Who is Elia Kazan?…
> >He’s the guy who *named names* of Hollywood people and writers attending >Communist meetings during the 1950’s House on UnAmerican Activities >Committee hearings. > >He’s widely regarded in Hollywood as a weasal and a rat fink. > >What people rarely talk about is the fact that those who supported >Stalin and Communist propoganda were waaaaaaaay wrong. Their thoughtless >idealism (or conscious in some cases) contributed to the slaughter of >millions. > >If Kazan were in Nazi Germany, he would have named names of those quiet >supporters of the Nazis. Funny how today we are aghast at those who >*failed to speak up* (read *failed to be weasals and rat finks*) when >the Nazis slaughtered but we hold Kazan in contempt for naming the quiet >supporters of Stalin and the Communists who conducted a much larger >slaughter. > >But idealistic *artistes* are often duped by the duplicitous seekers of >power. I find it rather grimly amusing that those who profess the greatest horror at “The Black L
He is an American stage and motion picture director and novelist. He was born in Turkey, and immigrated to the United States in 1913. He became known as a creative and sensitive stage director through his work on such Broadway plays as A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Sweet Bird of Youth. He also received two Academy Awards for best director, for Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and On the Waterfront (1954). So what s the controversy? When the House Un-American Activities Committee put Hollywood under scrutiny in the 1950 s in a search for suspected Communists, director Elia Kazan was willing to name names of film industry colleagues he believed to be party members. Jack Warner, the head of Warner Brothers Studio, first named Kazan as a Communist during the October 1947 HUAC hearings. Kazan, in fact, had been a member of the Communist Party for 19 months in the mid 1930 s. But he ended up selling out his friends in order to save his career. On the n
