Nicholas Kazan: Laughter in the Dark

Stephen Rebello: Home,' 'the family,' 'marriage' are concepts that loom rather...malevolently in your scripts. Just how strange was your upbringing?

Nick Kazan: Well, it goes back. My great-uncle, who brought my father's family to this country, was a legendary New York character who was profiled in The New Yorker by S.J. Perelman. He insisted on sleeping on the same sofa all his life and would have it transported from the Waldorf-Astoria in New York to the Queen Mary to the Ritz in Paris, have it put on the train in Istanbul and taken off at whatever hotel he was staying at. He'd have it carted off into the hinterlands where he would buy oriental rugs, then do the return trip in reverse order. He made and lost a million dollars twice, lost it first in the stock market crash and then at the racetrack. After losing it the second time, he published three books on how to win at the racetrack. At the end of his life he called himself "Flat-Tire foe," because he could no longer... inflate.

SR: Your father's two mentions of you in his auto-biography are terse-for instance, referring to you when you were a baby as "the new one" and all that.

NK: [laughing] Of all his children. We get along great. We're temperamentally akin. Energetic, enthusiastic, hardworking, optimistic by nature. I used to believe that my father was jealous or wary of my success, because he felt in some sense he was being replaced. After every film, he'd say, "Better luck next time." For instance, when he read At Close Range, he said, "Boy, this is really good. I hope they do it," but when he went to see the movie, he wrote me a letter blaming me for all its faults. I said, "If that's what you thought, why didn't you tell me when you read the script."

SR: But they didn't make your script.

NK: No, they made their own film. Anyway, he was wildly enthusiastic about Reversal of Fortune, so I was forced to revise my theory and accept that his previous opinions had been genuine and not the result of some inner process.

SR: Several people who recommended I read At Close Range told me they thought you were an especially interesting writer because your Oedipal issues were so red-hot.

NK: I was very aware from a young age of the accident of my birth. It was my great good fortune, in many respects, to have the father that I had, to have enough food, to live in a nice house. I was also aware that there was a kind of deferred energy that came to me from my father that had the potential to feed a place inside me that wasn't healthy. That is, people would occasionally gush toward me because of who my father was or be nasty to me because my father testified at HUAC. I was aware that both of these things were completely inappropriate. Maybe I was a baby who was switched at the hospital, you know? What did I have to do with anything, good or bad, that he did? Everyone is obsessed with the mystery of where they come from because it relates to the mystery of our existing at all. I had a very strong father and mother and older brother. My father was a benevolent figure to me. I related to him. I liked him. I felt myself to be like him. I quickly asserted myself as a successful person. One of the most obvious things about me is that I bear his name, which has associations.

SR: Did you ever consider not using your last name?

NK: Some people think of me in terms of my father. A lot of people aren't aware of him. I never mention him. I'm me. If you want to deal with him, deal with him. After struggling as a writer in Berkeley for many years, sending out scripts where nothing would happen, I decided I was foolish not to use my family contacts. My father set up meetings with two people that he liked and trusted. I met both of them. Nothing came of them. I heaved a big sigh. I didn't want to be looking over my own shoulder, trying to decide, if I got any success, whether I deserved it. Now I know that whatever's come to me, I've worked very hard and done it completely by myself.

SR: On some level, your father has to feel that you're crowding his territory.

NK: My mother was a writer, so I always saw myself as going into her profession. I decided to become a writer in my room my freshman year at Swarthmore in 1964, the year my mother died. What made me become a writer was seeing a play one night when I was in college, then waking up the next morning and writing a one-act play. I just sat in my room and I wrote a line of dialogue that was in my head. Another character answered. I didn't know who the characters were. Three hours later and I had 12 single-spaced pages. I got up, drank a cup of tea and literally didn't know what I had written. That experience was so much from my unconscious and that's what's so exciting about writing. It's like a narcotic. Anybody who can get that from any experience-you know, Holy Rollers, people who sing until they get into ecstatic states, voodoo, anything so that you lose yourself, so that you're not even aware that you are-knows what I mean. You don't often get that experience, but I think I keep writing because, when it happens, it's so exhilarating that, even if I only have it once a year, it's worth it.

SR: Well, you're talking about what Byron, Blake, Poe, Kerouac all aimed for-

NK: Oh, I abuse myself. I smoke a pipe, I chew tobacco, which I know are terrible for my health. I don't take really serious drugs. But I think, what am I doing, I'm killing myself. Well, maybe, but I'm getting to do this thing. It seems to happen more frequently, more intensely, more easily if I use caffeine. I've spent months where I've been told I can't drink any caffeine and I just look at my typewriter, look around the room, wander outside. I just have no drive to get things done.

SR: I still think of At Close Range as one of my favorite un-produced scripts.

NK: [laughing] I appreciate that. Jack Nicholson, who wanted to do it with Bob Rafelson, would have torn up the world with that part. We couldn't get the financing. The real guy on whom the "Brad Sr." character was based was so insane in such an electrifying way. When he went to prison, he started a Ku Klux Klan unit in a prison that was 98 percent black. This guy doesn't give a shit. I had the best time writing that script of any I've ever written. It was all there. I was blessed to get that story.

SR: What went so wrong with the movie?

NK: When we read At Close Range with the actors, people laughed all the way through. But Sean Penn and Jamie Foley believed they were making a tragedy, and, to them, a tragedy cannot have laughs. They also took out all the fore-shadowing that is necessary for a tragedy-a tragedy is a train wreck you know is going to happen but can't stop. Sean was at a point in his career where he felt he was on the verge of real superstardom. He felt that this was the picture that was going to do it for him and that he knew how to do it for himself. And he didn't. Sean would one day literally wake and say, "We're not going to shoot this scene," and Jamie would come to me and say, "Sean had a brilliant idea. We're not going to shoot this scene." I said, "If you don't, it means that these other scenes we've already shot will not make sense." And he'd go back to Sean and the next day he'd come back and say, "Sean had a brilliant idea: we're going to shoot the scene." Jamie always said the script was brilliant beyond understanding. And I always thought, "Maybe it's brilliant beyond his understanding, but not beyond mine." I was on location rewriting, but Sean wouldn't let me on the set. He had "too much respect for my work" to allow me to be present while he was acting. What that meant was he wanted license to change whatever he wanted to change at his own whim. Eighty-nine percent of the lines in there are mine, but there are scenes that weren't shot or were truncated.

SR: It strikes me that so many people can feel strongly about a script, yet see it completely differently.

NK: A script is like a Rorschach that everybody projects onto. Jamie Foley and Sean Penn weren't lying. They loved it. Maybe Sean felt that, as long as I was there, the script was mine and I might be saying, "You're doing it wrong." He had to make it his own and so did Jamie. Sean still boasts about how he rewrote the script which, thank God, largely he didn't. Still, they did enough. What's most painful is how few stories come to you from someone else or from your imagination that have this classic a feel.

SR: How demoralizing did it get for you on that one?

NK: People had been going around town saying that At Close Range was the best script they'd read in years. Yet, when it came time to film it, actors could make up their own lines, throw them out, decide they don't want to perform them-whimsically. I think a director should know these lines and scenes are there for a reason. The analogy that's always used is that the writer is just the architect. If you know anything about buildings, that means that the director is the contractor. When he's putting something up that doesn't work, he calls the architect who comes on site and they can solve it.

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