Blacklisted: Walter Bernstein & Lee Grant

Walter Bernstein, screenwriter, 93 Bernstein has always been open about the fact that he was a communist. He became politicized during a trip to France and then at Dartmouth, where he joined the Young Communist League. After he graduated, he went to Europe to cover World War II for Yank, the Army weekly. When the war ended, he formally joined the Communist Party. "I never thought there'd be repercussions," he says. "The ideas and the ideals were very important to me." Around the same time, an anthology of his wartime writing was published, which led to his first work in Hollywood. Things came to a halt in 1950 when his name appeared in Red Channels -- a pamphlet distributed to studios and networks that listed 151 show-business people whom it deemed members of or sympathetic to the Communist Party -- alongside allegations which, he says, were "all true." His name did not again appear in the credits of a film until 1958 or a TV show until 1961. That wasn't because he stopped working. In fact, using pseudonyms and fronts (other writers who agreed to claim credit so those blacklisted could earn a living), he wrote for The Magnificent Seven (1960), Fail-Safe (1964) and The Molly Maguires (1970). He is best remembered for The Front (1976), a dramedy about the Blacklist that brought him an original screenplay Oscar nom.