The Power of the Word

Jim could get a bit reactionary. Yeah, that’s an understatement.  I think what helped me deal with his right-wing rants was a deep down knowledge that beyond the Second Amendment, his first and truest love was No. 1, freedom of speech.  It think it’s why he always considered himself a visual journalist, a teller of truth at his core, no matter how poetic his images or how many prints sales and gallery shows he had.

It got us to thinking about great writers, screenwriters and directors who were caught by Jim’s lens: Elia Kazan on assignment and Dalton Trumbo, a speaker at a peace rally who Jim photographed out of sheer admiration.

Elia Kazan

I’m leading with this portrait of director/actor Elia Kazan -- which Jim shot in 1963 on assignment for Cavalier Magazine -- even though I am of very mixed feelings about Kazan due to his outing of communists in 1947 during the Red Scare.  It’s impossible to capture the immense output, credits, bio, etc of Kazan, who lived to see age 94.  Suffice to say, he inspired Marlon Brando, James Dean, Julie Harris, Eva Marie Saint, Warren Beatty, Lee Remick, Karl Malden, and Robert De Niro and directors such as Sidney Lumet, John Cassavetes, Arthur Penn, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese.

I know Jim was proud of this shot and when I admired the way the cigar smoke curled so elegantly and framed him just so, the next thing I know I’m getting a print despite my major problem with Kazan due to his naming names.

This is another instance where my memory is not as sharp as I’d like it to be … but I have a vague recall that Jim figured Kazan “regretted it most likely” and that his body of work made up for it.  Maybe it was a bit of wishful thinking on Jim’s part, I mean Kazan did create one of Jim’s all-time favorite films “East of Eden,” James Dean’s first lead role.

Dalton Trumbo

And then, Jim gives me the shot you see here of Dalton Trumbo, novelist and screenwriter (“Johnny Got His Gun," "Exodus" and Spartacus") and one of the Hollywood 10 blacklisted for a significant part of his career.  For most of my time in NYC, especially when I lived in a nearly 3,000 sq.-ft. converted loft in the Meatpacking District and had a bunch of wall space, I hung Kazan and Trumbo side by side.  It made for some lively dinner party conversations, believe me.

Was Kazan a hero for naming names and outing potential communists and communist sympathizers or was he a money-grubbing rat fink who threw his friends and colleagues “under the bus” so that he could keep working?  The thing that astounds me is that Trumbo never really held a grudge. In fact, in a 2007 documentary Trumbo (through actor David Strathairn) had this to say about it all: "There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides; and almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of these antithetical qualities in his own person, in his own acts."

I think for Jim, where Kazan was concerned it was a classic case of love the work, not the man.  Kazan later explains that he took "only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were, either way, painful and wrong.”

But it's this Kazan quote that really stopped me: “I realize now that work was my drug.  It held me together.  It kept me high.  When I wasn't working, I didn't know who I was or what I was supposed to do."  He just said it a little sooner than Jim that's all.