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    Norma Barzman, Blacklisted Screenwriter, Dies at 103

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    After she and her husband, a fellow writer, saw work in Hollywood dry up during the Red Scare, they continued their careers in self-exile overseas.Norma Barzman, a screenwriter who moved to Europe in the late 1940s rather than be subject to the congressional investigations and professional ostracism that overtook her industry for a decade, died on Dec. 17 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 103 and widely considered to be one of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.Her daughter Suzo Barzman confirmed the death.Mrs. Barzman and her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, were among the hundreds of film industry figures — including screenwriters, actors, directors, stagehands and technicians — who found themselves iced out of Hollywood after World War II because of their unwillingness to discuss their affiliation with the Communist Party or its many associated front groups.The Barzmans were both longtime members of the party, having joined in the early 1940s. Although their membership officially lapsed when they left the country, they did not renounce the party until 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.“I’m very proud of my years as a Communist,” Mrs. Barzman told The Associated Press in 2001. “We weren’t Soviet agents, but we were a little silly, idealistic and enthusiastic, and thought there was a chance of making a better world.”Mrs. Barzman with her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, in Madrid in 1961. When the opportunity arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a film in London in 1949, they expected to be there for six weeks. They ended up living abroad until 1976.via Barzman familyFor a time in the 1930s and ’40s, being a Communist, or just sympathetic to the cause, was considered de rigueur among the Hollywood left. But with the onset of the Cold War, attitudes began to shift. Rumors of a government crackdown percolated.The couple were sitting on their front lawn in July 1947 when a woman in a convertible stopped to talk. After a guarded introduction — her name was Norma, too — she told them that there was a police car at the bottom of the hill, stopping anyone turning onto the street to ask them about the Barzmans. Years later, they would realize that the other Norma had taken the stage name Marilyn Monroe.That fall, the House Committee on Un-American Activities called a group of screenwriters, directors and producers to testify about their connections to the Communist Party. Ten of them refused to answer questions, and each was later found in contempt. Though the Barzmans were not among that group, which came to be called the Hollywood Ten, they feared they would be subpoenaed soon.A few weeks after the hearings, a group of Hollywood executives released the so-called Waldorf Statement, which declared that the 10 witnesses, as well as anyone else who refused to discuss their relationship to the Communist Party, would be blacklisted from the industry.Work for the Barzmans quickly dried up. Finally, in 1949, an opportunity arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a film in London, where the blacklist didn’t reach. They set sail on the Queen Mary, expecting a six-week trip.They would not return to the United States until 1965, and they would live abroad until 1976.After several years in London, they moved to Paris; they eventually settled in Provence. They became local celebrities of a sort — the family that defied the blacklist — and made friends with the likes of the French actor Yves Montand and Pablo Picasso.An undated photo from the Cannes Film Festival. From left, Mr. Barzman, Mrs. Barzman and the Italian filmmaker Basilio Franchina.via Barzman familyMr. Barzman continued to write screenplays, usually for European productions, though often without credit. Mrs. Barzman got some work, too, but it was harder, especially since she also was raising seven children.Another friend, Sophia Loren, “pinched my cheek one day and called me ‘la mamma,’ which drove me wild,” she said in an interview for the book “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist” (1997), by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle.By the time the Barzmans returned to Hollywood in the 1970s, the film industry and the community around it had changed significantly, and they never managed to restart their careers.“I’ve been so blessed, even when I was suffering,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2001. “So I wasn’t bitter then, and I’m not bitter now. I guess because I still feel there’s so much hope. You have to work at things, whether it’s a marriage or a democracy.”Norma Levor was born on Sept. 15, 1920, in Manhattan — specifically, she liked to recall, atop the kitchen counter of her parents’ apartment on Central Park West. Her father, Samuel, was an importer, and her mother, Goldie (Levinson) Levor, was a homemaker.Norma enrolled at Radcliffe College, but left in 1940 to marry Claude Shannon, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who later became known for his work in computational linguistics.They moved to Princeton, N.J., where he had a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and where she worked for the economic branch of the League of Nations, which had relocated there from Switzerland at the start of World War II.The couple divorced in 1941, a year after her father died. Seeking a fresh start, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles — with a six-week stop in Reno, Nev., to finalize her divorce.She worked as a features writer for The Los Angeles Examiner while taking courses in screenwriting at the School for Writers, which was later added to the federal government’s list of subversive organizations.“Shortly after I arrived, I came to understand that all the progressive people I liked and who were politically active were Communists,” she was quoted as saying in “Tender Comrades.”Norma Barzman with her father, Samuel Levor, in Nice, France, in about 1930.via Barzman familyShe met Ben Barzman, another aspiring screenwriter, at a party at the home of Robert Rossen, yet another screenwriter. Mr. Barzman insisted that modern movies were too complex for women to write. She pushed a lemon meringue pie in his face. They married in 1943.Mrs. Barzman wrote the original stories for two films made in 1946: “Never Say Goodbye,” a comedy starring Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker, and “The Locket,” a noir thriller starring Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum. In Europe, her work included another screenplay, “Luxury Girls,” but her name was kept off it until 1999.Mr. Barzman died in 1989. Along with her daughter Suzo, Mrs. Barzman is survived by another daughter, Luli Barzman; five sons, Aaron, Daniel, John, Paolo and Marco; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.After returning to Los Angeles, Mrs. Barzman wrote a column on aging for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a memoir, “The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate” (2003).She also became outspoken in her criticism of the blacklist and the role many in the industry played in it. Larry Ceplair, a historian who has written extensively about the blacklist, called her the era’s “keeper of the flame.”In 1999 she joined some 500 other people outside the Academy Awards ceremony, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, to protest an honor being given to the director Elia Kazan.To avoid being added to the blacklist, Mr. Kazan had testified before the House committee, identifying several friends and colleagues in the industry as former Communists and earning long-lasting enmity from many in Hollywood.Mrs. Barzman, who was there with her teenage grandson, carried a sign that read “Kazan Is a Fink.” More

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      Marsha Hunt, Actress Turned Activist, Is Dead at 104

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      She seemed well on her way to stardom until her career was derailed by the Hollywood blacklist. She then turned her attention to social causes.Marsha Hunt, who appeared in more than 50 movies between 1935 and 1949 and seemed well on her way to stardom until her career was damaged by the Hollywood blacklist, and who, for the rest of her career, was as much an activist as she was an actress, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 104.Her death was announced by Roger C. Memos, the director of the 2015 documentary “Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity.”Early in her career, Ms. Hunt was one of the busiest and most versatile actresses in Hollywood, playing parts big and small in a variety of movies, including romances, period pieces and the kind of dark, stylish crime dramas that came to be known as film noir. She starred in “Pride and Prejudice” alongside Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in 1940, and in “The Human Comedy” with Mickey Rooney in 1943. In later years, she was a familiar face on television, playing character roles on “Matlock,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and other shows.But in between, her career hit a roadblock: the Red Scare.Ms. Hunt’s problems began in October 1947, when she traveled to Washington along with cinematic luminaries like John Huston, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as part of a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. Their mission was to observe and protest the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating what it said was Communist infiltration of the film industry.Many of those who made that trip subsequently denounced it, calling it ill-advised, but Ms. Hunt did not. And although she was never a member of the Communist Party — her only apparent misdeed, besides going to Washington, was signing petitions to support causes related to civil liberties — producers began eyeing her with suspicion.Ms. Hunt, second from left, with other members of the Committee for the First Amendment in Washington in October 1947. (Among the others pictured are John Huston, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, center, and Danny Kaye, sixth from right.) Her political activism led movie studios to stop offering her work.Associated PressHer status in Hollywood was already precarious when “Red Channels,” an influential pamphlet containing the names of people in the entertainment industry said to be Communists or Communist sympathizers, was published in 1950. Among the people named were Orson Welles, Pete Seeger, Leonard Bernstein and Marsha Hunt.By then, she had won praise for her portrayal of Viola in a live telecast of “Twelfth Night” in 1949. At the time, Jack Gould of The New York Times called her “an actress of striking and mellow beauty who also was at home with the verse and couplets of Shakespeare.” Her star turn in a 1950 revival of George Bernard Shaw’s “Devil’s Disciple,” the second of her six appearances on Broadway, had been the subject of a cover article in Life magazine. Yet, the movie offers all but stopped.In 1955, with little work to keep her at home, Ms. Hunt and her husband, the screenwriter Robert Presnell Jr., took a yearlong trip around the world. As a result of her travels, she told the website The Globalist in 2008, she “fell in love with the planet.”She became an active supporter of the United Nations, delivering lectures on behalf of the World Health Organization and other U.N. agencies. She wrote and produced “A Call From the Stars,” a 1960 television documentary about the plight of refugees.She also addressed issues closer to home. In her capacity as honorary mayor of the Sherman Oaks area of Los Angeles, a post she held from 1983 to 2001, she worked to increase awareness of homelessness in Southern California and organized a coalition of honorary mayors that raised money to build shelters.Ms. Hunt with Franchot Tone, left, and Gene Kelly in the 1943 movie “Pilot No. 5.”Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), via IMDbMarcia Virginia Hunt (she later changed the spelling of her first name) was born in Chicago on Oct. 17, 1917, to Earl Hunt, a lawyer, and Minabel (Morris) Hunt, a vocal coach. The family soon moved to New York City, where Ms. Hunt attended P.S. 9 and the Horace Mann School for Girls in Manhattan.A talent scout who saw her in a school play in 1935 offered her a screen test; nothing came of the offer, but that summer she visited her uncle in Hollywood and ended up being pursued by several studios. She signed with Paramount and made her screen debut that year in a quickly forgotten film called “The Virginia Judge.”She was soon being cast in small roles in a dizzying array of films. In “Easy Living” (1937), starring Jean Arthur, she had an unbilled but crucial part as a woman who has a coat fall on her head in the last scene. Bigger roles soon followed, especially after she joined Hollywood’s largest and most prestigious studio, MGM, in 1939.In 1943, she was the subject of a profile in The New York Herald Tribune that predicted a bright future. “She’s a quiet, well-bred, good-looking number with the concealed fire of a banked furnace,” the profile said. “She’s been in Hollywood for seven years, made 34 pictures. But, beginning now, you can start counting the days before she is one of the top movie names.”It never happened. In the aftermath of the blacklist, however, she began working frequently on television, appearing on “The Twilight Zone,” “Gunsmoke,” “Ben Casey” and other shows. She remained active on the small screen until the late 1980s.Her only notable movie in those years was “Johnny Got His Gun” (1971), an antiwar film written and directed by Dalton Trumbo, also a victim of the Hollywood blacklist, in which she played a wounded soldier’s mother.Ms. Hunt at her home in Los Angeles in 2007. She began working frequently on television in the wake of the Hollywood blacklist and continued acting until the late 1980s.Nick Ut/Associated PressMs. Hunt’s marriage to Jerry Hopper, a junior executive at Paramount, ended in divorce in 1945. The following year, she married Mr. Presnell. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1986. She is survived by several nieces and nephews.Ms. Hunt’s commitment to political and social causes did not diminish with age.In a 2021 interview with Fox News, she dismissed the notion that celebrities should avoid speaking out on political issues (“Nonsense — we’re all citizens of the world”) and explained what she considered to be the essential message of the documentary:“When injustice occurs, go on with your convictions. Giving in and being silent is what they want you to do.”Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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      Walter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWalter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101His movies included “Fail Safe,” “Paris Blues” and, perhaps most notably, “The Front,” based on his own experience of being blacklisted.The screenwriter Walter Bernstein in 1983. His leftist politics influenced both his life and his art.Credit…Susan Wood/Getty ImagesJan. 23, 2021, 6:06 p.m. ETWalter Bernstein, whose career as a top film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist, and who decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films, “The Front,” died on Saturday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 101.His wife, Gloria Loomis, said the cause was pneumonia.Described in a 2014 Esquire profile as a “human Energizer bunny,” Mr. Bernstein was writing, teaching and generating screenplay ideas well into his 90s. Until recently, he had several projects in various stages of development. He created the BBC mystery mini-series “Hidden” in 2011, and he was an adjunct instructor of dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts until he retired in 2017. “They’ll carry me off writing,” he told Variety.Mr. Bernstein’s politics — he called himself a “secular, self-loving Jew of a leftist persuasion” — influenced both his life and his art.“Fail Safe” (1964), the story of an accidental bombing of Moscow, was a bold rejoinder to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. “Paris Blues” (1961), which he wrote for the director Martin Ritt, a fellow blacklist victim and frequent collaborator, starred Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman as expatriate American jazz musicians and delivered pointed commentary on racial intolerance. “The Molly Maguires” (1970), also directed by Mr. Ritt, concerned union-busting in the coal mines of 19th-century Pennsylvania, mirroring the social upheavals of the late 1960s and ’70s.Mr. Bernstein with Woody Allen on the set of the 1976 film “The Front,” based on Mr. Bernstein’s experience during the blacklist of the 1950s. Mr. Bernstein’s screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.Credit…Columbia PicturesThe subject of “The Front” (1976), also directed by Mr. Ritt and the only film for which Mr. Bernstein received an Academy Award nomination (it was also nominated for a Writers Guild of America award), was the blacklist itself: Woody Allen starred as a “front,” a stand-in for a writer who, like Mr. Bernstein, had been blacklisted. (Mr. Bernstein made a cameo appearance for Mr. Allen that same year in “Annie Hall.”)Not all Mr. Bernstein’s subjects were political. The football-themed “Semi-Tough,” starring Burt Reynolds, Jill Clayburgh and Kris Kristofferson and based on a novel by Dan Jenkins, lampooned the New Age spirituality of such ’70s movements as EST; “Yanks,” starring Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave, explored the romantic entanglements and cultural differences between American troops and local Englishwomen during World War II. Mr. Bernstein’s lone feature film as a director was a comedy, “Little Miss Marker,” a 1980 version of the oft-filmed Damon Runyon story that starred Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews.A Hollywood EducationMr. Bernstein was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 20, 1919, to Louis and Hannah (Bistrong) Bernstein, Eastern European immigrants who were “not really affected by the Depression,” as Mr. Bernstein recalled in his autobiography, “Inside Out” (1996), because his father, a schoolteacher, was protected by civil service employment rules. He attended Erasmus High School in Flatbush, which was so crowded the students were split into three shifts, a boon for the film-loving Walter: When he was on the 6:30-to-noon shift, he could catch matinees next door at the Astor Theater, where admission during the day was a dime.Upon graduation, Mr. Bernstein was offered what he called a “wild, dubious” gift from his father: six months of an intensive language course at the University of Grenoble. His father knew a French family Walter could stay with and “had aspirations for me I did not share,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, adding, “If I had a choice of where to go for six months it would have been Hollywood.”Walter Matthau, Julie Andrews and Sara Stimson in “Little Miss Marker” (1980), the only feature film Mr. Bernstein directed.  Credit…Universal PicturesBut the experience broadened him, thrusting him as it did into the midst of young intellectuals, often Communists, living on a continent where Hitler, war and Marxism were the currency of conversation.He then attended Dartmouth College, where he became the film critic of The Daily Dartmouth, a job that came with a pass for the local cinema. “The only catch,” Mr. Bernstein recalled in “Inside Out,” “was that there were no screenings or previews, so you had to write the review before seeing the movie.”“I found this no real impediment,” he added. “Anyone could review a movie after seeing it; that was mere criticism. Doing it this way made it art.”He also became a contributor to The New Yorker, for which he would write during and after the war, and where he eventually became a staff writer.First, however, there was a war to get through. Shortly after graduating from Dartmouth, he was drafted and sent to Fort Benning, Ga., where in 1941, during the relatively relaxed period before Pearl Harbor, soldiers staged a show titled “Grin and Bear It,” written by Mr. Bernstein. (“It wasn’t very good,” he recalled, “but it was a show.”)“Brooks Atkinson was coming down from The Times to see it,” he said, “and John O’Hara, who was the reviewer for Newsweek. It was a big thing. We were supposed to open on Dec. 10.” On Dec. 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.“One of the actors said, ‘Now we’re not going to get the critics,’” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “And we didn’t.”Making Wartime NewsWhile contributing military-themed articles to The New Yorker, Mr. Bernstein, who eventually attained the rank of sergeant, became a globe-trotting correspondent for Yank, the Army journal, a job that would last throughout World War II. It was for Yank that he got the scoop that would give him his first taste of fame.“Army Writer Also Sees Tito but Censors Stop His Story” read the May 20, 1944, Associated Press headline: Mr. Bernstein, defying military protocol, had been spirited into war-torn Yugoslavia by anti-German partisans and given the first interview with Marshal Josep Broz, known as Tito, the Communist leader who would head the postwar Yugoslav republic until his death in 1980.“I was the first Western correspondent to see him,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “The Allies were planning to send in a couple of reporters from the pool and photographers, but the military wanted to delay any news about Tito till after the Second Front opened; the partisans wanted the opposite. They wanted publicity.”Although Mr. Bernstein’s interview with Tito was temporarily quashed, the Associated Press article made it world news.The screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, center, in 1947 after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refusing to say whether he was or had been a member of the Communist Party. Mr. Trumbo, like Mr. Bernstein and a number of other Hollywood writers, was blacklisted.Credit…Henry Griffin/Associated Press“I had an aunt who was a charter member of the Communist Party; she worked for the party as a stenographer or something like that,” Mr. Bernstein said in 2010 in an interview for this obituary. “And when I came back from the war, she asked me if I would talk to some Communist functionaries. I said that was all right with me. They wanted to know about Tito; nobody was telling them anything. And I told them about my adventures.”“I didn’t join the party until after the war,” Mr. Bernstein said, although the events of the ’30s, including the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe, made the Communist cause attractive to him. “The Communists,” he said, “seemed like they were doing something.”In 1947, with his Yank and New Yorker experience under his belt, a well-received collection of his war stories (“Keep Your Head Down”) on the bookshelves and a hankering to get into movies, Mr. Bernstein went to Hollywood. He had been offered a contract with the writer-producer Robert Rossen at Columbia Pictures, where he did uncredited work on “All the King’s Men.”Mr. Bernstein ended up staying in Hollywood for six months: His agent, Harold Hecht, had formed what would be a prolific production partnership with the actor Burt Lancaster and “offered me a job for twice what I was getting,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, “which still wasn’t much.”That led to his first Hollywood credit, “Kiss the Blood Off My Hands” (1948), a crime drama starring Mr. Lancaster and Joan Fontaine. But by this time the blacklist was starting to make itself felt within an industry where left-wing political sentiments had previously been both common and tolerated.Suddenly Untouchable“I was still in Hollywood in 1947, during the Hollywood Ten,” Mr. Bernstein said, referring to the prosecution of writers, producers and directors who had appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to answer questions about their Communist affiliation. “I was working for Rossen, who was a Communist. At first it was the Hollywood 19, then it was cut down to 10. I don’t know why. Rossen was very upset that he hadn’t made the cut.”No one took the hearings seriously at first, but they soon would. Mr. Bernstein was considered untouchable both in Hollywood and in the fledgling television industry in New York once his name appeared in “Red Channels,” an anti-Communist tract published in 1950 by the right-wing journal Counterattack.“I was listed right after Lenny Bernstein,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “There were about eight listings for me, and they were all true.” He had indeed written for the leftist New Masses, been a member of the Communist Party and supported Soviet relief, the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and civil rights.Mr. Bernstein at his apartment in Manhattan in 2000. He continued to write, teach and generate screenplay ideas well into his 90s.Credit…Jim Cooper/Associated PressMr. Bernstein and other blacklisted writers were forced to work under assumed names for sympathetic filmmakers like Sidney Lumet, who used Mr. Bernstein, now back in New York, throughout the ’50s on “You Are There,” the CBS program hosted by Walter Cronkite that re-enacted great moments in history.It was during this period that Mr. Bernstein and his colleagues, notably the writers Abraham Polonsky and Arnold Manoff, began the ruse of protecting their anonymity by sending stand-ins to represent them at meetings with producers, a ploy later dramatized in “The Front.” (In addition to Mr. Allen, the movie starred Zero Mostel, who, like the film’s director, Mr. Ritt, had also been blacklisted.)“Suddenly, the blacklist had achieved for the writer what he had previously only aspired to,” Mr. Bernstein joked in “Inside Out.” “He was considered necessary.”It was the now largely forgotten “That Kind of Woman” (1959), with Sophia Loren, that restarted Mr. Bernstein’s “official” career. The film’s director was Mr. Lumet, who hired Mr. Bernstein under his own name, thus effectively restoring him to the ranks of the employable.In the years following the blacklist, Mr. Bernstein worked regularly for Hollywood, although he continued to live in New York. Among his film credits were the westerns “The Wonderful Country” (1959) and “Heller in Pink Tights” (1960), the Harold Robbins adaptation “The Betsy” (1978) and the Dan Aykroyd-Walter Matthau comedy “The Couch Trip” (1988). He received an Emmy nomination for the television drama “Miss Evers’ Boys” (1997), based on the true story of a 1932 government experiment in which Black test subjects were allowed to die of syphilis, and wrote the teleplay for the live broadcast of “Fail Safe” in 2000.In addition to his wife, a literary agent, Mr. Bernstein is survived by a daughter, Joan Bernstein, and a son, Peter Spelman, from his first marriage, to Marva Spelman, which ended in divorce; three sons, Nicholas, Andrew and Jake, from his third marriage, to Judith Braun, which also ended in divorce, as did a brief second marriage; his stepdaughter, Diana Loomis; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a sister, Marilyn Seide.Six decades after the fact, Mr. Bernstein voiced a warmly nostalgic view of the Red Scare period, an era that has become synonymous with intolerance and fear.“I don’t know if it’s true of other people getting older,” he said, “but I look back on that period with some fondness in a way, in terms of the relationships and support and friendships. We helped each other during that period. And in a dog-eat-dog business, it was quite rare.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More