Back To The Blacklist

The phenomenon known as the Hollywood Blacklist in the late 1940s through the early 1960s was part of the Red Scare era when the Soviet Union emerged as the most dangerous adversary to the United States, especially when both countries acquired nuclear weapons and both relentlessly built up their arsenals.

J.Edgar Hoover

Fear of Soviet Communism and “communist subversion” was amplified and exploited by such notorious figures as Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, and J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time czar of the FBI. Their apparent zealotry greatly enhanced their public profiles and power, for as long as it all lasted.

It was in this context that majority Republican members of the US House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committees began hearings into communist affiliations and sympathies among those working in the Hollywood movie industry, especially the directors, actors and writers. This is how the Blacklist began, and it spread to other categories, wantonly destroying careers and lives.  It violated civil liberties, constitutional guarantees and due process. But it happened, in America.

I wrote several articles about the Blacklist in the 1970s, when the silence that followed its slow demise was finally broken. In particular, I covered the first documentary film on the Hollywood Blacklist, and the first feature film to center on it as a subject.

Except for the one article that was published at the time (in the alternative weekly called Washington Newsworks, which not coincidentally I was editing), my manuscripts survive in mismatched pieces and drafts. So I’ve assembled what are in form and some content, essentially new articles that tell the story through reporting on those two movies, and through the element of them that most interested me, namely the Children of the Blacklist—literally the children of blacklisted parents, but eventually meaning us all. That sense of it is also there in my accounts of the documentary, for it was being made by that next generation, which is my generation.

I’m posting this now partly because we in the US may be facing the start of another era of totalitarian hysteria like the Blacklist. We’ve never been without the impulse in my lifetime, especially in Washington. But it takes all the power centers in the same hands—executive, legislative and judiciary—to effectively start this tyrannical process. Unfortunately, as a result of the 2024 elections, that seems to be happening.

But the story of the Blacklist tells us something else that I think is of particular importance: this kind of oppression is not actually completed from within the government that fosters it. It is also and sometimes primarily executed from the private sector, from the public. It takes their willing cooperation, if not instigation.

For the government –even HUAC—did not create the Blacklist. That was done by the Hollywood studios and soon after the television networks themselves, out of personal and corporate fear, in conjunction with others who were probably zealots but were basically making money by making lists of people the studios and networks then blacklisted.  The longer they kept making the lists (in both senses of longer), the more powerful they were and the more money they made.

In their 1947 statement from what has become known as the Waldorf Conference, studio heads gave at least lip service to protecting civil liberties and due process of those accused of advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.  In fact, few were specifically accused of this, with any evidence presented.  And so there is the second lesson: that once the hysteria starts it spreads and overcomes legalities or complexities.   

 Driven in part by political ambitions and the profit motive as well as the mob mentality, the Blacklist hysteria fed on itself, until it spread beyond Hollywood to television and New York theatre, eventually to academia and some professions, with many unknown and unacknowledged victims, for more than a decade.

More Background

I first got interested in the Hollywood Blacklist in the mid 1970s when that documentary was being made by director David Helpern, one of my best friends in Cambridge, MA. It was called Hollywood on Trial, though if you've seen a film of this title, it probably isn't this one. The American Movie Channel took the title for their 1995 television documentary. (To confuse things even more, the company that made the 1976 documentary was called October Films, which as far as I know is unrelated to the company called October Films now.)  

As a title, Hollywood on Trial had an even longer lineage: it's the title of a 1948 book about the Hollywood Ten--those indicted for contempt of Congress--by one of their number: Gordon Kahn.  He and his two sons are involved in the stories I tell here.

But the 1976 Hollywood on Trial is the one that was nominated for an Academy Award as best documentary. (It lost out to Harlan County USA, and David, in the audience for the ceremony, remembered that when he heard the first syllable of the winner announced, that "Ha-", his heart stopped.)

Though the Blacklist began in the late 1940s and persisted into the 1960s, it took until the mid-1970s before the silence was broken, especially by Hollywood. Perhaps the first ground-breaking reference to the Blacklist was in the 1973 blockbuster, The Way We Were. In 1975, Lee Grant won best supporting actress for Shampoo, and mentioned in her Oscar acceptance speech that she had been blacklisted, the first such mention, and probably the most public acknowledgment of the Blacklist’s existence to that time.

In 1975 I got a magazine assignment to write a story about the Blacklist, this documentary, and the first feature film about it, The Front, directed by Martin Ritt. This got me access, though nothing ended up being published there.

Along the way I became especially interested in stories of the next generation--those who were children of blacklisted writers, directors and actors.  I wrote separate pieces and proposals on "Children of the Blacklist" that also went nowhere at the time.  This aspect intrigued me, not only because it was my generation, but because I found that I knew a child of a blacklisted writer: Buffy Offner, daughter of Mortimer Offner.  She took some of the photos that accompany these posts.  That's another reason I'm doing this: to honor her memory.

Apart from interviews I conducted, I feel now it is especially valuable to preserve my descriptions of interviews that were filmed for the 1976 Hollywood on Trial documentary but were not included in the final movie. I wish I had images from those interviews but I don’t. I hope the film of those interviews is preserved somewhere.

So in this iteration I present an overview of the Hollywood Blacklist; then Children of the Blacklist, and finally, some updates on relevant events and especially, people mentioned here.

The Blacklist That Ate Hollywood

Dalton Trumbo at the 1947 HUAC hearing

Hooray for Hollywood! Ginger Rodgers, sequined battleships, tap shoes and patter, tough guy detectives, Bogart and Bacall, Dracula and Frankenstein. That's entertainment! All the thirties and forties dream factory products now washed with nostalgia and categorized as good clean fun.

But there were other things happening in Hollywood, too. Films like The Informer, The Dreyfus Affair, The Grapes of Wrath. Films with some political impact or just intelligence that suddenly weren't being made anymore. Stars like John Garfield who disappeared from the screen. Successful screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner, Jr. who suddenly took twenty-year vacations. And the rarely revived, pathetically lifeless films that followed in the fifties and early sixties. Something was happening there but we didn't know what it was. Now we know. It was the Blacklist.

Beginning with the first "Inquiry into Hollywood Communism" conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947, a period of intense political and cultural repression hit the dream factories: a time of fear, suspicion, doubt and injustice that did not end for nearly twenty years. It destroyed families, friendships, careers, lives. Before it was over it had taken from the screen such talents as Garfield, Lee Grant, Zero Mostel and hundreds of screenwriters, actors and directors whose names are now obscure---because the Blacklist destroyed them.

The Blacklist sucked the lifeblood from Hollywood, then itself died in the early sixties. For at least another decade it was a conspiracy of silence few Americans knew about.

But in 1976 it comes full circle to the screen it once attacked, in the form of two motion pictures that can at last hold the Blacklist up to full public view. One is a feature film, The Front---the first Hollywood product to really deal with the Blacklist, starring Woody Allen. The Front was written by Walter Bernstein and directed by Martin Ritt, both of whom had been blacklisted. It also stars Zero Mostel and Hershel Bernardi, also blacklisted.

The other new film is Hollywood On Trial, the first full-length film documentary on the Blacklist, made by a group of young filmmakers headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and narrated by John Huston.


1. "You think I'm a shit, don't you?" How Hollywood Became A Dream Divided Against Itself

Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s was an exciting place. Movies were popular antidotes to the Depression and war-weariness, and so the glamour of Hollywood was somewhat self-satisfied, a kind of public service. But Hollywood was also a place of ideas. Expatriate writers and directors from war-torn Europe, including Jews and others fleeing the Nazis, encouraged this more serious culture. It was a time of political ideas and debate, responding to the Great Depression, the plight of the Okies in California, to the new union movement and the rise of fascism around the world.

The apotheosis of right-wing witch-hunting and the direct precursor of McCarthyism that outlived McCarthy, HUAC launched its 1947 inquiry with much fanfare, demanding to know the political affiliations and union membership of movie people suspected of having subversive ideas they might sneak onto the silver screen.

But Hollywood matched HUAC's flamboyance. The first ten who refused to answer the committee's questions on constitutional grounds were immediately charged with contempt of Congress. "The charges were correct," screenwriter Dalton Trumbo said later. "I did have contempt for that particular Congress."

The jokes and much of the bravado stopped when their Supreme Court appeal unexpectedly failed (the composition of the Court had changed between the hearings and the decision) and the Hollywood Ten were sentenced to prison.

At first Hollywood was united in its resistance to the politicians' attempt to tarnish their American Dream factory. When HUAC's investigation was first announced, actor-director John Huston was among those who organized a galaxy of Hollywood luminaries such as Humphrey Bogart, Frederic March, Danny Kaye and Lucille Ball into the Committee for the First Amendment. They took to the radio with a program called "Hollywood Fights Back" and barnstormed cities between Los Angeles and Washington, protesting the HUAC hearings and asserting their first amendment right to a "free screen."

But when the Hollywood Ten was indicted, movie studio executives met at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York and issued the infamous Waldorf Statement, which declared that the Ten would not be permitted to work for any major studio again, and that the studios would be on the lookout for other similarly dangerous subversives. It was the official beginning of the Hollywood Blacklist.

It was the industry itself, not the committee, that changed all the rules. Now the careers of all dissidents were in jeopardy, and so Hollywood's united front crumbled. Some of the Ten had been too abrasive and defensive. Defending someone's right to be a Communist (the American Communist Party being an official US political party that put forward candidates in elections) no longer seemed wholesome. Grumbling about mistaken strategy, some prominent members of the First Amendment Committee dropped out. One of those was Humphrey Bogart.

He was working on "Key Largo" at the time, directed by his friend, John Huston. They had a brief conversation on the subject during the filming that not only demonstrates the strain being put on relationships, but in its own way is a perfect illustration of how easily the Hollywood métier lends itself to black comedy. Bogart and Huston had hardly exchanged an unnecessary word during the filming, and now they were in a bar, drinking side by side in silence. Until Bogart said, "You think I'm a shit, don't you?" "Yep," Huston replied.

But even such tragicomedy wasn't possible for long. When movie people began testifying and naming their friends for having attended a meeting at which Communism was discussed, or being members of subversive organizations like the End Jim Crow in Baseball Committee, there were no illusions of unity left to defend. Hollywood had become a dream divided against itself, and it has never been the same.

The Blacklist soon spread to television, where the networks were actually paying people like Vincent Hartnett and his Red Channels scare sheet $5 for each name of an alleged Communist in the media. Behind Hartnett and other groups was the threat of organized boycotts of sponsors' products if the people they named weren't kept from working. As always the names included civil rights activists, pacifists and anyone who spoke up against the Blacklist itself-like John Henry Faulk, whose only subversive act was running for an Actors' Guild office, or Lee Grant, who was kept out of films and television for twelve years because of something she said in support of another Blacklisted actor, at his funeral. (And so another actress was blacklisted because she said something in support of Lee Grant.)

The cost of twenty years of the Blacklist was felt in personal terms: defeat, despair, and even suicide were not unknown, and alcoholism, divorce, breakdown and early death were not uncommon. Friends informing on friends led to lifelong suspicion and guilt.

The effects were inevitably felt throughout the culture and are still being felt, for behind much of the vapidness of today's movies is the job the Blacklist did in ridding Hollywood of an atmosphere in which ideas could grow and be respected.

Writer-director Abraham Polonsky recalls the years when, thanks largely to the influx of European directors and the presence of writers like Aldous Huxley and William Faulkner, Hollywood was actually a place of intellectual ferment. "I remember my conversations with my friends in the 40s. Hegel, Marx, Kant, Russell, Wittgenstein, all the modern writers, all the modern painters, were active names in the communal, social, personal dialogue in this town. Nowadays, I only hear those painters' names when I go to Sotheby's to listen to an auction."

The thrust of the Blacklist was to make unsafe any impulse in the entertainment community that did not contribute directly to making money for the studios and networks. Intellectual and political activity, unionization, and anything that threatened the authority of the status quo were the real targets of the Blacklist, not Communism. And so, the Blacklist succeeded.

II

"You know, it only takes one man"- Tales from The Front

Blacklisted screenwriter Gordon Kahn, exiled in Mexico to avoid going to jail, got a phone call from blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in California. It was the night of the 1956 Academy Awards. The Oscar for Best Screenplay had just been awarded to Robert Rich, and accepted on his behalf by a Writer's Guild official. But Robert Rich was a front--Dalton Trumbo's, in fact. It was the name he put on his screenplay for The Brave One. Trumbo had become the first blacklisted writer to win an Oscar under another name. He wouldn't be the last.

"They talked for awhile on the phone," Gordon's son James Kahn remembered, "and then for a long time they just giggled."

There is something funny about the idea of fronts, which is one reason another blacklisted writer, Walter Bernstein, decided he could approach the whole subject of the Blacklist by writing a comedy about a man who lends his name to the screenplays of another.

That idea was becoming a film---a real Hollywood major studio movie---in the fall of 1975, ten years after Bernstein began planning the script, two years after he'd written it. Martin Ritt, who'd directed Bernstein's script of Paris Blues (the 1961 movie about jazz and race relations in Paris that starred Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Diahann Carroll and Sidney Poitier) and who'd acted in television shows Bernstein wrote before they were both blacklisted, managed to convince David Begelman, the new president of Columbia Pictures, to take a chance on a film about the Blacklist. Among Ritt's credits were Sounder and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

He also convinced Woody Allen to star in it---his first dramatic role, and the first movie he's acted in that he hadn't written. Allen consistently explained this career departure the same way: "I admire the director, I like the script, and I think the subject matter is extremely important."

The Front's main story is about Alfred Miller, a fictional blacklisted writer played by Michael Murphy, who asks his best friend, Howard Prince (Woody Allen) to pass himself off as the author of Miller's script. Prince had never written a word in his life.

This is one kind of front: an actual, breathing person who could attend script meetings and otherwise put a face on the illusion to make it more convincing. Bernstein himself used fronts and tells funny stories about what may be the most tragically absurd phenomenon of the Blacklist. Bernstein used some friends. Writer Millard Lampell used a novelist who wanted to learn screenwriting. Dalton Trumbo even tried to use novelist Nelson Algren (Algren was willing but it never really happened.) The resulting problems are legendary: fronts who began to believe they'd really written the scripts, for example, and became critical of the actual writer's work if it wasn't up to the front's reputation.

Lampell tells the story of a blacklisted writer whose script won an award. His front accepted the plaque and met the writer after the ceremony to celebrate. Only nobody felt like celebrating. They had a few drinks in silence, staring at the award. The writer felt terrible because he was the only one who knew his work had won. The front felt terrible because his name was on an award he didn't deserve. They had a few more drinks and on the way home, they dropped the plaque into the nearest sewer.

Walter Bernstein and Martin Ritt on set of The Front

Later the writers who used fronts were more or less an open secret in the industry. They still had to use them, but fronts became simply pseudonyms. Bernstein remembers that period, too. He experienced the usual humiliations. "Once I was watching an episode of 'You Are There' with my kids, and I let it slip that I'd written it. They wanted to know why somebody else's name was on it. I had to tell them not to say anything about it to anyone."

But there were also the converse absurdities. "Once I was complimented at a party for a script I didn't do," Bernstein said. "Someone said to me, 'hey, congratulations on your TV show last night.' 'Thanks,' I said, 'but that wasn't mine.' But he didn't believe me. 'Sure, I know you can't say, Walter, but I really liked it.' 'But I didn't write it---really.' 'It's okay, Walter, I understand.'"

Fronting became so much of an open secret that Bernstein received a card from a producer which ended, "By the way, give my regards to..." and listed four names, all of them fronts Bernstein had used for the producer's shows.

But finally fronts became like the Blacklist itself: a very cruel, very bad joke. It became common practice in Hollywood that when there was no money left in the screenwriting budget, the call would go out for blacklisted writers because they had to work cheap. But eventually they won so many awards--through fronts, naturally---that they became magic. They were the best. Lampell quotes a producer's outburst: "This script is terrible! Go get me a blacklisted writer!"

Most of 

Woody Allen and Zero Mostel

The Front was shot in New York City, but a week was spent on location at a resort hotel in the Berkshires. It was a bizarre shoot. Elderly denizens of the hotel, some of them visiting members of the National Hebrew Association and the Medical Center of Denver, mixed with the costumed extras from New York who were, at 7 a.m., dressed as a nightclub crowd in 1953. It looked like the last remains of the junior prom having breakfast at an old folk's home.

Few of the extras knew what the film was about, which isn't unusual, but fewer still knew about the Blacklist. One actress remembered that her aunt had belonged to the League of Women Shoppers, made famous by Walt Disney denouncing it before HUAC as a Commie front, after first confusing it with the League of Women Voters.

Meanwhile on stage Zero Mostel (playing a blacklisted writer named Hecky Brown) was putting on a one-man show that got better with each take. He sang, told jokes, did sight gags and otherwise resurrected his 1950s nightclub act. He also made sure to do something different each time, so the audience of extras would really laugh. So we got to watch Zero Mostel top himself, take after take.

Later Mostel would play a scene in which the nightclub owner tells Hecky that the pay he was getting for his act---already a fraction of what he made before being blacklisted---was to be cut in half again. The same thing happened to Mostel at a different hotel, twenty years before.

Director Martin Ritt, clad in a floppy Navy blue jumpsuit, paused between takes to talk about the tone of The Front. It had begun as more of a comedy than it was shaping up to be. "As we began filming," Ritt told me, "the picture became tougher...This picture will be the toughest kind of picture on a moral level it can possibly be."

Ritt, whose own refusal to testify to HUAC ended his acting career (Paddy Chayefsky wrote "Marty" specifically for Marty Ritt to play) is forceful about the Blacklist's continued relevance. "The object of the Blacklist was to impose economic sanctions on those who disagreed with HUAC. The object of the hearings was to break the will of anyone who opposed them. They told me, 'name someone who's dead, we don't care. Just name somebody.'... If the committee had successfully broken the wills of those who were blacklisted, there just wouldn't have been a constituency left to fight Watergate. The behavior of those who resisted set an example, made people think."

But Ritt wasn't intending to make a political tract--he wants The Front to be entertaining, to succeed with audiences, for a number of reasons. "If it's successful it will mean a great deal towards the possibility of making serious films," Ritt said. "And since at my age I don't have too many more films to make, I want them to be serious."

Besides those participating in this film who had survived the Blacklist, there were several children of Hollywood people who had been blacklisted. John Garfield's daughter Julie had a small part as a waitress, and his son David was a production assistant.

John Garfield at his HUAC hearing

David Garfield is a head taller, but otherwise is a very good likeness of his father, whose performances in films like Body and Soul and Force of Evil made him the quintessential dead-end kid with a heart of gold, and a major movie star. David speaks in the same rapid, unmistakable tones his father made famous, and he pulls no punches about the Blacklist.

"I was eight years old when my father died in 1952. But even afterwards my mother made us watch the McCarthy hearings on television," David Garfield remembered. "My father wasn't a leader in the thinking department, but he was curious. When he saw his best friends turn against him, it broke his heart. One minute he was a star, the next people were crossing the street to avoid him. I really believe he was killed by it."

John Garfield was in fact one of the most outrageously victimized. He was hounded and smeared for political associations which apparently amounted to little more than signing petitions and attending parties. He spent the last years of his life trying desperately to clear himself. At the time of his death in 1952, a non-show business friend commented, "John was guilty of two things: loving people and being naïve."

David Garfield believes it can happen all over again. "Sure---and it would happen in exactly the same way," he said. "Whatever the issue. The networks would line up as they did, the studios-everything. In this picture Woody has a line, he's speaking to a network exec. He says, 'you know, it only takes one man.' And he's right. And it only makes me admire my father more. It only takes one man to stand up against it. But it took a lot to stand up---and not many people can do it."

III
"Can They Teach Us Something About How We Should Live?"

Arnie Riesman and David Helpern. Photo by Elizabeth Offner

When Hollywood on Trial was shown at Cannes, Variety described it as being as much a regular feature as a documentary. And why not? After all, it stars Ronald Reagan, Walt Disney and Ginger Rodger's mother, as well as Millard Lampell, Richard Nixon, Ring Lardner, Jr. and Jack Warner. It's Hollywood!

It was this combination of politics and the movie business that first attracted HOT's director, David Helpern, Jr., to the subject of the Blacklist. As a student he came upon a special issue of Film Culture on it. Then after his first documentary, I'm A Stranger Here Myself: A Portrait of Nicholas Ray was successful enough to interest investors in his work, he took on the challenge of making a film about the Hollywood Blacklist. Helpern is 28.

One of Helpern's partners in October Films, James Gutman, agreed to produce. Neither Helpern nor Gutman is old enough to remember the Blacklist, but their own political involvements in the sixties drew them to it.

Jim Gutman  photo by Elizabeth Offner

For Gutman, who had traveled to Chile during the election of Allende on another documentary project, the period is bound up with his own political education. "I come from a long line of gray flannel capitalists," Gutman he said. He first met children of Blacklist victims while at Harvard, but their parents had mostly given up their politics and gone into safer businesses. It started him thinking about the lack of continuity between the radicalism of the thirties and that of the sixties, both in the lives of his friends whose parents had been radicals but weren't anymore, and in the culture in general. What caused the break?

"The answer, of course, is McCarthyism," Gutman said. " The Blacklist itself. That silenced it."

Arnie Reisman was the editor of a Boston entertainment weekly in the early 70s, and interviewed visiting movie stars. Because he knew the son of a blacklisted writer who shared some memories, he often included in his interviews the question, “Where were you during the Blacklist?” He got some fascinating answers, but when he tried to put together a discussion program for public television in 1970, no one would agree to appear on it.

Then in 1974 Riesman edited a special issue on the fifties for The Real Paper in Cambridge, and received an article on the Hollywood Blacklist written by David Helpern. The issue never appeared, but the article resulted in Arnie's participation as writer and interviewer in Hollywood On Trial.

He got the chance to ask his questions when HOT interviewed principals of the period in California and New York. The first confirmed acceptance of an interview came from Ronald Reagan, who was one of the more or less official keepers of the Blacklist in Hollywood. Reagan, seated in his flag-flanked governor's chair, politely explained how he helped run an office where anyone in Hollywood who wasn't working could come to find out if he was really too tall for the part, or if he'd just been blacklisted.

The young filmmakers were a little surprised at how many interviews they obtained. They shot first on the East Coast and then in California, with several interviews shot almost incongruously against lush outdoor backgrounds. Even the first uncut interviews were fascinating: Dore Schary, a scenarist and playwright ("Sunrise at Campobello") who rose through the ranks to become a studio executive, seated in his rococo living room, a portrait of JFK on the piano, giving a classic chronicle of the liberal dilemma, beginning with his efforts organizing the Screen Writer's Guild and his gradual but complete cooption by the studio blacklisters.

And by contrast, writer Millard Lampell at his rambling New Jersey home, describing how he watched in horror as fear crushed the minds of his Hollywood idols, only to find himself subpoenaed and blacklisted a few years later, while working on a television special on... paranoia.

Dalton Trumbo in the 1970s

"Some of them went to considerable trouble to talk to us," David Helpern said. "Dalton Trumbo had been very ill---he had a heart attack a year ago. His daughter told us he was too sick, but he was eager to talk to us. He promised us an hour and gave us three." So he appeared, frail but dandyish in his black sweater, slumped in a huge red chair, struggling against his weak physical condition to tell his story.

But some people were still frightened to talk about the Blacklist. A writer for a famous comedy team declined because he was just getting on his feet again and was afraid of the unwanted notice an interview might give him. A movie character actor and respected acting teacher refused for the reason that many more of the blacklisteds used to give---what if it started up again?

In some cases, Helpern and associates opened channels of communication long closed by the animosity and paranoia the Blacklist nurtured. David talked about one incident involving Leo Townsend, a cooperative witness. "We found him living in a one-room cottage at Malibu, trying to sell a TV pilot, a sad and lonely man in his sixties. He was abandoned by both sides, a real casualty. He was worried about doing the interview with us. He wanted us to like him." Townsend mentioned that he'd written a long letter to Trumbo after reading his famous "only victims" statement, but never received a reply. "But I can understand that," he told them. Helpern and Reisman related the story to Trumbo, who said he had intended to answer Townsend's letter but had been too ill. They passed that information back to Townsend.

Part of Helpern’s interest was his curiosity about what those who'd lived through the Blacklist had to say to the generation that experienced their form of radicalizing in the sixties.

Howard Da Silva

"In the sixties we were forced to make decisions," Helpern said. "They were all around us. But now [in the 70s] there's no mass movement to identify with-so what do we do now? So I look at people who thirty years ago made a certain commitment. Did they know what they were doing? Are they glad? Are they heroes? What do they regret? Can they teach us something about how we should live?"

Helpern talked about one interview, with actor Howard DeSilva. "I asked him if he had ever considered cooperating with the Committee." Cooperating is the polite term for naming names. "He just smiled. 'Never,' he said. Well, why didn't he? That's what I want to understand in this film...You have to understand events through people, what they thought about, what they felt. I trust film---I trust its ability to portray emotion."

Frank Galvin, the documentary's film editor, is slightly older than the others, with a slightly different perspective. In his late 30s, he'd already served in the Navy, as the photographer who films incoming planes landing on aircraft carriers---usually a safer job than it looks, unless the plane crashes. The very first plane that he filmed did exactly that.

Frank Galvin. Behind him is photo of Millard
Lampell.  Photo by E. Offner

Now Galvin edits newsreel footage of HUAC hearings while reliving some of it, since he is old enough to remember seeing it the first time around. "I don't remember much specifically, but I do remember the mood of watching it." From a family he characterizes as "white collar, middle class Boston Irish Catholic" he remembers his father watching the McCarthy hearings and saying, "If those guys have nothing to hide, why don't they talk?" Frank didn't disagree, then. Then came Vietnam.

 "I saw it coming in 1962. I felt sure it was going to be bad, but not as bad as it got. I'd been reading Bernard Fall, I read every issue of I.F. Stone, the New Republic and the Nation. When McNamara came to Harvard and when the State Department issued their white paper, it started a new round of obsession. I was in a state of fury over government policy and in daily agony over the war. I came out of it a socialist anarchist-and Democrat, still. The only two people I've voted for President in fifteen years of voting were Kennedy and McGovern."

Frank was David Helpern's documentary teacher at the Orson Welles Film School in Cambridge. "He showed up one day in a ten gallon hat, plunked himself down and stayed for five semesters...Now he's one of the few young filmmakers around who is really professional."

There was a kind of meeting of the generations on the set of The Front, when the October Films crew was there to capture a few minutes of it, and interview the principals for their film. Once David Helpern took advantage of a lull in Zero Mostel's act to direct an extra for the H.O.T. camera. The two crews-the huge and hugely equipped Columbia crew and the small October Films group---were getting along famously, mutually interested in each other's film.

"For years nobody wanted to hear about the Blacklist," Walter Bernstein said. "I got a great deal of satisfaction from talking to the October Films people. They really wanted to know...I was teaching a senior seminar in screenwriting at NYU while I was writing 'The Front' and none of my students knew anything about the Blacklist."

There is a natural bond between these generations. A panel discussion on the Blacklist organized in Los Angeles by young members of the New American Movement Media Group heard blacklisted actress Karen Morely say, "I feel very close and very warm toward the generation that stopped the Vietnam war." Will Geer hardly spoke of the old days at all, using his time to endorse the senatorial aspirations of former movement hero Tom Hayden.

It may be that history will show that it was the sixties generation that finally rang down the curtain on HUAC itself. The first test of the student movement at Berkeley was the 1960 anti-HUAC demonstration at the San Francisco Court House, where police turned fire hoses on white students for the first time. Ironically, HUAC was finally destroyed by a political extract of something it labored to annihilate or at least co-opt: political theatre. When Jerry Rubin showed up to testify in an American Revolutionary War uniform, the committee's option was as good as cancelled.

Zero Mostel as Hecky Green in The Front

After their visit to the set of the Front, the October Films group discussed their observations. They were impressed with Bernstein's quiet humor. "He's allowed himself to see that he learned something about himself from being blacklisted, "Helpern said. "As horrible as it was, it did do something positive, in a personal way. Like Millard (Lampell) when he said he might have been a much more glib, slick human being otherwise. Or when Zero Mostel said he might not have done Shakespeare…"

Still, something that they all discovered in the course of making their film was that in some ways the Blacklist is not really over. The fear is still there: several people refused to talk to them about their involvement. Others claimed continued harassment.

At this point HOT is nearing final edit. Frank Galvin is cutting and splicing footage according to what he and David decided the day before. Then David views the results on the Steenbeck editing screen. A trove of historical footage came in relatively late.

Meanwhile, Arnie has come in from working at home on a new treatment. He tells everyone about the testimony before the Church subcommittee that he'd heard on the radio that morning. A retired FBI agent talked about Communists in the fifties and blamed antiwar protests in the sixties and seventies on Communist influence. As Arnie narrated it, Senator Tower of Texas heartily agreed. "He told them,' When I made a speech at Berkeley I was called a fascist pig. Nobody would call me that unless they'd been trained, and only Communists are trained to call people fascists.'"

The editing room is just big enough for the Steenbeck, a table to rewind the film on, shelves for the film cans, the telephone and three or four chairs. Two well-thumbed copies of Eric Bentley's history of HUAC, Thirty Years of Treason, sit within easy reach, like Bibles.

After some discussion on script matters, David asked Arnie if it had occurred to him that part of the reason they were doing the film was that they were Jewish. Many of the people blacklisted were Jews, and anti-Semitism played a strong part in the entire HUAC-related frenzy. A particularly obvious example was committeeman John Rankin of Mississippi simply reading some well known names (Danny Kaye, June Havoc, Eddie Cantor) and then revealing their birth names (David Daniel Kamirsky, June Jovick, Edward Iskowitz) as all the evidence he needed to discredit their criticisms of HUAC's activities.

"I just thought about it today," David said. "It hadn't occurred to me before."

"No,” Arnie said. “I've been seeing it more broadly, as the American Inquisition."