On Kazan and Loyalty

How can Hollywood “forgive” President Clinton’s actions by separating his personal “affairs” from his job as president but cannot “honor” Elia Kazan by separating his “testimony” from his work as a two-time Oscar-winning director?

Thankfully, Hollywood is not full of hypocrites. A big thumbs-up to Warren Beatty, Helen Hunt and Meryl Streep for honoring Kazan’s lifetime achievement award with their standing ovation. A big thumbs-down to Nick Nolte, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, et al for their self-righteousness.

ANSON LEE

Los Angeles

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The point is the same that we liberals have made about Clinton. Kazan’s personal life and actions have nothing to do with his professional life. And snitching on his best friends does not take away from his talent as a director.

I will borrow from Neil Simon (“The Sunshine Boys”) to summarize Kazan: As a director, very few people can touch him. As a human being, nobody wants to touch him. Let us leave it at that.

GOKUL

Los Angeles

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Patrick Goldstein’s analogy of Kazan informing on his friends before the House Committee on Un-American Activities with “Nazis who tortured Jews” or “Klansmen who bombed a black church” would have done Joe McCarthy proud but it certainly is not a feather in Goldstein’s cap (“Forgive, Protest or Even Learn?” March 24).

The individuals Kazan informed on had not bombed, tortured or harmed anyone in any way. They simply belonged to a political party deemed unacceptable.

NORMA FITTON

San Luis Obispo

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Goldstein makes excellent points about the inseparability of art and politics. As I watched the Oscar show with friends after we returned from the protest outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I was shocked to see Colin Powell come out to introduce film clips of war movies, with a dedication to troops defending our freedom. And this at a time when the U.S. military has been raining bombs on Iraqi civilians and was preparing to rain bombs on Yugoslav civilians. How could defenders of Kazan’s award have the chutzpah to claim that the academy was separating art and politics?

LEONE HANKEY

Los Angeles

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Yes, I agree that his testimony was reprehensible even without the luxury of hindsight as we now have. However, since I was only a couple of months old at the time of Kazan’s testimony, I have a few questions.

I understand that the people he identified were blacklisted, but blacklisted by whom? I understand that the people he identified were unable to get work, but they weren’t given work by whom? Only Elia Kazan? Was he capable of employing every writer, actor, director or technician who was blacklisted and therefore he should bear the guilt for Hollywood? I don’t think so.

It seems to me the complicity for the blacklisting and the climate of fear goes way beyond Kazan, perhaps to people honored by the academy in the past for their achievements. Let’s take our cues from the past and move on.

DAVID NEAL

Los Angeles

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As one of the blacklisted screenwriters who led the protest against the academy’s honoring Kazan, the evening was a great victory for us and for all people who cherish the 1st Amendment.

But the most important accomplishment of our committee’s five-week struggle is that we got the underlying message out, the one not about Kazan: Our country was built upon dissent. Justice must be fought for. And the young should be taught history so that evil periods like McCarthyism do not happen again.

NORMA BARZMAN

Los Angeles

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So the Oscars came off smoothly, with good work rewarded. Early anxieties about the Kazan award went unrealized. There was some scuffling by street protesters but inside the hall the presentation was vigorously applauded; only a few sat silent.

It seems that the fierce and relentless attack on Kazan, lasting many weeks, was in fact the last hurrah of the Hollywood left. (Mind you, the Hollywood liberal is still with us, but that’s a different breed of cat entirely, alive and well, content to be the arbiter of taste, political correctness and the search for the next Great Restaurant.)

Your true Hollywood leftists were not all Communist Party members, though they all believed in the Soviet dream. The Iron Curtain dropped and changed everything. Alger Hiss was convicted and imprisoned, the Rosenbergs were executed, Fuchs was captured. It was an Evil Empire, there was a Cold War, and we won.

CHARLTON HESTON

Beverly Hills

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I’m the daughter of the movie actor John Garfield. He was blacklisted and died of a heart attack at 39. My parents were separated at the time. He refused to name names to the committee, and even worse, the FBI was pressuring him to sign an affidavit saying my mother was a Communist.

My father was not political, but he always concerned himself with the plight of the working man. In his film “Body and Soul,” he plays a boxer confronted by mobsters who want him to throw a fight. He refuses. In the same way, in his own life, he refused to give up my mother. As a result, he was hounded to his grave by the FBI. He hadn’t worked in 18 months. Days before his death, both his friends, Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan, named names.

We are always in danger of forgetting our history. We need to identify those instances where individuals behave with honor and integrity when faced with death, as depicted in films like “Life Is Beautiful” and “Saving Private Ryan.”

Hollywood, at its best, shows us who our heroes are. In my opinion, my father was one. One doesn’t rat on one’s friends.

My father didn’t just die of a heart attack, he died of a broken heart.

JULIE GARFIELD

Los Angeles

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How ironic that juxtaposed with the presentation of a special Oscar to Kazan, who regardless of his talent cruelly threw friends and associates to the wolves of the HUAC, a film montage in memory of Stanley Kubrick showed a clip from “Spartacus” in which the slaves each declared himself to be Spartacus to the Roman soldiers rather than identify Spartacus so that they would be freed!

PHYLLIS H. FLETCHER

Goleta

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So Kazan got his honorary Oscar. Members of the entertainment community either applauded or didn’t. After the ceremony, everyone went back to work and made money. Until they hit 40. Then the other blacklist kicks in.

SUZY SIMON

JOEL SANOFF

Sherman Oaks