think we put out 10 or 12 CD compilations in the six years that I was there just to promote the music. We’d send them out to a thousand radio stations.

We would just call the radio stations and push the music, push the music, push the music.

That was a great way for me to learn the ropes of networking, and learn the ropes of collaboration. And to be “good in a room.”

When I moved to Atlanta, I started writing for “Southeast Performer.” Then “Paste Magazine” was out of Decatur and I did some freelance stuff for them. They were right down the road from the high school. In the early days, I did the little side blurbs for them.

Whenever any opportunity came to write something to get published in print or online, I would jump on it pretty much. I love seeing my name in print. Ha!

Scott: How did you get into screenwriting?

Chris: I used film in my English classes to teach symbolism and theme and elements of the hero’s journey. I used Joe Versus the Volcano to teach the Joseph Campbell hero.

“Empire of the Sun,” my favorite movie of all time, is how I taught symbolism because it’s chock-full of packed symbolism to the point where Spielberg’s basically puking it out onto the screen. I’m like, “If you guys don’t see the symbolism in this, I don’t know what to tell you.”

I also was always cracking jokes about being a failed writer. A student said to me as a joke, “Why don’t you write movies? You’d be good at it!” I was like, “Ha ha ha. Nobody writes movies!” Then flash forward five years later, I actually gave it a shot and she was right. I should have listened to her a lot sooner.

Scott: How did you learn to write screenplays?

Chris: The screenwriting subreddit and this website called “Go Into the Story,” is how I learned.

Scott: Well, there you go.

Chris: My wife and I were in Boston and we got hit…this was February of 2015, we got hit by these four, five back-to-back blizzards. Snow was above my head. Car was literally buried. Couldn’t open our front door. My wife and I were locked in our apartment for nine days. We literally couldn’t open the front door. And we had a two year old and one more on the way.

I was inspired by fatherhood. I had a story in my head, and that student’s words were always in there. I googled how to write a movie and the screenwriting subreddit popped up.

I spent one day reading the top posts on the subreddit. In 2015 r/screenwriting was such a magical place with so many gifted writers there. Pro and amateur. Working and “had-worked.” I posted the script to the subreddit for feedback.

Screenwriter Robert Cargill, of all people, was active at the time, and we started chatting. I learned from Chin Ho! how important networking was to an artistic career, and never let an opportunity go.

Seymour Stein, the man who signed Talking Heads, The Ramones, and Madonna came to see Chin Ho! at CBGB’s once. We had a song that we knew he liked called “Incoherent” and wanted to check us out. At one point he came and leaned against the wall next to me after our set, and I chickened out saying something to him. Then he left. Later I read in a Rolling Stone article where he said he always gives his artists a chance to stick their necks out and prove they want it. Madonna came to his hospital bed when he had open heart surgery or something to get signed. That’s how he knew who was hungry enough to want it. To take the risk and talk to him. And I was too scared to even say hello.

I always wondered if that was a missed opportunity to rock stardom.

Wasn’t going to happen again. I basically reached out to Cargill, told him my Seymour Stein story, and said, “Dude, can you give me 30 minutes of your time?” He said yes. He read the script and basically gave me my first masterclass in screenwriting. I learned more in that 30 minute conversation than ever before. Cargill.. if you’re reading this. I love you.

Then I changed that script around based on the notes he gave. Not every one of them. But about 70%. I spent two years writing and rewriting it, probably about 16, 17 times while doing other scripts. Then I found Going Into the Story, and I found Michael Tucker’s “Lessons from the Screenplay” YouTube channel.

And there was a guy on the subreddit named Matt Lazarus, aka Cynical Lad, who was a working screenwriter at the time. He was a fellow Vermonter. He was working in LA and I connected with him, talking through email and such about the industry and scripts. He was my Save the Cat. That’s how I learned. He sadly passed away a few years ago.

I try to get the name “Lazarus” into every script I write, or get someone to call someone a “cynical lad” to honor his memory.

I learned strictly from what I could find on the Internet and just doing it.

Scott: That approach worked out for you because you’ve had two scripts make the annual Black List, “Viceland” in 2020 and the script we’re going to talk about, “Kazan” which made the list in 2023. What’s that experience been like, making the Black List?

Chris: Unbelievable, two different experiences. The first time I made it with “Viceland,” it was a COVID year. My manager, John Zaozirny at Bellevue is a great guy. Incredibly smart. He got me a ton of generals, and I was able to make a lot of connections with people. But this was 2020. People had no idea if movies were going to ever return in 2020. If movie theaters were going to come back, much less want to hire someone to write a script. It was such an odd time. And a hard to break into Hollywood no doubt.

I had these great generals and I met a lot of wonderful and amazing people at these companies that I was dying to work with. People I felt were impossible to meet only a year before. Talking to Jonah Hill, Bad Robot, Legendary Films, etc. But they all ended the same. “Well, we’ll have to get back to you when this whole pandemic thing is over.”

So I went to John when the Viceland wave died down and said, “What’s next?” And he was like, “On the Waterfront.” I was like, “Let’s do On the Waterfront. Here we go.” So we started working on the Kazan story.

The Black List in 2023 was such a different experience.

People are eager. People are open. People want ideas. Or they have ideas so they want writers. I signed with Chris Ridenhour at IAG. He immediately got me into pitch meetings on two big biopics. Some IP’s that are out there. Some production companies have sent materials to me to pitch on, and I’m developing a story from the ground up with another development exec.

And Kazan was perfect for me because it also incorporates The Crucible by Arthur Miller — one of those despised things I read in high school that I fell in love with on the tour bus. And then taught it in my American Literature classes. I know it backwards and forwards.

Scott: That’s a perfect segue to Kazan. Here’s the summary of it as provided by the Black List.

“The story of the tumultuous relationship between Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan, born out of the success of ‘Death of a Salesman’ and destroyed when Kazan named names to the House Committee of Un-American Activities, resulting in two of the greatest works of the 20th century, ‘The Crucible’ and On the Waterfront.”

What was the inspiration for taking this on? Is this something you had talked to John about before, or John mentioned this to you. How did you land on this?

Chris: One of John’s absolute favorite movies is “A Face in the Crowd.” We talk about A Face in the Crowd a lot, and it’s a Kazan film. He’s a big fan of that golden era. We knew Viceland was our little punk-rock, Aaron-Sorkin script; the way that we pitched it, we wanted to do something bigger. Something that was celebrating that golden era of Hollywood and something that aimed for the fences. And I think John likes me as a writer because I don’t fear that. I’ll take risks and aim high. If we want to write something aimed at Spielberg then we write something that’s aimed at Spielberg. Damn the torpedoes.

And that era of McCarthyism where Kazan and Miller dwelled was very familiar and aligned politically to where we are now. It makes me yearn to be in the classroom again. Where being on one side of the political spectrum damns you to the other side. Damns you depending on the point of view of who you’re talking to. Or raises you up.

When we started talking about Kazan and Miller, it was this idea of, maybe we should find a way of breaking that story, that friendship. Let the heart of the story be these two gentlemen who hitch their horses together to try to overcome incredible odds and make it on Broadway on their own… and then do it. Together. Then what happens when one of them excels further and the other one feels left behind? And how would you pivot your political views and ethics to better yourself professionally?

That was really interesting to me because that idea of taking the next big step to better yourself is a part of my psyche. I know that feeling of never being satisfied with what you have and where you are. And how protective of what I’ve done, and how far I’d go to preserve it and protect it. To keep doing it. That’s definitely inside me as it was Kazan. That’s a theme in almost of every successful script I ever wrote. They all have that element.

The protagonists believe that there’s something — even if they don’t know what it is — in them that’s untapped. Bigger than them. Kazan knew he had that in him. Miller was fine where he was and what he accomplished, and would never sacrifice his scruples. Kazan couldn’t. He could never be satisfied, and I get that part of being a creative.

We decided to focus in on their friendship and what happens when they start sacrificing each other to actually achieve their dream; by sacrificing each other, they go on to achieving the greatness they were both pressing for: Miller’s The Crucible, and Kazan’s On The Waterfront.

Scott: The description that you had of your own existence going from the band and then to college and teaching high school shows that you were trying to better yourself. I could see why you would resonate with this idea.

Chris: Yeah, 100 percent. Even my script I wrote about the skateboarder Rodney Mullen, which is what got me connected to Bellevue. Rodney Mullen was the skateboarder who invented the Flatland Ollie — the jump without a launch ramp. Revolutionized skateboarding. He was on the Bones Brigade alongside Tony Hawk back in the 80s.

He’s watching these guys go 50-feet ramps and going 30 feet up and above that and doing tricks and he was like, “I can’t do that.” He was pulled out of obscurity in Florida and brought to LA and told, “No. You’re going to do great things. You’re going to be huge!” And it doesn’t happen for him. Not for a long time. That was autobiographical for me.

Every character that I’m drawn to has that sense in them that there is something that has yet to open up, or they have more to give to the world, and the struggle is figuring out how to get it out.

That’s what drew me to Kazan, Miller and to the guys from Viceland, from “Vice Magazine.”

Every script I wrote that had wheels on it, that was the invisible thread through all of them. People yearning to do immortal things. If I have a motif in my scripts, that’s it.

And daddy issues. [laughs]

Scott: Let’s talk about these two central characters. I’d like for you to draw comparisons and contrast between them. Here’s how Kazan’s introduced in the script:

“33, a ragged face of Middle Europe roots, carries the scars of a poverty-stricken immigrant upbringing and a rage in his eyes. Didn’t even have a smile.”

Then, in contrast, Miller:

“33, prim and proper mannerisms manicured-like hedges around his father’s estate. Unlike Kazan, his face is solid, built on a foundation of a full belly of wealth.”

There’s obviously a socioeconomic difference between the two. What else would you say draws them together, but also distinguishes them?

Chris: The two biggest differences that I pulled from the research between Miller and Kazan was that Miller was artistically satisfied. He knew he was good. He knew that he was great. And didn’t really need to prove it. He knew the world would come to him because, being a child of upper class roots, it always did. He never had that feeling that he had to be hungry. To sacrifice. To do the next thing and the next thing had to be bigger than the previous thing.

The man hit it big on Broadway with Death of a Salesman, he didn’t even attempt to write another play. He tried to direct another person’s play. Then after The Crucible, which gave him immortality, it took him another 10 years before he wrote the next one.

He was this guy who was cut out of wealth; where it was OK to fail and it was OK to take some time off, versus Kazan.

Kazan, he has in his biography this amazing photo of two year old him and his family when they first arrived in America from Greece. In his notes he says something along the lines of, “If you look at this, we’re all touching each other.” Everyone has a hand on somebody and he was like, “That’s something that we don’t do anymore. Americans don’t do that. We lost that.”

I was like, “This is a dude who has put everything into becoming American to the point where now he’s old and looking back and regretful. He’s looking back and feeling the loss of who he was, and his instinct is… oh well.”

To him, that was a sacrifice to become American. He needed more, and was willing to sacrifice it all to get it. He had to be sleeping with Marilyn Monroe behind his wife’s back. He had to sleep with all of his leading ladies. He had to be on a constant conquest and he had to conquer.

That was what I pulled from it. You don’t get to the top without making some people angry. You don’t get that thing without burning bridges. You don’t bed Marilyn Monroe if you don’t plan on hurting other people. For him, anybody who stood in the way of him becoming an icon, becoming immortal and a legend, the best there ever was, anybody standing between him and that was going to get trampled, including his own family. But not Miller.

Miller knew he was going to come up with something great and was patient. And it was that calmness that eventually got him married to Monroe (and eventually bore her to divorce). Kazan wasn’t. He wanted to burn the world if they didn’t love him. That was what he wanted to do.

Scott: You get a sense that he needed that external validation and that’s what the Oscar for Best Director represented for him, right?

Chris: Yeah, his shield. To prove that he was an American. His father charged him, “Make this country yours, make the Kazans be American.”

He thought the only way that could happen would be to achieve something that equaled America’s greatness — that top tier, one-percent thing. In his mind the Oscar was that thing. He watched Miller win awards effortlessly. He was fuming about that.

We took some liberties with Kazan’s story because, if you’re a big Golden Age of Hollywood nerd like John and I, Kazan did win a Best Director Oscar BEFORE On the Waterfront. It was actually for his first film ever, A Gentlemen’s Agreement, the moment he got out there.

John and I were like, “No, we’re not going to talk about that. Don’t tell anyone that.”

[laughter]

Scott: I do want to get into that, because writing a historical adaptation is a tricky business. I want to get to that just a sec because there’s a whole backdrop to this.

Of course, being a screenwriter and a lover of history, the Hollywood Blacklist was just such an incredibly vicious period of time.

There’s always a question in Hollywood whenever you do something that’s a period piece: “Why now?” You just mentioned it earlier. We are in this strange type of an environment nowadays that echoes the political and cultural situation back in the late 40s and 50s America.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about your understanding of that whole Red Scare, HUAC committee, the Hollywood Blacklist. What was your general sense of how you’re going to use that as the backdrop of the story?

Chris: I think I was raised as a creative-minded person. But blue collar. My mom worked on a factory machine when I was a kid. So did my father. Section 9 housing. Workers Unions. Rage against the machine. The landlord sucks. The boss sucks. Damn the Man. Power in numbers. .

My grandfather Joe Smyrski took me to see the movie Guilty by Suspicion in 1991. He was the guy who sort of planted the seed of the love of film and the meaning of film for me. We’d go to movies and he’d explain all the inner workings to me so I understood what I was watching. And took me to movies that were over my 12 year old head, but he had a magic to him that made it all make sense to me. That’s where I learned about McCarthy… and him showing me Silkwood, the Union-movie with Meryl Streep.

The more I read about Kazan, the more you realize that it was a no-win situation for everybody involved. Pressure from McCarthy, from the Unions, from the communists, from the studios. Once you were named, you were named, and that was that. You had to choose a side.

Tying it into the Salem witch trials, as Miller did, made perfect sense. I say this as a fan, but The Crucible is a very easy interpretation of the situation. Be good. Stand by your principles. Deny. Deny. Deny. Versus Kazan, where here’s this guy who’s like, “Look, I won’t deny it. I was a communist. I told you I was a communist before. It’s the truth!”

He testified twice. The first time he named himself, didn’t name anybody else. Even when provoked, he was like, “No, I’m sorry, I’m here for me. If you want to know about them, you can ask other people, but I’m not going to tell you.”

Then the second time he’s realizing that these people he’s protecting, these members of Group Theatre back in the day, who had kicked him out of Group Theatre because he stood up to the Communist Party, threw him under the bus.

Why protect those people? Brando’s Terry Malloy was a thug. Did horrible things because horrible people told him to. Then they turn on him and try to get his brother to kill him.

That was what was happening to Kazan in Hollywood. They were driving wedges between him and Hollywood. “Why am I going to lose Hollywood over these people who weren’t protecting me back then?” He did it and had to face that backlash.

I think that’s important today because you read about these celebrities who say something or they post something, or whatever, that either is viciously cruel and heartless or is misconstrued that way. The Internet and the social networking today is like having your name named. If you post the wrong thing, and enough people say you’re out… you’re out.

Be honest about who you are and what you think. But accept the consequences.

That’s what Kazan was facing. He was like, “Well, I can fess up and be honest and continue on and be hated, or I could lie and keep some sort of false sense of pride about who I was and lose everything. What should I do?” He chose to protect himself.

Now, as a 47-year-old writer who feels like they’re on the brink of something happening in Hollywood, if I was in that situation, I can’t tell you I’d go the Miller route or the Kazan route.

If it was suddenly anti-American to be in a band and could lose the last seven years of work in Hollywood because of it. And someone said, were you in a band? I’d be like, “You know I was in a band! You know who I was in a band with! It’s documented! Why do you need me to say it!?!”

Damned if you say the truth. What everyone already knows. That’s where Elia Kazan was. I’d like to think I’d take the high road and do nothing, but I can’t honestly tell you what I would do.

I wanted to get that in the script. I wanted people to get into Kazan’s mindset and be like, “This isn’t an honorable thing from any point of view.” This is a rock and a hard place and there’s no easy decision to make.

That was the motivation for the story, do you tell the truth to save yourself, even if the truth hurts those you love? In the end, he told the truth. What everyone already knew.

But he never named Miller. Even when implored.

Scott: You probably heard the traditional biopic, the cradle-to-grave biopic, where you cover the expanse of an entire lifetime versus what’s become more popular in the last 15, 20 years or so, what is called a “snapshot bio.” Where you use a compressed period of time as a lens through which you can interpret a character. Like what Spielberg did with Lincoln that just focused on the passing of the 13th amendment.

You’ve got a hybrid thing here going, it seems to me because Act One is like the friendship in Death of a Salesman, and off of that, seeing, “There is Arthur Miller’s big name, and here’s my little name,” and then getting that offer to go to Hollywood.

Then Act Two is that post-success of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” where Kazan does get nominated for best director. Then Arthur Miller’s in Hollywood, too, and Marilyn Monroe, all that stuff. That, too, is this compressed period of time. It’s maybe five weeks, six weeks, or something like that before the Academy Awards?

Chris: Yep.

Scott: Then you’ve got Act Three, which is the Schulberg writing the whole On-the-Waterfront thing versus the parallel storyline with Miller doing The Crucible. It’s almost like three snapshots.

Chris: 100 percent.

Scott: How did you crack that structure?

Chris: The first act takes place over three years. The second act takes place in about five weeks. The third act takes place over two years. That came from John and I, the trial and error of trying to figure out how to tell a 30-year friendship in two hours, essentially.

We tried to do the snapshot. We tried to do the “One Night in Miami” kind of thing, where maybe it’s the opening night of Streetcar, and it’s a party and Kazan has to make the decision at the party. But it just didn’t work.

It took us two-and-a-half years to crack the story before I even started to write it.

Scott: Wow.

Chris: We also tried to do the Steve Jobs approach, where it was like opening night of Death of a Salesman and then opening night of Streetcar. I can’t remember how we had the third. Oh, the finale was the failed play that Miller and Kazan did together at the end of their career. They got together one last time, and it was a miserable failure. Miller was a post-Monroe trainwreck and Kazan was on top of the world — switched roles from their roots.

It wasn’t capturing that era. Didn’t have “that feel.” Felt small.

That was what we kept bumping on. We wanted to see the old Warner Bros. lot. We wanted to see DeMille. Bogart. We wanted to see Monroe. We wanted to have a conversation about the Dodgers moving out to LA. More than just the backstage wings of three different parties.

We wanted it to be big.

Finally, one day I said, “John, I’m just going to write about the creation of Death of a Salesman. I’m just going to write that. I’m going to see how many pages it takes. Then I’m going to get back to you, and we’re going to talk about what would happen next.”

John had faith in me, so that’s what we did. I wrote, I think, the first 22 pages or 24 pages about Kazan getting booted out of Group Theatre by the communists, and finding Miller and doing Streetcar and conquering Broadway.

I was like, “OK, I wrote a short film about that.” Then I was like, “I need a second short film about Kazan in Hollywood now and Miller’s coming to visit,” and that’s how we put it together.

It was funny because there were so many stops and breaks. Finally, when it clicked, it clicked, and I wrote that draft of Kazan, the Black List draft after two-and-a-half years… in about four weeks.

That was the perfect timing to get it out there, right before the Black List voting. Irony.

Scott: Well, you got it across. I picked up on that, so it’s very effective. That middle part, let’s go back to what you were talking about in terms of Kazan’s decision. Part of that is his drive to succeed, Best Director Oscar, that obsession with that, but one thing that happens in the middle of your script, that Act Two, is the whole Cecil B. DeMille machinations with people and the FBI and extortion and photos.

That pressure keeps building. It’s relentless. I’m assuming some of that is true, maybe a lot of it. How much of that stuff is accurate, historically?

Chris: There’s one thing that I’ve learned from reading about Elia Kazan and reading his memoir. You can’t believe a word the dude says. He’s got these massive stories in him. His memoir is 1,500 pages long and is called “A Life.” It’s ridiculous. He breaks down every single play he directed, every actress he slept with, in great detail — quoting things verbatim that were said 50 years before he wrote it. I guess he’s got a memory like a vault, and you’re just like, “Dude, there’s no way.” So full of shit.

So that was another thing that John and I went back and forth on whose story is this? Whose point of view is this story?

Molly Kazan swore that she was followed by the FBI and Kazan just hated DeMille, according to Kazan. He felt like DeMille was out to get him, but he also felt like everybody was out to get him.

We needed an antagonist. We needed somebody to be pulling it all. We felt Ronald Reagan would just be a little too on the nose…

We were like, “Let’s take DeMille and Reagan’s crony and make them be the bad guys.” Just the stuff that Kazan said happened, we’ll get it in there, and we’ll show it.

The Men from Detroit, as Kazan referred to the Communist Party members, he claims they showed up at his door in Hollywood and threatened him and said, “If you don’t protect us, we’re going to murder your kids.” But who knows.

According to him all that stuff happened, so we got it in there as much as we could. But it could also just him making excuses after-the-fact to cover his own ass.

Scott: Well, that gives you some cover.

Chris: Right.

Scott: I’d like to follow up on that because the end of Act Two is your classic all-is-lost, he does testify, and then everybody hates him. Then you’ve got this moment of serendipity where he ends up in a bar and there’s Budd Schulberg. Did that actually happen?

Chris: Kazan was of that first generation of Hollywood mythmakers. He was one of the dreamers. He was one of the guys who created the mysticism of Hollywood.

According to him, he went back to New York to try to make good with some friends and ended up going into the waterfront bar and found Budd Schulberg there in a fist fight. Is that what happened? Probably not. It’s his story and it’s Hollywood gold. You always have that: the lore attached to Hollywood movies. The tales are sometimes better than the films themselves.

But, in reality, Schulberg was writing On The Waterfront at the same time as Miller based on the same articles. I’m sure there was no magical meeting. Kazan must have known that. Hollywood is a small town now and was smaller back then.

Kazan spends his memoir just crapping on Miller’s draft of the same story. Miller’s was called “The Hook” and was focusing more on the politics while Schulberg was focusing more on the character and the emotional drive of Terry mallow versus Miller who was still writing…He wasn’t writing Hollywood, he was still writing for the Broadway stage. Not the screen.

Scott: That was interesting. It was the same source material, but…

Chris: Different outcome. Different takes.

Scott: Two divergent takes on it. It was interesting because your tag at the very end of the script does mention the Lifetime Achievement Award that Kazan got at the Oscar ceremony in 1999. I remember watching that on TV. I knew about the Hollywood Blacklist, of course. It’s echoed in your story because he wins his Academy Award in ’55, but in 1999 when they announced the Lifetime Achievement Award, some people applauded, some didn’t.

I remember Warren Beatty got up, but Spielberg sat down, but he applauded, and then there was Nick Nolte and some of the other people didn’t applaud at all. It’s still a thing after all these years,

Chris: It’s still a thing and I wonder if that would still be a thing now, I remember that, too. Like I said, my grandfather was the one who put movies into my head and we would watch the Oscars together. I remembered that moment.

I don’t know how to respond to that because I get it, from the people who he hurt, the number of careers that were crushed under his feet because he wanted to be on top. People died.

I think I do know how to respond to this. The character of Jeff Corey in the script. He was a real person. Jeff Corey was an amazing actor who had quite the career moving at a rapid pace during this time period. Funny enough, I taught in Atlanta with his granddaughter, Nora, and that’s how I knew about his story. He was one of the blacklisted actors.

Corey and Kazan did not know each other. I really wanted to get Jeff Cory’s story out there because I thought it was amazing and Jeff Corey in the script, he takes the high road and he’s like, “I’m not going to do any of this.”

Which, talking about strange serendipity nature of the world and Hollywood, the character in The Crucible who was named after a real person during the Salem Witch Trials, who takes the high road that inspires John Proctor to do the same… was named Giles Corey.

But Jeff Corey. He very famously appeared in front of HUAC wearing sunglasses and was one of the first to basically talk to McCarthy out of spite. He was the first to be like…basically he had the first fuck-you face on live TV.

Jeff Corey stuck to his morals and he refused to testify. The information that they had gathered about him was completely incorrect. The testimony in the script is his actual testimony.

He’s asked, “Where were you in 1940 something? Did you attend any meetings?” Corey’s response was, “I did. I attended a lot of meetings. Mostly they were about the sinking Nazi U-boats because I was fighting World War II in 19…”. He was like, “That’s where I was. I attended a lot of meetings. Yep, I did. Where were you?”

Fucking awesome.

He spent the next 12 years blacklisted from Hollywood. But started teaching acting classes in his backyard. In that backyard, Jeff Corey created Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, — and who else was back? — Jane Fonda…

Scott: Jane Fonda…

Chris: Yeah, Jane Fonda, Leonard Nimoy, James Dean. He brought in the next generation of Hollywood, but the sacrifice he made, his family he couldn’t keep, for years…Scott, he has an amazing memoir out there called “Teaching Hollywood How to Act.”

“I teach people, not things” is a great fucking line in there. For teachers all over.

He ended up losing everything and gave more to the world because he lost it. Because of snakes like Kazan. Who knows how many other names we lost, Hollywood names that could have been somebody because Kazan had to be at the forefront, and he had to be the central figure of it all.

When Kazan got that Academy Award, I think the people who were sitting down were sitting down for those people. The nameless. The Jeff Corey’s. The people who couldn’t be there because of him. I think they were doing it in honor of them versus honoring Kazan.

Scott: It really is just such a tragic chapter, and not only Hollywood history, but American history. The script you’ve written, the way it ends, because they get together again and they have it out, these two guys. Let me read this exchange between the two of them in your script.

Kazan says, “I beat the Communist Party. I beat McCarthy. I dodged the Blacklist, and I won. I won it all.”

Then Miller says, “McCarthy didn’t create the Blacklist. Hollywood did to protect itself from outsiders like you. You sided with your oppressor, and they awarded you for doing what you always do as you were told. You destroyed careers, ravaged friendships, ruined families.” And Kazan is quick to snap back “Who ruined yours?” The story really is tragedy, isn’t it? It’s almost like Charles Foster Kane.

Chris: It’s a man who gets everything that he wants, and loses everything that he needs and doesn’t realize that until the very end.

He loses all the people who got him there, and all the people who stood by him. Through all of it, he loses them all in the end to get the golden statue. Then when he looks in the statue, he sees his distorted face. And is capable of kicking his best friend down even more when seeing him at rock bottom. One last time to ensure his place at the top.

Scott: That’s great.

Chris: There’s a little Velveeta cheese in there. I think for me that was the end. That was the moment. That was where Miller got to be able to say the Hollywood machine created the blacklist to protect itself. It didn’t need to exist.

It was literally just everyone getting on their knees to McCarthy and saying, “Please don’t cause problems. Don’t ruin me!” Kazan was just a puppet in this whole time period. He did the dance. He sang when he was told to sing. He thought he was standing up for himself, but in the end, he was doing exactly what he was told to do. He got his reward for doing it, like a mutt.

Just like the entire Hollywood industry was at the time. Protecting itself.

Scott: It’s it reminds me of that Bible verse, “Beware the man who finds the kingdom, but loses his soul.”

Well, it’s a terrific script. What’s the status on it? It might be a little dicey, I think, because you’ve got Nick Kazan and Robin Swicord…

Chris: I kept that in my mind. Obviously, John and I were very aware of dealing with Hollywood royalty, the names that were attached to this and the family lines that are still doing this.

“At Close Range” is one of my all-time favorite movies, and directed by one of Kazan’s kids, I think he directed it or did he write it? Directed it. I can’t remember. Sean Penn, Madonna’s music, it’s amazing, but so in my head. I was like, “I do need to honor this guy. And damn him at the same time” The script, I think, is it’s on people’s desks. We’ll have to see.

I tell John that I don’t want daily updates. I want to get that golden email someday.

Scott: At the very least, what you call in Hollywood, a great writing sample.

Chris: Thank you.

Scott: Let’s segue into some craft questions for you. You did mention that you’ve been working on or exploring doing some more biopics. Is this a case where, like Hollywood does, they tend to brand people. You did a biopic. “Oh, so you’re Mr. Biopic now,” or is this more reflection of the fact that you really like writing?

Chris: I don’t mind. If I get pigeonholed as a biopic writer, I’ve got no problem with that. It is my niche. I’m going all the way back to my literary analysis. The research is my favorite part. I enjoy digging into a person’s life and trying to mine out a three-act story structure.

Someone said, I think it was Jon Silk, the producer and a friend of mine now who I met through Viceland said, “God doesn’t write in three acts. That’s why you have to.” That’s what he told me. I was like, “Yeah. That’s it.”

I really enjoy adapting. I really want to be an adaptation guy. I don’t come up with good ideas on my own. Every now and then I’ll get a little one that I think is interesting. For the most part, I want to be the person that people send IP to and say, “Hey, what would you do with this?”

I don’t want to waste my time, or my manager or agent’s time, coming up with scripts that people don’t want to make. I want people to hand me packets of things saying, “How would you do this and we want to make this?” I’m like, “Let’s do it like this. Let’s take it in this direction.”

If there’s a great nugget or a great story out there that needs to be told or people should know about, I’m all about that and it doesn’t bother me to be that person.

Scott: I was very impressed with a lot of the script, but two things I wanted to talk about in terms of craft. You’ve got these time jumps, a bunch of them.

You mentioned that Act One is maybe two years. Act Two is maybe five weeks. Act Three is maybe three to three years. Those transitions that you do, they’re seamless. A lot of them are, the standard pre-laps and that sort of thing, but there’s a lot of visuals that you…

You don’t shy away from that so-called rule. It’s not like camera angles, but it does feel very directorial in some respect, because there’s a lot of visual writing there. You maybe talk about your philosophy on that and how you use that to help make these transitions seamless.

Chris: My method if I have a method — I don’t know if I have a method of writing — is I sit at my desk all day long playing games and reading articles, and then go play Xbox for a little bit. Then when I lie in bed trying to go to sleep at night. I start visualizing the movie and I lay in bed for an hour-and-a-half or two hours just picturing the movie. Every night. Until I see it. Like it already exists.

Even before I start writing it, or an outline, I’ve watched it a hundred times in my head, and I start to think about, how do I move from 1947 to 1952 without the typical newsreels or the, “Oh, here’s all the major events,” and how do you break that cliché?

Sometimes those are the last things I write because I don’t know yet. I don’t know how it’s going to work, but for the most part, what’s just really important is to make sure that when that scene ends, we are moved into the exact opposite.

The way that Kazan moves from Act One to Act Two is, Kazan tells Miller he’s leaving for California, and Miller’s left looking out at the New York skyline at night, and he cries.

Then the next thing is, I think it’s DeMille in his darkened office and complaining about the immigrants to LA and who are infiltrating his beautiful…

Scott: Domain.

Chris: Yeah, who is storming his castle, and he’s got a stuck curtain and he’s trying to move the curtain to let the light in while talking about pushing people out.

Then finally when he rips it down and the light pours in, it’s Hollywood and you’re just like, “Oh, here we are,” and then Kazan’s at the top of his game essentially. I always try to go from sounds or go from opposites, like light to dark, quiet to loud.

Those are just simple ways of letting your audience know that you’re moving somewhere else or moving forward, or something like that.

Anything but the calendar being ripped off the wall. Anything besides that.

Scott: Maybe the sound thing is a reflection of the fact you were in a band for six years and you love music clearly.

Chris: I put music in every script. Every script I write has music. “Mutt” was all about like ’80s and ’90s, left-of-center college radio, and then Viceland was punk and hardcore.

That’s another part that I really enjoy about screenwriting, is I make a playlist about that time period, and I just listen to it constantly. I guarantee you, they’re public. If you go to Spotify and search “Kazan soundtrack,” you can find all my songs are in script.

Scott: All right. I’m going to check that out.

Chris: All those are in there. Sound is big. I love music, and I love doing stuff like that. Finding new music through writing.

Scott: I’m happy to hear this. Yet another person is basically saying, “These so-called rules,” because that’s one of them, right? “No, you can’t include actual song titles in scripts, because they got to have the…” It’s just bullshit.

Chris: It is bullshit. Anything you can do to get the tone across, do it. Just do it. The song that’s playing when Miller shows up to Kazan’s House in LA is this wonderful song that I had never heard before called, “If I Knew You Were Coming, I Would Have Baked a Cake,” which is the perfect unspoken feelings in that room.

You just read the title, or hear it from the screen, and think, “Oh, I know how everybody in this scene feels.” They’re all like, “Hi, great to see you. Why are you here?” Music, man. Break every rule you can to get that tone, to get that feeling on the page. Break them all.

Scott: One of your fellow 2023 Black List writers, Filipe Coutinho, who I actually worked with as a mentor in a Black List feature writers lab, his script, “Patsy,” which is about Patsy Cline, he actually embedded hot links in the script where you can go and click on it and you can hear Patsy singing “I Fall to Pieces” and other songs.

Chris: Oh that’s so cool. I had a script set up over at Baha Productions that is a horror take on “Spinal Tap.” It’s a documentary about a band who ‘s like the opposite of the Grateful Dead. People don’t follow them. They go nowhere. People go to them, and they don’t come back.

I put hotlinks in that script to comparable music because I didn’t know if anyone in Hollywood would know what I was talking about when I described the music as “grimy, sludgy, Norwegian cacophonic death metal dirge on quaaludes.”

All that stuff’s fun, and I’ve seen scripts now where they actually put visuals in to show you the setting and pictures of characters, which I would never do, but none of the rules are set in stone. So if some screenwriter decided to do it, fuck yeah.

Format’s going to change. Just like the English language and literature, it changes over time, with the time, and things change. Scripts will do the same. Especially with technology. It will have to.

I have a feeling in a couple decades, a screenplay will be an AI-created video format or something that you’re watching versus reading. Who knows?

I have no idea, but the way we do it now will be dead. Me too, probably.

Scott: This idea that there are these rules… No. There’s expectations, conventions, but rules are so restrictive. I hate that word when it’s applied to any creative activity including screenwriting.

Chris: Movies are going to be filmed in virtual reality. There’s going to be a time where we’re going to be wearing headsets and be in theaters with friends all around the world.

That’s going to happen.

We’re going to be looking around like this with our friends, and at a horror movie where the killer’s sneaking up behind us, that’s how we’re going to find out, when we turn around. And we’ll have to scream for everyone to turn around.

The seeds are already out there for that format. The new Apple VR headset has a movie theater built into it. You can put it on and see it in a movie theater like this. It’s all going to change.

If we stick to sluglines and fade-in/fade-out, and, “Don’t put that on there, they’ll stop reading it.” This format is temporary. You have to keep up with it. If we don’t keep up with the tech, we’re going to get left behind.

But then… sheet music hasn’t changed in centuries, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Scott: Let me ask you one last question. What advice do you have for aspiring screenwriters about learning the craft and trying to break into the business?

Chris: I always try to avoid the typical go to response of, “Well, read a lot of scripts and watch a lot of movies, and read scripts while watching movies.” Yep, that’s very important. However, my biggest hack is this.

Get an Excel file opened up, or Google Sheets, or whatever you’re using. Color code it, so the cells alternate colors. You got one column going down.

Sit back and watch a movie by yourself with your laptop, with the screen open, and type what you see and what you hear just as fast as you can. Don’t think. Just type what you see. Then when they switch to a new scene, press tab, go to the next cell, type that scene out.

What starts to happen is a pattern emerges, and things start to come out that you wouldn’t notice through reading the script, or even watching the movie passively, but to actually engage with the film.

An example of this is “The Social Network.” I have probably 100 of these in my Google folder of movies that I have taken for…I think it was Goldman who said every movie has 40 great scenes. I have 40 great scenes of a hundred different movies that basically just explain what’s happening.

In The Social Network, the concept of temperature is mentioned in so many scenes. It’s not a movie that makes you think “temperature” but it’s there. One scene is hot, next one is cold. There’s a scene where they’re outside, and he’s doing this, and he’s looking at Mark going, “Aren’t you cold?” He’s like, “No, I’m fine.” Would have never have noticed this motif unless I was literally sitting there typing out what I am witnessing. Then you go back and you look at it and you start to see it, you start to pull out those things.

Hooray for my literary criticism degree.

That’s how I got ideas like Miller looking at Kazan and seeing…

Scott: That smile.

Chris: His smile, his angry Anatolian Smile. He sees that in the reflection of the silver plate. He’s like, “Ah, there it is.” Then we see it again when it’s reflected in the gold of the Oscar award. Things like that, motif of reflections, are in Kazan. That’s because I’ve sat there and done this to a hundred movies.

You basically map out the entire movie, then in the next column, why? Why did that happen there? What was the character’s reasoning for asking that question?

Why did Eduardo turn to Mark and say, “Aren’t you cold”? Why was that such an important interjection to put into their really intense conversation at that exact moment? You start to realize they’re separating, they’re no longer…He’s literally warming up to Facebook and Eduardo’s cold to it.

Then in the next column, so you got like three columns, you start to create your own little beat sheet. You start to create your own little Joseph Campbell story. The mentor enters, the friendship shatters, you just write these little scene summaries, two or three words.

Then what you have is you have this incredible arsenal of essentially structures of how these things are broken down. When you are writing, you can say like, “Well, man, I just got done writing a very out of character, haunted house story, that I don’t know what’s going to happen with it.”

I went back and I was like, “Well, what did ‘Insidious’ do?” I can sit there and see how Insidious uses its beats to craft its story. Then I can like, “Well, does ‘Poltergeist’ does the same thing?” Like, “Go look at Poltergeist.” I’m like, “It does here, but it changes it down here.”

The wealth of knowledge that you gain about structure from just that process of breaking down movies, scene by scene, is more important to me than just reading the script. Reading the script gets the voice, but the structure comes from dissecting what you’re watching, actively engaging and actively questioning what you’re watching. That’s what I tell everybody. Break them all down.

Scott: That’s great advice. You’re not only learning that script by script, movie by movie at a conscious level, the more you do it, there is an osmosis thing going on where you’re starting to intuit this or get it at a subconscious level.

Chris: Yes. You do start to figure out the pattern of the biopic, even when they’re cradle to grave or when they’re snapshots. They all do have this flow. I hear a lot of writers, especially in the subreddit these days, the screenwriting subreddit. “The structure is bad. Don’t worry about structure.”

If you think about it from an architect’s point of view, the concept of a building, of a standing skyscraper, the structure of that building is built upon concepts that go back thousands of years. You can’t change them too much. It’s the solid base that keeps the building up. Storytellers have to do that same thing. They got to find that solid structure.

What screenwriters have to do is they have to decorate that structure to make it look completely, totally different than anything else they’ve ever seen before, so that when someone drives by it, they see a work of art versus the girders — the structure.

That’s what screenwriters do. That’s the importance of structure: how do you take what a biopic does and play with time. Move forward a decade seamlessly, but yet you’re still doing exactly what the Elvis did as far as structure, and you’re still doing exactly what the biopic Tucker did. You’re still doing exactly what all these other biopic films that come out did — followed the same structure. It’s decorated in a different way.

Sometimes they’re identical, and you’re just like, “Yeah, OK, so every Steven Seagal movie does the same exact thing.” Every now and then you stumble on something like Social Network, where you’re like, “Wow. The moving through time backwards and forwards, it’s ‘Amadeus.’” Then finally you’re like, “IT IS AMADEUS!” That’s magical for me to discover that.

That gets rid of the mystery of structure for me. It’s there and it’s strong, use it. Just make it beautiful. Just make that structure beautiful. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be a screenwriter. You should be doing something else.

Scott: Like William Goldman said: “Screenplays are structure.”

Chris: Absolutely. A hundred percent. The artistry, the talent of the screenwriter is to turn it into an art form, to turn it into something that makes people go like, “Oh, that’s new.” It’s like, “No, it’s not. No, it’s not. You just made it look good.”

Chris is repped by Bellevue Productions.

chrisparizo.com
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8446483/
www.slamdance.com

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.