Having just mentioned an Elia Kazan movie, I wanted to direct your attention to a recent Fresh Air episode that has interviews not only with Kazan, but also with Eva Marie Saint.

Film Icons: Elia Kazan / Eva Marie Saint

We begin our series celebrating classic movies with Terry Gross’ 1988 interview with On the Waterfront director Elia Kazan, as well as a 2020 interview with his granddaughter, actor Zoe Kazan. Plus, we’ll hear from the film’s romantic lead, actor Eva Marie Saint, who told Fresh Air in 2000 that she got the part after improvising with Marlon Brando.

Well worth your attention, even though Gross doesn’t ask Kazan about A Face in the Crowd.

But she does ask Eva Marie Saint about Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. And I’m always happy to listen to anyone talk about one of my favorite films.

It also gives me another chance to talk about my friend Frank Scott.

In the 70s and 80s (I only got to know him in the late 80s) Frank worked as a news correspondent for a local Philadelphia radio station. In 1983 during the mayoral race between Wilson Goode and Frank Rizzo, Frank was one of the correspondents selected to anchor the debate between those two candidates, an experience (so his cousin told me at the time) that left him angry at the idiotic constraints put on him by the League of Women Voters that was sponsoring the debate. So he decided not to participate in any future debates if asked.

By the way, I’m in something of a quandary here. You see, Frank Scott was Black, and I fear that to say so puts me in the position of sounding like Stephen Colbert talking about his Black friend.

So I won’t say that Frank was my Black friend.

Anyway, when I did get to know Frank, he once told me about interviewing Eva Marie Saint back in the 70s.

She was promoting a TV movie that she had starred in, The First Woman President, about Edith Wilson after her husband Woodrow had a stroke while still in office, and Frank was next in line to interview her. Meanwhile, the fellow who was currently taking up her time (interviewing her would be too kind a word to describe what he was doing) was not asking her about anything to do with her acting, let alone her appearance in the TV movie.

When he was finally finished and it was Frank’s turn to interview her for his radio station, he started off by apologizing for the previous fellow and asked her if she wanted to take a moment to collect herself. As gracious as she ever was in any of her film roles, she said no, let’s keep right on going; apparently she was used to that kind of treatment by clueless “interviewers”. According to Frank, she and he had a very productive conversation after that. I only wish it had been preserved in some way. Perhaps it still exists in the radio station’s archives, if only I knew how to find it.