‘The whole picture business stank’
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.
