Interview (Part 4): 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.

Today in Part 4 of a 6-part series to run each day this week, Chris discusses how it took him two and a half years to nail the story structure before starting to write the script.

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.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Chris answers some screenwriting craft questions.

For Part 1 of the interview series, go here.

Part 2, go here.

Part 3, go here.

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.