After years on the Hollywood black list, he recovered and also wrote ‘Fail-Safe’, ‘Semi-Tough’ and ‘The Molly Maguires’.
Walter Bernstein, the resilient screenwriter who used his ignominious experience on the 1950s Hollywood blacklist to write the Oscar nominated script for Forward, died. He was 101 years old.
Bernstein died on Friday night, the screenwriter, former president of WGA West and longtime friend of the Howard Rodman family reported on twitter.
Bernstein also adapted Eugene Burdick’s novel for Sidney Lumet’s nuclear disaster film Fail-safe (1964) and Dan Jenkins ‘book on Burt Reynolds’ football game Semi-resistant (1977), and wrote John Schlesinger’s war drama Yankees (1979), starring Richard Gere. Another three films he worked on starred Sophia Loren.
Born in Brooklyn, Bernstein formally joined the Communist Party while studying at Dartmouth College – “I never thought there would be repercussions,” he said The Hollywood ReporterScott Feinberg in 2012 – at the time he served in the United States Army during World War II, traveling everywhere as a correspondent for Tugging magazine.
He was blacklisted in 1950 while working as a television writer, and his name did not appear on any film credits until 1958 or on a TV show until 1961. Bernstein, however, was able to continue his career underground, at first using pseudonyms and then paying others – known as “fronts” – to receive credit for their scripts.
“I didn’t make a lot of money, but I was able to work. And I had deep and very good relationships with other people on the black list,” he told Christian Niedan in a 2013 interview for the Camera in the Sun website. “And that may seem strange, but in some ways, it was not an unhappy time because of that, because of the feeling of solidarity, of the feeling of community that we had. We help each other. “
Forward (1976), directed by Martin Ritt, starred Woody Allen as Howard Prince, a small cashier / bookmaker who is hired by three blacklisted TV writers (Michael Murphy, Lloyd Gough and David Margulies) to become the face of your job.
Bernstein wanted to make the film like a drama, but Columbia Pictures director David Begelman became interested only after he and Ritt introduced comic elements to the story and made Allen star on a rare occasion that he also didn’t write or direct.
Like Bernstein, many of the cast and crew involved in the Forward were victims of the blacklist in real life, including Ritt and actors Herschel Bernardi and Zero Mostel. (Mostel’s harried character, comedian Hecky Brown, was based on Philip Loeb, a blacklisted actor who committed suicide after being banned from the industry.)
“It was our film, in a way it was our revenge,” said Bernstein. “We were saying, ‘We’re still here.’ It was a very rewarding experience. “
After nearly a decade on the black list, Bernstein finally got his name on the 1959 Loren script That kind of woman, directed by Lumet. “He recommended me to [producer and Loren’s husband] Carlo Ponti, “said Bernstein to Feinberg.” He didn’t know, didn’t care about the blacklist or knew me, just believed in Sidney’s word. “
That kind of woman came out about a year before the launch of Spartacus (1960), who is known for the decision by producer star Kirk Douglas to credit Dalton Trumbo’s blacklisted script.
The son of a teacher, Bernstein was born on August 20, 1919, in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn, and at that time he was a student at Erasmus Hall High School. During the war, he was correspondent for the Army’s weekly magazine Tugging, and he infiltrated Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia to get a rare interview with Marshal Tito.
Following the service and tickets in The New Yorker, Bernstein in 1945 published a book with his war stories, Keep your head down. He then went to Hollywood and helped adapt the script for Kiss the blood from my hands (1948), a noir crime film starring Joan Fontaine and Burt Lancaster. He also worked briefly for Lancaster and Harold Hecht at Norma Productions.
Bernstein returned to New York in the early 1950s to try his luck on live television. Meanwhile, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House’s Non-American Activities Committee embarked on a witch hunt to eradicate show business communists.
“I was writing this [anthology] show for CBS called Danger, writing with great joy for them “, he said THR. “One day, a producer, Charles Russell, said to me, ‘There’s a problem here, you have to put another name on the script. I don’t know [what’s going on,] they just told me up there that they can’t use you anymore. “
Bernstein’s name would appear in Red Channels, a newsletter with names of so-called communists working in Hollywood in the summer of 1950. “There were about eight designations for me – all true, all the things I did,” he said. San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. “I wrote for communist magazines, I supported the relief of the war in Russia, I supported the legalists in Spain.”
That meant he was automatically blacklisted, and the only way to continue his career as Walter Bernstein was to testify and point out other Hollywood lefties. He wouldn’t do that.
But Lumet, then a director of Danger, and Russell allowed him to continue writing secretly (Ritt was a producer on that show and was blacklisted), as well as Russell again on Are you there, a program presented by Walter Cronkite that dramatized news events.
The writers “were blacklisted, there was nothing else they could do for us,” said Bernstein, “but Lumet and Russell would also have been blacklisted if they knew they were hiring blacklisted people. They took a big risk. “.
A memorable story in Forward Hecky was forced to take a job at a Catskills resort for a salary that was a fraction of what he earned before he was blacklisted. This really happened with Mostel, and it was Bernstein who took him to work.
Allen later put Bernstein in a scene with Diane Keaton, Sigourney Weaver and himself under the marquee of the Thalia theater in Annie Hall (1977). “I still get a check from SAG when it is shown, for $ 7.50,” he told Niedan.
Bernstein ended up writing three films starring Loren, including Michael Curtiz A breath of scandal and George Cukor Heller in pink pants, both released in 1960. And he wrote a draft for another film that year, The Magnificent Seven.
Bernstein also worked with Ritt on Paris Blues (1961) and Molly Maguires (1970) and with Semi-resistant director Michael Ritchie again in An almost perfect case (1979) and The Couch Trip (1988).
Bernstein then wrote and directed Little Miss Marker (1980), a period piece set in the 1930s starring Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews.
Bernstein, who taught scriptwriting at Columbia University, NYU and City College, received an Emmy nomination for writing the 1997 HBO telefilm MS. Evers’ Boys, and in 2000, he transformed his Fail-safe the script for a CBS telefilm in black and white live, starring George Clooney.
Bernstein posted From the inside out: a blacklist memoryin 1996.
In his book Camera in the Sun Q&A, Bernstein recalled that a British critic once referred to him as “that useful screenwriter”. He liked that.
“Being useful is important to me,” he said, “feeling that what you did was of some use – be it artistically, or socially, or politically or whatever it was, it was not a waste.”