The ‘Buzz’ on screenwriter is good
By Bob Strauss, Film Critic
Los Angeles Daily News, CA
Aug. 25, 2006
Albert "Buzz" Bezzerides wrote some of the more flavorful films of
the 1940s and ’50s, Nicholas Ray’s primal "On Dangerous Ground" and
the noir apocalypse adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s "Kiss Me Deadly"
among them.
The subject of the documentary "Buzz" was also Humphrey Bogart and
Robert Mitchum’s favorite dialogue doctor. And he was pals with
much-better-known authors William Faulkner and William Saroyan,
among others.
Additionally, at age 98, the Turkey-born, Fresno-raised son of a Greek
father and Armenian mother is still kicking around his ramshackle
Woodland Hills home, shouting like any screenwriter worth his salt
about how Hollywood screwed him. With missing teeth and sheepdog
eyebrows, Buzz still nurtures the sharp, critical view of the world
that informed his best books and scripts – and even at his most
nostalgic moments disdains sentimentality like a cancer. It’s a ball
listening to him gripe.
Two hours of it, though, is a bit much. And Greek director Spiro N.
Taraviras doesn’t present his material in anything like a scintillating
manner. He makes the crucial mistake of going in straight chronological
order, and there really isn’t very much interesting about Bezzerides’
immigrant background or college days at the University of California
at Berkeley. He would’ve been better, perhaps, to revisit that stuff
after focusing on some of Buzz’s movieland adventures, which cover
the gamut from run-ins with moguls to fighting for story integrity
(and usually losing) to the fear and loathing of the anti-communist
witch hunts.
Apparently unable to access (or afford) actual footage from films such
as "They Drive by Night" and "Track of the Cat," Taraviras treats us to
their vintage theatrical trailers instead. This doesn’t give us much
sense of Bezzerides’ fine writing, but boy, were those things sexy
as all get-out. Ever wanted to know why they call them teasers? This
movie shows you.
Beside the always-entertaining Buzz, Taraviras interviews some actors
he wrote for (Cloris Leachman, Terry Moore, Gloria Stuart) and director
Jules Dassin, himself 95 and an Athens-based expatriate since the
blacklist days. Friends, relatives and, of course, enthusiastic
European critics contribute their views. The talking heads are
broken up by unimaginative establishing shots of both San Francisco
(Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars) and SoCal (palm-lined boulevards,
Griffith Observatory).
But we sure get what makes Buzz distinctive: an unshakable belief
that the rich and powerful will always cheat the average guy, and
he crankily considers himself one of the latter to this day. Along
with being a respectful portrait of an amusing, singular talent,
the film also, by extension, fights the good fight for all of the
overlooked creative types whose work make movies great while a few
big names grab all the credit.
BUZZ
Our rating:
(Not rated: language)
Director: Spiro N. Taraviras.
Running time: 1 hr. 58 min.
Playing: Laemmle Fairfax, Los Angeles.
In a nutshell: Biography of 98-year-old screenwriter Albert "Buzz"
Bezzerides is often fascinating.