Collaborators

Set amidst Hollywood blacklisting and sexual exploitation, McCarthy witch hunts, the violent struggle for civil rights, and Cold War nuclear brinkmanship, COLLABORATORS has two main threads: the love and marriage between playwright Arthur Miller and movie star Marilyn Monroe; and the ramifications of director Elia Kazan's decision to "name names" before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). COLLABORATORS strives to remain historically accurate while imagining the characters' interior lives as they move through this turbulent period.Kazan introduces Monroe to Miller in 1951, while the young, unknown actress is Kazan's mistress, and it is love at first sight for both of them; but the highly successful creative collaboration between the director and playwright soon ruptures over Kazan's testimony. Miller, who flees back to New York to avoid betraying his wife with Monroe, subsequently writes THE CRUCIBLE to condemn informing, while Kazan goes on to direct the Academy Award-winning movie, ON THE WATERFRONT, which celebrates an act of informing as heroic. And Monroe continues her affair with Kazan, marries and divorces Joe DiMaggio, becomes a major movie star, forms her own production company so she can become a serious actor, meets the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, marries and divorces Miller, and becomes involved with John Kennedy. The director and playwright reunite years later when Kazan directs Miller's AFTER THE FALL, which is based on the playwright's failed marriage to Monroe, a marriage that was cursed on their wedding day when a paparazza died in a car crash while chasing them - the most famous couple in the history of the world to that date. Monroe takes a fatal overdose of prescription drugs while Miller decides, on that day, that the character based on Monroe must kill herself in his play. (This is historically accurate.)COLLABORATORS uses multiple narrators to tell this story, giving each principal character her or his own voice. It shows Monroe to be an intelligent, perceptive and authentic artist frustrated by a culture that refuses to recognize her as such; it offers a balanced depiction of Kazan's dilemma when he was called upon to name names before HUAC, and it presents Miller in love, torn between his passion and his strong sense of duty and proper action.Richard A. Schwartz is Professor Emeritus at Florida International University, where he specialized in the literature, politics, and culture of the period. His seven non-fiction books include COLD WAR REFERENCE GUIDE, COLD WAR CULTURE, THE 1950s, and WOODY: FROM ANTZ TO ZELIG, a comprehensive study of Woody Allen's creative work through 1998. Schwartz's 1983 article describing the FBI investigation of Albert Einstein in the 1950s, a cover story in THE NATION, attracted worldwide attention.