Wealth & Money Quote by Elia Kazan

Kazan is poking at the most expensive superstition in American culture: the belief that charisma is a kind of moral credential. When he calls stars “overrated,” he isn’t just griping about salaries. He’s challenging the industry’s central illusion that fame equals value, that the face on the poster matters more than the machinery of craft, risk, and labor behind it.

Coming from a director, the line doubles as a turf war. Film mythology sells the actor as auteur-by-proxy: the public attaches meaning to a body, a voice, a private life. Kazan, a key architect of mid-century American realism, had skin in a different game. His best work depends on messy interiority, on performances that look discovered rather than packaged. Star systems flatten that; they turn acting into branding and scripts into delivery vehicles.

The subtext is also self-defense. Kazan’s legacy is permanently complicated by his testimony before HUAC, a decision that stained him in the very community that minted “stars” as untouchable icons. Dismissing stars can read as resentment toward a moralized celebrity culture that can canonize and condemn with the same tabloid speed. If the crowd insists on saints and villains, Kazan wants to shift attention back to process: rehearsal rooms, camera angles, the unglamorous choices that actually make meaning.

It’s a cold line, but strategically cold: an attempt to de-romanticize fame and reassert authorship in an economy built to make directors disappear behind faces.