BUZZ

A. I. Bezzerides or Buzz was born in 1908 in Samsun, on the Black Sea. In 1940 he began working as a screenwriter in Hollywood. François Truffaut described him as Hollywood’s first film noir screenwriter. The screenplay for They Drive by Night (1940), directed by Raoul Walsh, was based on his novel Long Haul. He wrote, among others, the screenplays for Thieves’ Highway (1949), by Jules Dassin, On Dangerous Ground (1951), by Nicholas Ray, and the classic film noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955), by Robert Aldrich. The documentary is a journey to places where Buzz lived and worked, revealing the way Hollywood’s production system worked in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It focuses on Buzz’s disagreements with producers, his collaboration with various directors and his friendship with people such as author William Faulkner and the actors Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum. His friendship with screenwriters, whose names where on the Black List, led to his name being put on an unofficial list, which later came to be known as the Grey List. From then on, Buzz had difficulty in finding jobs