Buzz (*)
review by Jon
Waterman
There’s no way to know his story by looking at him.
Always donning the same black hat and red checkered flannel
lumberjack shirt, A. I. “Buzz” Bezzerides is a
short elderly man who just happens to be one of Hollywood’s
better underappreciated writers of the 40s and 50s. He also
happens to be one of the first, if not the first, mainstream
writer to bring film noir to American audiences. His writing
credits include “Thieves’ Highway” and “Kiss
Me Deadly” as well as the novel from which “They
Drive by Night” was based. This is the story of an unassuming
Armenian and his rise and decent in Hollywood.
Director Spiro Taraviras uses all the standard public television
documentary techniques to turn this potentially interesting
story into a standard story of Hollywood success and failure.
First there’s the out of place, foreboding deep voiced
narrator looming over everything. Luckily, the narration ends
up being sparse. Then there are the still photographs and movie
posters that get your typical treatment and placement. The
one original aspect is how they zoom into specific sections
of the movie poster, but there isn’t much reason for
it and it distracted me from whatever was being said. The wipes
didn’t work for me either. For such an influential and
talented writer, I wanted to see more than five people interviewed.
They add more near the end, but by that time it’s too
late.
Not all the blame rests on Taraviras, however. Bezzerides
himself proves to be a rather lethargic and at times untrustworthy
subject. Perhaps it’s because he was a nonagenarian at
the time, but he just isn’t a very eloquent speaker.
His stories tend to be overly simplistic, occasionally interesting
and sometimes too short to be effective. I had a hard time
believing his story about talking to Humphrey Bogart through
the window while HB was on his death bed. That’s not
to say it didn’t happen that way. I think the most telling
aspect about talking and following Buzz around was how he pecked
away at his typewriter. Again, this could be due to his old
age, but if he actually wrote in this matter throughout his
career, that makes his story more amazing.
The story is told chronologically, yet it still takes a while
for Taraviras to tell us how Buzz broke into Hollywood. That’s
strange considering that the nearly two hour film merely glances
over much of his personal life. There are only passing mentions
of Buzz’s divorce and his two kids (although one is interviewed
extensively about his father’s career). Mostly it focuses
on the bad deals he made and how the studio system of the time
screwed him over time and time again. Then it all came to a
head when he was gray listed during the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) investigations of the 1950s. After that he
became a television writer, where we was further taken advantage
of.
I guess I sort of just told you most of the major plot points.
That’s fine. You probably don’t need to see the
movie anyway. There are many other books that have more interesting
stories of Hollywood that delve deeper into the studio system
and within HUAC. There have to be better, more general docs
that tell similar tales as well. This effort simply wasn’t
comprehensive enough or unique enough to warrant the long running
time. And it ruins the end to “Kiss Me Deadly.”
respond to jon@filmbrats.com
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