Watch PBS American Masters online: Episode 5 A Letter to Elia

For Martin Scorsese, growing up in Little Italy, seeing On the Waterfront and East of Eden as a young man was a life-changing experience. Scorsese appears on and off camera throughout A Letter to Elia, taking us through Kazan�s life and through his own as well, and through his growing realization that there was an artist behind the camera, someone �who knew me, maybe better than I knew myself.� The film is about being exposed to the right movies at the right moment in your adolescent life, when you�re wide open and ready to connect, to be spurred on by the work up there on the screen, and then, maybe, to chart a course toward making your own movies. Watch a preview: Composed of clips, stills, readings from Kazan�s autobiography and his speech on directing (read by Elias Koteas), a videotaped interview done late in Kazan�s life, and Scorsese�s commentary on and offscreen, A Letter to Elia takes a close look at the life of art and its creation � the work, the distractions, the inspirations, the complications, the intersections between art and experience. A Letter to Elia, written and directed by Scorsese and his longtime collaborator Kent Jones, is a deeply personal film, a frank portrait and self-portrait, and an equally frank acknowledgement of the closeness and the distance between artists and their art.

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