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The Big Screen: Treasures from the Moving Image

Presented by UNCSA at UNCSA

April 3, 2010

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A Face in the Crowd Directed by Elia Kazan. With Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick, Percy Waram, Paul McGrath, Rod Brasfield and Marshall Neilan. A charismatic, folk-singing drifter (Griffith, in his feature film debut) is thrust into the national spotlight, becoming an overnight media sensation in the process, and only later revealing himself to be a power-hungry manipulator. A Face in the Crowd reunited director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, their second collaboration after the successful and Academy Award-winning On the Waterfront in 1954. Working from Schulberg’s own short story, “Your Arkansas Traveler,” the filmmakers intended to examine the calculated ways in which the mass media influences public opinion. Kazan and Schulberg were thorough in their research, attending board meetings of Madison Avenue ad companies and visiting New York television stations. A Face in the Crowd was not a big hit when it was first released, perhaps due to the fact that its still-prescient message was years ahead of its time; it was one of the first movies to question television’s influence on our culture, coming nearly two decades before writer Paddy Chayeksfy excoriated the industry in Network. The National Film Preservation Board added the film to the National Film Registry in 2008. This film is part of a series of public screenings entitled The Big Screen: Treasures from the Moving Image Archive sponsored by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts. All ticket proceeds benefit UNCSA School of Filmmaking Scholarships