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After years on the Hollywood blacklist, he rebounded to also write “Fail-Safe”, “Semi-Tough” and “The Molly Maguires”.
Walter Bernstein, the resilient screenwriter who took inspiration from his ignominious 1950s Hollywood blacklist experience to write the Oscar-nominated screenplay for The front, is dead. He was 101 years old.
Bernstein died Friday night, 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 for Burt Reynolds’ football game Semi hard (1977), and he wrote John Schlesinger’s war drama Yanks (1979), with Richard Gere. Three other films he worked on starred Sophia Loren.
Born in Brooklyn, Bernstein officially joined the Communist Party while attending Dartmouth College – “I never thought there would be repercussions,” he said. The Hollywood ReporterScott Feinberg from 2012 – then served in the United States Army in World War II, traveling everywhere as a correspondent for Yank magazine.
He was blacklisted in 1950 while working as a television writer, and his name did not appear in any movie credits until 1958 or on a television show until 1961. However, Bernstein did. was able to pursue his career clandestinely, initially by using pseudonyms. and then paying others – known as “fronts” – to take credit for his scripts.
“I didn’t earn a lot of money, but I was able to work. And I have built very good, deep relationships with other blacklisted people, ”he told Christian Niedan in a 2013 interview for the Camera in the Sun website. “And that might sound weird, but in some ways it wasn’t a miserable time because of it, because of the feeling of togetherness, the feeling of community that we had. We were helping each other.”
The front (1976), directed by Martin Ritt, starred Woody Allen as Howard Prince, a small restaurant cashier / bookmaker who is hired by three blacklisted television writers (Michael Murphy, Lloyd Gough and David Margulies) for become the face of their work.
Bernstein wanted to make the film a simple drama, but Columbia Pictures director David Begelman only got interested after he and Ritt introduced comedic elements to the story and got Allen to star on a rare occasion. which he did not also write or direct.
Like Bernstein, many actors and teams involved in The front had been actual victims of the blacklist, including Ritt and actors Herschel Bernardi and Zero Mostel. (Mostel’s tormented character, comedian Hecky Brown, was based on Philip Loeb, a blacklisted actor who committed suicide after being banned from the industry.)
“It was our movie, it was our revenge in a way,” Bernstein said. “We said, ‘We are still here’. It was a very satisfying experience. “
After nearly a decade on the blacklist, Bernstein finally got his name on a screenplay for the 1959 film Loren That kind of woman, produced by Lumet. “He recommended that I [producer and Loren’s husband] Carlo Ponti, “Bernstein told Feinberg.” He didn’t know or didn’t care about the blacklist or knew me, he just took Sidney’s word for it. “
That kind of woman came out about a year before the release of Spartacus (1960), who is famed for producer star Kirk Douglas’ decision to blacklist Dalton Trumbo as screenwriter.
Son of a teacher, Bernstein was born August 20, 1919 in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, then a student at Erasmus Hall High School. During the war he was correspondent for the army weekly Yank, and he infiltrated Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia to mark a rare interview with Marshal Tito.
Track the service and switch to The New Yorker, Bernstein published in 1945 a book of his war stories, Keep your head down. He then traveled to Hollywood and helped with the screenplay adaptation of Kiss the blood of my hands (1948), a noir crime film starring Joan Fontaine and Burt Lancaster. He also worked briefly for Norma Productions of Lancaster and Harold Hecht.
Bernstein returned to New York in the early 1950s to try his hand at live television. Meanwhile, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee had embarked on a witch hunt to root the Communists out of the spectacle.
“I was writing this [anthology] show for CBS called Danger, writing very happily for them, ”he says THR. “One day a producer, Charles Russell, said to me, ‘There is a problem here, you have to put another name on the screenplay. I do not know [what’s going on,] they just told me upstairs that they couldn’t use you anymore. “
Bernstein’s name would appear in Red chains, a newsletter with the names of suspected Communists working in Hollywood, in the summer of 1950. “There were about eight designations for me – all true, all I had done,” he said Chronicle of San Francisco in 2005. “I had written for Communist magazines, I had supported Russian war aid, I had supported the loyalists in Spain.”
This meant he was automatically blacklisted, and the only way to continue his career as Walter Bernstein was to testify and fingerprint other Hollywood lefties. He wouldn’t do that.
But Lumet, then director on Danger, and Russell allowed him to continue writing secretly (Ritt was a producer on this show and had been blacklisted), as did Russell again on You are the, a program hosted by Walter Cronkite that dramatized current events.
The writers “were on the blacklist, they couldn’t do anything to us anymore,” said Bernstein, “but Lumet and Russell would also have been blacklisted if it had been known that they were hiring people on the list. black. They took a big chance. “
A memorable story in The front Was Hecky forced to accept a gig at a Catskills complex for a salary that was only a fraction of what he was receiving before being blacklisted. It really happened to Mostel, and it was Bernstein who drove him to work.
Allen then put Bernstein in a scene with Diane Keaton, Sigourney Weaver and himself under the Thalia Theater marquee in Annie hall (1977). “I always get a check when it’s shown, from SAG, for $ 7.50,” he told Niedan.
Bernstein ended up writing three films in all with Loren, including Michael Curtiz’s. A breath of scandal and George Cukor Heller in pink tights, both released in 1960. And he wrote a draft for another movie that year, The Magnificent Seven.
Bernstein also worked with Ritt on Paris Blues (1961) and Molly Maguires (1970) and with Semi hard director Michael Ritchie again on An almost perfect deal (1979) and The journey of the sofa (1988).
Bernstein then wrote and directed Little Miss Marker (1980), a period play from the 1930s starring Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews.
Bernstein, who has taught screenwriting at Columbia University, NYU, and City College, received an Emmy nomination for writing the 1997 HBO TV movie The boys of Miss Evers, and in 2000 he turned his Fail-Safe screenplay in a live CBS black and white TV movie starring George Clooney.
Bernstein released Upside down: a memory from the blacklist, in 1996.
In his questions and answers on Camera in the Sun, Bernstein recalled that a British critic had once called him “that useful screenwriter”. He liked it.
“Being useful is important to me,” he said, “feeling that what you have done has been of some use – whether artistically, socially, politically or otherwise has not been. a waste.”
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