Walter Bernstein, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter for “The Front”, who spent years on the Hollywood blacklist, died. He was 101 years old.
Bernstein died on Friday night, according to former WGA West President Howard Rodman.
In the 1950s, Bernstein was blacklisted in Hollywood after being suspected of being a communist working in the entertainment industry.
“There was a little booklet called ‘Red Channels’, which was a collection of about 150 names of people in the entertainment business, with a list of the so-called ‘communist’ associations or ‘communist front’ you were automatically blacklisted,” Bernstein told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. “There were about eight assignments for me – all true, all the things that I did. I wrote for communist magazines, I supported the relief of the war in Russia, I supported the legalists in Spain ”.
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As a result, Bernstein said he needed to rely on several “fronts” to get work in Hollywood – an experience that would later inspire Bernstein to write “The Front”, which starred Woody Allen as the friend of a blacklisted screenwriter who became becomes a “Front” for the screenwriter, signing his name in scripts in exchange for money.
Still, Bernstein would spend nearly a decade on the black list before writing “The Front”. His return, as it were, would not happen until 1959, when he was credited as a screenwriter for “That Kind of Woman”, a film starring Sophia Loren and directed by Sidney Lumet.
Bernstein would then write – and be credited for writing – films like “Paris Blues”, “Fail-Safe” and “The Molly Maguires”.
In his honor to Bernstein, Rodman described the screenwriter as a “fighter for social justice”.
“Without exaggeration: we will not know how to do it again”, Rodman I wrote. “Walter, at heart, was a fighter for social justice. From the moment he was young, until his last weeks. May your life be an example for all of us. “
Bernstein leaves his wife Gloria and their four children.