Kathimerini, Greece
March 27 2007
`The whole picture business stank’
Spiro N. Taraviras’s `Buzz’ is an intimate portrait of Hollywood
screenplay writer A.I. Bezzerides
Buzz celebrating his 98th birthday at the Writers Guild of America
screening of the documentary, with Spiro Taraviras and actress Terry
Moore.
By Christine Sturmey – Kathimerini English Edition
A fitting homage to the late Hollywood screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides,
who passed away last January 1 at 98, the documentary written,
directed and produced by Spiro N. Taraviras, `Buzz,’ currently
playing at the capital’s Phillip and Mikrokosmos theaters, offers a
bittersweet account of the life of a master `engineer’ of words. It
is also a lot of fun.
Filmed mostly at the Woodland Hills, California, home of the colorful
Bezzerides, whose nickname was Buzz, the documentary takes us back to
Hollywood’s golden years, but the veneer is quickly stripped by the
elderly Bezzerides as he shuffles around his ramshackle home,
trashing the giant film industry and its approach to the creators it
employed, having them churn out material in assembly-line fashion.
The `dream factory’ of the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood was the place
for an engineer like Buzz, who worked tirelessly on creating his own
original screenplays and on tinkering with those of others so they
would `work’ better.
Taraviras’s award-winning documentary reveals the duality of Buzz –
the engineer who had a collection of rundown jalopies in his backyard
waiting to be fixed and the mechanic of words to whom Hollywood’s
greatest actors turned to give their characters real voice. It is an
intimate portrait of this complex artist and man, following his life
from 1999-2002, when the interviews with him were conducted.
Getting him to talk was no easy matter, says Taraviras. `Step by step
we gained his confidence and he collaborated but he was never an
easygoing interview partner. He was never a person seeking glamour
and he was telling us – screaming to us actually – after few hours of
our daily meetings: `You are stealing my time. I have to go to work.’
He was 92 by then and daily he was sitting in front of his typewriter
writing scripts. After over 70 years of writing the typewriter was
the extension of his fingers. He couldn’t live without writing. His
favorite motto was: `I am not writing for money, I am writing to
write.”
Albert Isaac Bezzerides – who would later become known as `the first
film-noir writer in the United States,’ according to Francois
Truffaut, after writing `Kiss Me Deadly’ – was the son of an Armenian
mother and a Turkish-speaking Greek father. He was born in Samsun,
Turkey, on August 9, 1908. His family migrated to the United States
when Buzz was 2 years old and settled in Fresno, California, where
his father worked as trucker in the produce sector.
His experiences working by his father’s side while also attending
school and the University of California at Berkeley provided the
inspiration for the 1940 drama `They Drive by Night,’ starring George
Raft and Humphrey Bogart, and based on his novel `Long Haul.’
This novel marked the beginning of Buzz’s thorny relationship with
the industry, when Warner Brothers offered him $2,000 for the rights
to his novel and a $300-a-week contract as a screenwriter, after
having produced a script based on his book without buying the rights.
For old Hollywood fans, `Buzz’ is a trip down memory lane, with sexy
trailers of classic films, as well as a fountain of gossip concerning
the inner workings of the industry and juicy tidbits about some of
its greatest stars. Bezzerides reminisces on his friendships with
prized writers William Faulkner and William Saroyan, and actors
Bogart and Robert Mitchum (on `The Angry Hills’) and, of course, his
relationship with an industry he felt had repeatedly cheated him of
his rights.
`He was simply a bad salesman of his work but to me he was a great
writer,’ says Taraviras.
The McCarthy stigma
Buzz was also among hundreds of artists questioned by the McCarthy
Committee over his so-called `un-American’ activities. After being
put on the `gray list’ he fell out of favor with the industry and
struggled to find work.
The documentary pauses on this controversial period of American
history, with commentaries by film critic and historian Dan Georgakas
– who also offers valuable insight on other aspects of Buzz’s life
and work – and actress Gloria Stuart, who had worked closely with
Buzz and was a personal friend.
One wonderful chapter of `Buzz’ shows Bezzerides in his Los Angeles
home and Jules Dassin (Buzz wrote the screenplay for his `Thieves’
Highway’) in Athens holding a dialogue via the documentary. The two
associates comment on one another’s work and iron out an old
misunderstanding that had eaten away at both for over 50 years.
There is also a good deal of information on Buzz’s personal life,
with commentaries offered by his son Peter and daughter Zoe, as well
as by Philippe Garnier, a journalist and film historian who worked
closely with Bezzerides. The documentary also shows Buzz’s profoundly
naive side, best illustrated by a story about his inadvertently
driving a pair of robbers to the sites of their heists.
The two-hour documentary – the result of four years of work and hours
spent at Bezzerides’s home, talking with him and following his daily
routines – treats us to a lot of interesting material.
`I was never a part of the motion-picture life,’ says Buzz, sitting
in his favorite armchair dressed in his trademark lumberjack shirt,
wool cap and worn beige corduroy trousers. `I think the whole picture
business stank,’ he says later.
The documentary ends beautifully, with Buzz walking out of the same
door he came in at the beginning.
`Writers are not considered to be very important in pictures,’ he
says. `What do writers do? They take a blank page and put something
on it… If the page is bad, the picture stinks. If it’s a good page,
the picture doesn’t stink. And the reaction I’m getting today might
mean my pictures said something: reality.’
`Buzz’ is in English with Greek subtitles.