Fifty Years and Counting: The Power of the Blacklist

Since 1980, the Writers Guild of America has been restoring the screen credits of writers who were blacklisted more than 45 years ago: Their names are rising from an unquiet grave. On March 31, credits on 24 more films were rectified by the guild. Today, some of the beneficiaries sound as pleased as the blacklistees who regained their passports in 1958, after the Supreme Court ruled that passports could no longer be withheld for political reasons. I remember how gleefully they waved those documents at friends--few passport photographs have displayed such exultant smiles.

Yet, even when their old pre-blacklist movies were shown on television, their names were wiped out of the credits. Imagine books without names on the spines.

Paul Jarrico, the former blacklistee who galvanized this campaign to correct some two decades of credits, said detailed detective work is sometimes necessary to learn who wrote which screenplays under a pseudonym or behind a front. If the name of someone thought to be a left-winger was used on a movie, the American Legion and similar groups threatened to picket the theaters. It would then be un-American to cross that picket line. Hence: Distributors wouldn’t handle those pictures and most projectionists would refuse to run them.

We might celebrate the resurrection of names by ditching the terms “McCarthyism” and “McCarthy era,” which reduce the history of American anti-communism to the rabid behavior of one person. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was a byproduct of the period, not its creator. He sailed into the national spotlight in 1950 because of his colossal talent for exploiting the media. But McCarthy played no part in the hearings of 1947, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities was focusing on Communists in the film industry, which resulted in the firing of the Hollywood 10. Blacklisting accelerated after the hearings of 1951. Yet, many still misunderstand the 1950s because they assume “McCarthyism” died when the man lost his power in 1954.

The blacklist persisted well into the 1960s. Though Otto Preminger openly hired Dalton Trumbo of the Hollywood 10 to write “Exodus” in 1960, almost no one else fared as well. Ring Lardner Jr., also of the 10, had been the co-writer of the Oscar-winning “Woman of the Year”; but his name didn’t appear on the screen until 1965. Albert Maltz, co-author of “The Naked City,” another of the 10, was blacklisted for 16 years. (His name will now be seen on “The Defiant Ones.”) Abraham Polonsky, who’d written “Body and Soul,” had to write anonymously for 17 years; more than two decades passed between the first film he directed (“Force of Evil”) and the second (“Tell Them Willie Boy is Here”). The studios had vowed that there would never be a blacklist. But as Polonsky reminded me, “All politics consists of false promises and real consequences.”

Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, who wrote “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” didn’t receive an Oscar for the script--the award went to the French novelist Pierre Boulle, who could not then read or write English. (In 1984, Foreman was told he would finally receive a screen credit and an Oscar; he died two weeks afterward. Wilson was already dead.) In 1965, Lester Cole had to use a pseudonym for “Born Free”--Columbia had balked at using any part of his script when the executives realized who had written it, and did so only at Foreman’s insistence. Anne Revere, who played Montgomery Clift’s mother in “A Place in the Sun”--where most of her major scenes were cut after she was blacklisted--was barred from movies until 1969. The name of harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler was expunged from U.S. prints of the British comedy “Genevieve,” for which he wrote the music, and he couldn’t perform on any sponsored TV show in the 1970s.

So the notion that McCarthyism ended with the demagogue’s downfall wrongs those who remained unemployable for years. And screenwriters who used other names could not rely on their previous credits: It was as if they’d achieved nothing in the past and were starting their careers anew each time. Therefore, most earned roughly 15% to 20% of their former fees.

Throughout the blacklist era, there was abundant gossip about the authorship of certain screenplays. Many scripts were ascribed to Trumbo, who worked under a host of names. Lardner later wrote, “To the frustration of the actual writers, some of the best work in Hollywood was being assigned by rumor to Trumbo, and the more outstanding the picture, the broader the leer with which he declined to comment.” Trumbo’s name has now been restored to “Roman Holiday,” “The Brave Ones” and “Gun Crazy.”

In the midst of these welcome restorations, one may wonder how long it takes a society--or an individual--to heal. We know that lives were ruined by the blacklist, that some careers were permanently demolished. I’ve talked with widows who said their husbands’ fatal heart attacks were triggered by the blacklist. Ten years ago, the screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter said to me, “The blacklist was a howling success. It destroyed the left-wing movement.” Most of his colleagues would agree. But while the survivors assert that the domestic Cold War damaged American democracy, they also seem inclined to let the past rest, perhaps because one consolation of history may be that nothing lasts forever.

And yet, it seems to me that the anti-communism we associate with the Cold War era is still vigorous, despite the disintegration of Communist regimes abroad and our government’s zeal to trade with China. (The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 doesn’t appear to kindle the passions that the Moscow trials of the 1930s continue to do.) Having written about the blacklist, I’ve been told by quite a few self-defined liberals--many of whom opposed our role in Vietnam--that the blacklistees deserved what happened to them because most were Communists.

Some of the senior radicals I’ve known joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, resigned in the 1940s and were punished in the 1950s. During the Depression, as fascism flourished in Europe and capitalism seemed to be floundering at home, it was not unusual for Americans to become Communists; the party wasn’t--and isn’t--illegal. Its members often infuriated outsiders who thought as they did--about civil rights or public housing--with their stance of moral superiority. And their gift for invective as well as the defense of the Nazi-Soviet pact may have roused their contemporaries’ wrath almost as much as Josef Stalin’s dictatorship.

Of course, many liberals disagreed profoundly with the Communists. But as the postwar wind shifted and it became perilous to be considered a liberal, many reviled those for whom they feared to be mistaken. Ex-communists were--and are--sometimes described as though they were guilty of the crimes of Stalin. And the former Communists who gave names to the committee appeared to discover their hatred of communism only after they were summoned to testify. After all, refusing to cooperate would have meant being fired.

It seems unlikely that our current politicians will accuse Hollywood of producing movies crammed with subversive politics. But since Bob Dole declared that American movies are “nightmares of depravity”--attacking pictures he hadn’t seen in an effort to attract the Christian right, it’s tempting to guess how the film industry might try to pacify the Christian Coalition. Just as the studios hastily made anti-communist pictures to placate the House committee, they might remake the Bible movies of the 1950s, such as “The Robe,” for which Maltz will now be credited as co-author.

The old films oozed with sexuality so that sinners could be condemned. Soon there could be movies about the Rev. Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart--sin and repentance--or a film featuring Pat Robertson at the moment when his prayers rerouted a hurricane headed for his television station, as he has claimed. These pictures might soar at the box office. But this time--unlike the blacklistees--the writers might be eager to use pseudonyms.