‘We Behaved as Badly as Anybody’

Amid the faded posters, grainy photographs and yellowed lists of names on display in the gallery of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills is a small booklet affixed with some dirty, 45-year-old laundry.

Stapled in 1957 over Article 8, Section 1, Paragraph F of the academy’s bylaws, a typewritten revision warns that anyone who admits membership in the Communist Party or who refuses to testify before a “duly constituted Federal legislative committee or body . . . shall be ineligible for any Academy Award . . .”

There’s more. The booklet is one of more than 200 items in an unusually comprehensive exhibit that opened Friday in which the academy acknowledges its complicity and that of the movie industry at large in destroying or damaging the careers of hundreds during the infamous era of the Hollywood blacklist.

“We behaved as badly as anybody,” said the academy’s current executive director, Bruce Davis.

The exhibit, which is open to the public and runs through April 21, is the academy’s first detailed presentation of its role in the events that led to the blacklist and helped perpetuate it. Although some of those events are now more than half a century old and many of those blacklisted have died, the academy has had to face the fact that the blacklist remains a volatile issue, one that continues to inspire recriminations, accusations and anger.

The exhibit is likely to stir more debate about the blacklist years in Hollywood. Some in Hollywood think the academy has not gone far enough to right its wrongs. Others fear that visitors will learn little about those who cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and will leave with an oversimplified impression of a complex time.

Putting It Together Was a Difficult Task

The exhibit arrives as the war on terrorism has excited a new nationalism and alerted civil libertarians to watch for government crackdowns on freedom of speech.

“Part of the reason for doing shows like this is to make it less likely for it to happen again,” Davis said.

Mounting a show about the era was a delicate task. Some people on opposite sides still won’t speak to each other, said the academy’s Ellen Harrington, co-curator of the show with author Larry Ceplair. One person refused to donate items out of fear that the exhibit would not give credibility to those who supported the blacklist, Harrington noted.

In 1999, the academy learned just how inflammatory the issue still was when it presented a lifetime achievement award to acclaimed director Elia Kazan, who had cooperated with the House committee.

To some, such as blacklisted writer Norma Barzman, Kazan was a symbol of those in Hollywood who cooperated with the committee and thereby altered the course of many lives, including her own. She and her blacklisted husband, Ben, left the United States for Europe in 1949 and lived in France for 27 years.

Barzman said she was “bouncing mad” over the Kazan award. She said she told the academy’s then-President Robert Rehme: “ ‘Now you’ve got to do something for us.’ They called me in a year later and said, ‘We’re going to do it, and make it bigger than you wanted. I said, ‘Nothing is too big for me.’ ”

The Kazan controversy accelerated plans the academy already had for an exhibit on the blacklist, Davis said. He noted that Ceplair, co-author of “The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960,” wasn’t subject to interference by the academy. “There wasn’t any point in doing it unless he had absolutely free rein,” he said.

To some like Barzman, the exhibit is a way for the academy to improve its image. Davis said the presentation isn’t meant to be a “ritual expiation,” noting that the academy already has made several mea culpas to the blacklisted. And he said the academy “absolutely” stands by its award to Kazan.

Role of Pariah Is Reversed for Some

Veteran producer Sam Gelfman wants the academy to publicly acknowledge during the upcoming Oscar ceremony the half-dozen blacklisted people who won or were nominated for Academy Awards under pseudonyms. Even though credit has been restored to all blacklisted nominees and winners, the acknowledgment needs to be made public, he said. “They should have it,” he said. “It’s right.”

On the other side, some say those who cooperated with the congressional committee have now taken on the role of pariah, once played by those tarred with the brush of communism. They complain that their side is rarely heard.

“People had their own reasons for talking to the committee,” said Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, author of “Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s.”

Some former party members didn’t like the way they had been treated by the party, which had squelched free speech. Others were moved to speak because of Stalinist atrocities, including anti-Semitism, Billingsley said.

The exhibit, “Reds and Blacklists: Political Struggles in the Movie Industry,” explains that the academy contributed to the political climate even before the first congressional hearing in 1947. In the 1920s and ‘30s, the academy, unlike today, was deeply involved in labor-management struggles that helped politicize Hollywood--and always on the side of the studios.

Studio executives and producers agreed not to hire anyone whose name appeared on the blacklist. By 1955, the movie industry had caved in to the “Red Scare.”

The unions also cooperated with the House committee. The Writers Guild agreed that studios could remove names of blacklisted writers from movies; the Directors and Screen Actors guilds adopted loyalty oaths.

Rather than politics, the reasons were more often profit, job security, and--in denying awards to blacklisted writers--embarrassment, the exhibit asserts.

Examples of Some of the Actual Lists

Items on display were gathered from museums and individuals. They include posters of anti-communist movies from the 1950s such as “I Married a Communist,” a photo of movie stars Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and others as they board an airplane for Washington, D.C., in 1947 to support friends who would try to challenge the congressional committee, and letters from some who went to prison rather than inform.

There are examples of some of the actual lists used by studios. One contains the names of those who didn’t respond to a subpoena to appear before the committee that were published in the panel’s annual report.

A second list contains names gathered by organizations such as the American Legion from letterheads of suspect organizations, authors or entertainers. According to Ceplair, the effect of appearing on either list was the same: “You could lose your job.”

Ceplair, a teacher at Santa Monica College, knows that such an exhibit won’t please everyone.

“That’s the nature of the beast,” he said. He said his goal was to show that “for about 15 years in this country, the 1st Amendment went on vacation because of actions by various governments in the U.S. and a lot of vigilante or hate groups.”

The congressional hearings weren’t the first time the government had expanded its powers to control speech in a time of crisis, but they remain the worst in recent memory, Ceplair said.

The roughly 600 people affected in Hollywood were among thousands of ordinary people across the country who lost jobs because they were accused of being communists or communist sympathizers.

Soon after the academy amended its bylaws in 1957, however, its board was embarrassed because blacklisted writers began receiving awards under pseudonyms, and explanations became difficult.

Finally in 1959, when it became known that an Oscar would be going to “Nathan E. Douglas” (Nedrick Young) and his writing partner for “The Defiant Ones,” the board met to rescind the rule.

“They also met with Young and said, ‘If you come, don’t embarrass the academy.’ So, that’s what happened,” Ceplair said. “Ned Young and his partner won, came up, said thank you very much and that was it.” The exhibit includes a clip of the ceremony.

Stories about the rule had been breaking on television and the blacklist began to crumble, he said.

Elizabeth MacRae, Young’s widow, said she recently asked the academy to publicly acknowledge his work under his pseudonym. “I think the academy needs to go the extra step and connect them with their films,” she said. She has not yet received a response.

Perceptions of a Real Threat

Many in Hollywood then--and some now--believed communists posed a real threat to the movie industry. Testimony from actors, screenwriters and producers from the era released last year by the National Archives indicate that communists had infiltrated trade unions, inserted anti-capitalist messages into scripts and taught young actors how to portray pro-communist attitudes in their scenes.

There are those who insist the threat of communism and its propaganda in films justified whatever action they took to combat it.

“People have played it down until there wasn’t a threat there. There was a threat,” said Ramona Moloski of Canoga Park, the daughter of high-profile union leader Roy Brewer, now 92, who cooperated with the committee and opposed strikers. “My dad’s main thrust was to save the country from being overthrown by the communists. It hurts me when I see them go after my dad,” she said.

“The minute you tried to fight communism, you got on their list, believe me.”