Blacklists Backfire

 

Walter Bernstein was a movie-mad writer who contributed to the New Yorker, before being drafted into the US Army at the start of World War II. He became a correspondent for the Army newspaper Yank, reporting from North Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  This led to a book, and a stint as a New Yorker staff writer. Then Hollywood called.

 Bernstein worked on a few movies before receiving his first screenwriting credit in 1948, for the timeless epic Kiss The Blood Off My Hands.  But his career was soon stopped when his name was named in the notorious Red Channels and he was blacklisted. 

 He was blacklisted—that is, prevented from earning a living by writing for the movies and then for television—so that his unAmerican views, such as his support for racial and economic equality, would not get slipped into his screenplays and thence into movie theatres and on television where they would poison the minds of impressionable Americans. 

 That basically was also why a lot of other writers, actors and directors were blacklisted.  And it worked, sort of.  Movies and TV shows became bland and fearful, and many of those who were blacklisted never worked in their professions again.  Some never recovered.  Some killed themselves.  But others survived. 

Walter Bernstein survived.  I met him and interviewed him in the mid-1970s, on a location shoot in Massachusetts for a movie he wrote about the blacklist, called The Front.  When he died a couple of months ago, this was the movie that was mentioned most prominently in the few obituaries or stories about him.

 The movie was a serious comedy, which matched Bernstein’s view of the blacklist itself: a comedy of the absurd, with tragic consequences, but also with redemption.

 In the 1950s, with so many writers blacklisted, the film and television industries had a big problem.  Not many people—or many they knew of—could write a good script that could be filmed.  So it wasn’t long before the industry itself began to subvert the blacklist meant to stop subversion.  They found ways to hire blacklisted writers and look the other way.

 Sometimes the writers were able to just use pseudonyms.  Some of those pseudonyms won Emmys and Academy Awards.  But especially at first, some writers worked through a “front.”  That was someone who agreed to pose as the writer, attend story meetings and otherwise represent the script, to pretend that they wrote what they didn’t write.  While producers pretended they didn’t know who was actually writing it.

 Some fronts took their new careers a little too seriously, and began making demands on the writer and the producers, apparently convincing themselves they actually wrote the script.  This is a source of the comedy in The Front.

 But other things happened to those who were blacklisted.  For example, the blacklisted actor Zero Mostel, who was in this movie.  He told us that the forced inactivity of the blacklist gave him time to reflect, to figure out what he stood for, and to broaden his artistic interests. For example, he did serious theatre, and he began to paint.

 Other things happened to writers as well.  Some got more serious in their work as well as their lives.  Bernstein would keep writing, using pseudonyms and fronts, but he was not going to be limited to Kiss the Blood Off My Hands.

 One of his first regular blacklisted writer jobs in the 50s was writing for the CBS series, You Are There.  He wrote it with two other blacklisted writers.

 You Are There had a unique format.  It was hosted by serious news reporter Walter Cronkite, who pretended to be reporting on moments in history that would then be dramatized.  Cronkite and other reporters would pretend to interview participants.

 I remember this series vividly.  It was an almost perfect format for school age children.  And so I learned about the Salem witch trials, the trial of Joan of Arc, the Dreyfus case of an unfairly accused Jew, the blacklisting—I mean, the trial—of Galileo—from this television series written by blacklisted writers.

 My impressionable mind was poisoned, it turns out, not only by Walter Bernstein, but by blacklisted writers who fled to England and wrote several shows syndicated in the US in the 1950s that I watched avidly, such as the Richard Greene series Robin Hood (which not only robbed the rich to feed the poor, but took on anti-Semitism and anti-immigration) and Sir Lancelot.  

 Bernstein eventually began writing under his own name again.  He and blacklisted director Martin Ritt collaborated on Paris Blues in 1961, starring Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll, with Louis Armstrong, about American jazz artists in Paris, with the Poitier character reveling in the lack of racial discrimination that haunted him in the US, and refusing to return.  Bernstein and Ritt collaborated again on The Front in 1976.

 Bernstein wrote the script for Fail-Safe in 1964, about the dangers of the nuclear balance of terror, and The Molly Maguires (1970) about unionization in 19^th century Pennsylvania coal mines.  In 1997 he wrote Miss Evers’ Boys, exposing the now-notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which gave the disease to black men but not the cure, starring Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davis and Laurence Fishburne.  As well as, of course, Heller in Pink Tights, The Couch Trip, and Semi-Tough.

 He even got to direct a Hollywood movie from his own script, though it was an affectionate remake of a Damon Runyon comic story: Little Miss Marker.  Then in 2000, he wrote a new live television version of Fail-Safe.  He was co-executive producer, along with George Clooney.  In 2013, he wrote and co-created the political thriller mini-series, Hidden.

 All in all, Walter Bernstein got people to laugh, to thrill, to think and to feel, as he went on poisoning American minds, for well over 60 years.  He was still working when he died in January, at the age of 101.