When organizers moved the Academy Awards broadcast to a Sunday night, they were thinking mainly of bigger audiences and, of course, higher television profits. But long-ago screenwriter Bernie Gordon prefers to think of this year’s ceremony as the world’s largest classroom.
Last year, a record estimated 87 million viewers tuned in to see the Hollywood glitterati preen as they honored themselves in their annual ritual of glamor and glory. This year, Gordon hopes that Oscar night provides a little peek–and maybe, some insight– into some forgotten chapters of American history.
“There’s a whole younger generation out there that doesn’t have the foggiest idea what went on in this country during the McCarthy era,” said Gordon, who was blacklisted by Hollywood during the anti-communist frenzy of the 1950s that was personified by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
“The blacklisting didn’t just hurt people in Hollywood, but lawyers and doctors and housewives and union guys all across the country.”
Gordon helped organize the Committee Against Silence, a movie-industry group opposed to the decision of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to present famed film director Elia Kazan with a special, lifetime achievement award.
If his credits alone were considered, it would be hard to quibble with the gesture. The 89-year-old Kazan has won Oscars for “Gentlemen’s Agreement” and “On the Waterfront,” and was the director as well of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “East of Eden.”
But to Gordon’s ear, “lifetime achievement” sounds like it ought to encompass what a man does off as well as on a sound stage. So Gordon and his friends have asked those who attend the Oscars on Sunday night to “sit on their hands” and not applaud when Kazan gets his award.
Gordon and Kazan once marched together on the same side of the political aisle. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, desperate times seemed to call for desperate measures. There were soup kitchens and millions unemployed in this country. Overseas, Hitler was using the Spanish Civil War as a proving ground for the weapons of World War II, sending Nazi airmen and tanks to support fascist rebels while the Western democracies refused aid to Spain’s elected government.
So Gordon and Kazan became communists. Gordon was a student at the City College of New York, where the lunchroom was a hotbed of political debate. Kazan was an actor with New York’s experimental Group Theater, which was equally left of center.
Two decades later, the political climate shifted dramatically, as the Cold War inspired a concerted effort to root out communism on the domestic front. Well known for its liberal sentiments, Hollywood was a sitting duck. Congressional investigators and frightened studio moguls demanded that leftist actors, writers and directors publicly recant as the price of keeping their jobs.
On April 10, 1952, Kazan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming eight of his associates in the Group Theater as communists. Giving up his friends allowed him to continue making movies.
In his 1988 memoirs, “Elia Kazan: A Life,” Kazan recalled he was persuaded to testify by Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox. “Who the hell are you going to jail for?” Zanuck argued. “You’ll be sitting there and someone else will sure as hell name those people.”
Gordon refused to listen to a similar argument.
“My bosses at Warner Brothers said, `Just say a few words to the committee,’ but I wouldn’t and was fired,” Gordon said. “I found myself making 50 bucks a week, selling plastic doo-dahs.”
Eventually, Gordon rebuilt his career in England and Spain. Others among the hundreds blacklisted by the Hollywood studios were hurt worse. So, too, were teachers fired by school boards and union officials kicked out of the very unions they had helped build during the 1930s.
The so-called Hollywood Ten– some of the most talented screen writers of the day–went to prison for refusing to testify before the committee. Even after serving their terms, they had to scratch out a living, quietly writing scripts under pseudonyms.
Kazan wasn’t the only one to turn in friends and colleagues. But most of those who did so later expressed regret and contrition.
Kazan, though, never did, even after the Hollywood establishment tried to heal the scars of the McCarthy era by restoring screen credits to blacklisted writers.
So his name has remained a lightning rod in Hollywood. Other industry groups, such as the American Film Institute and Los Angeles Film Critics Association have refused him their awards. When the directors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted Kazan an honorary Oscar earlier this year, the announcement provoked a bitter dispute in the movie industry and beyond.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. accused Kazan’s critics of “orgies of self-righteous frenzy.” He wrote, “Let Mr. Kazan’s denouncers apologize for the aid and comfort they gave Stalinism.”
Actor Richard Dreyfus has been equally vocal in his criticism of Kazan’s award. So, too, was Rod Steiger, who starred in Kazan’s “On the Waterfront.”
Playwright Arthur Miller, though, came down on the academy’s side of the issue. That was something of a surprise, because Miller, who was himself hurt during the era, broke with Kazan after he testified. “My own feelings toward that terrible era are unchanged,” Miller wrote in the Nation magazine. “But at the same time history ought not be rewritten; Elia Kazan did sufficiently extraordinary work in theater and film to merit its acknowledgment.”
That noisy debate comes as a belated delight to Norma Barzman, another member of the Committee Against Silence. She and her late husband Ben, both screenwriters, were blacklisted during the McCarthy era. To survive, they had to leave the country and work in the European movie industry.
“Kazan’s testifying helped silence political dissent in this country,” said Barzman, 78. “He contributed to the rewriting of history.”
Barzman is grateful to a new Hollywood generation for belatedly recognizing the contributions of those once blacklisted, by restoring their screen credits. But she wonders if even the most liberal of younger screen writers recognize their indebtedness to their predecessors.
“Some of us who were blacklisted built the Screen Writers Guild,” Barzman said. “We fought the studios to get the benefits, like pensions and medical care, that younger people take for granted.”
Originally, Barzman was going to stay home Oscar night. Now she will be among those picketing the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “My 14-year-old grandson . . . called,” she said. “He said: `We’re going to the demonstration, grandma. I’m going to carry a sign saying: I’m the grandson of two blacklisted writers, and proud of it.’ “
Not all young people are so informed about their country’s past, notes Abe Polonsky, another veteran of the blacklisting. Once a script writer, he still teaches at the University of Southern California at age 88.
“If I would ask my class who were the Wobblies,” Polonsky said, “the kids might guess they were a rock group from Canada.”
Actually, the Wobblies–the Industrial Workers of the World– were members of a labor movement that tried to organize unskilled workers in industries like mining and logging in the early years of this century. Many fell victim to an earlier Red Scare at the end of World War I.
Historian Larry Ceplair says he’s not surprised by the gap in the historical knowledge of Polonsky’s students. Author of “The Inquisition in Hollywood,” a study of the blacklist years, Ceplair teaches at Santa Monica Community College.
“When I show my class a documentary on the Red Scare,” Ceplair said, “afterward, the kids say they can hardly believe such things ever happened in America.”
Ceplair added that one of the most pernicious aftereffects of the McCarthy era was that it rendered Americans amnesiac about significant chapters in their country’s history.
Long before the Communists, Ceplair noted, there were Socialists and Anarchists, Single Taxers, Populists and Progressives, plus adherents of a hundred other causes. All were mocked as purveyors of pie-in-the-sky ideas.
Yet some of the causes they fought for passed into the political mainstream as benefits now taken for granted–like the 8-hour workday, child labor laws, industrial safety regulations, Social Security and the right of the elderly and poor to decent medical care.
By giving Kazan an Oscar, the Academy’s directors may have inadvertently provided Americans with just that history lesson, say members of the Committee Against Silence.
“I’m just an old blacklisted screenwriter, not a historian,” said Gordon, 80. “But it seems to me that young people need to know some of those things. Don’t you?”
