For a mother of small children, a quiet solo flight is a vacation unto itself. She scrolled through the in-flight movies. Until then she had been avoiding rewatching her grandfather Elia Kazan’s 1955 masterpiece.
She was flying halfway across the world to scout locations for her own version of East of Eden, a seven-part adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel that premieres on Netflix on Oct. 1. She hadn’t wanted the film to influence her. But her script, which she’d begun working on in 2020, was finally turned in.
As the end credits rolled, she sighed in relief. The film, which introduced a brooding James Dean to cinema, is more inspired by the novel than a direct adaptation of it: It covers only the last third, crucial characters have been excised, and famous lines are missing. Cyrus (Tracy Letts in the new series), a self-mythologizing Civil War veteran, prefers his gentle son Adam (Christopher Abbott) to the violent one, Charles (Mike Faist).
A generation later, Adam’s twin sons Aron and Cal (Joe Anders and Joseph Zada) vie for the affection of their emotionally absent father. Kazan wrangles with the novel’s central question: Whether those boys can escape the shadows of their family history and forge their own paths—and whether America, carrying the sins of slavery, campaigns of violence against Native Americans, and racism against immigrants building a future in the West, can do the same. Both versions are, in Kazan’s estimation, self-portraits of the artists who made them.
Renowned for directing A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront and co-founding the influential Actors Studio from which the school of “method acting” was born, Elia Kazan was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. The Hollywood blacklist was in effect and, Faced with the possibility of never being able to work in Hollywood again, he named names. His granddaughter has never read his autobiography, though she has tried.
But she believes that Elia Kazan, who died in 2003 when she was 20, saw himself in the black sheep of the family: “He had this cold and demanding father, and I think he was projecting onto Cal.” Made during a period when the director was facing significant backlash, his version focuses on guilt, rejection, and alienation. What most intrigued Zoe Kazan, a new mother when she started on the script, were characters her grandfather rewrote or omitted: Cathy (Florence Pugh), a mother who walks out on her infant sons and whom Kazan calls “irredeemable, irresistible, and so full of agency,” and Lee (Hoon Lee), a Chinese American servant who steps in to raise the boys. Kazan may live closest to Cathy and Lee in her script.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
