Cached Saturday, May 12, 2007, from The Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-gordon12may12,1,234904.story

Bernard Gordon, 88; blacklisted screenwriter led '99 Kazan protest

By Valerie J. Nelson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Bernard Gordon, one of the younger screenwriters blacklisted during the McCarthy era whose proudest moment late in life was the protest he led against the honorary Oscar awarded director Elia Kazan, has died. He was 88.

Gordon, who wrote for years under a pseudonym but saw many of his film credits restored, died Friday [May 11, 2007] at his home in the Hollywood Hills after a long battle with bone cancer, said his daughter, Ellen Gordon.

When Kazan stepped onstage in 1999 to accept an Academy Award for lifetime achievement, many in the audience withheld their applause. Outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center, hundreds of demonstrators noisily protested, holding signs bearing such messages as "Don't Whitewash the Blacklist," a result of the campaign Gordon helped orchestrate.

In 1952, Kazan had denounced colleagues as onetime communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Gordon had been subpoenaed to appear before the committee but was never called to testify. The exiled screenwriter was forced to work abroad. He made more than 20 films, including penning the scripts for "The Thin Red Line" (1964) and "Battle of the Bulge" (1965).

"Some very, very prominent people had been affected by the depths of that campaign against Kazan. That was Bernie Gordon's handiwork, and he lived long enough to experience some vindication," said Patrick McGilligan, co-author of "Tender Comrades," a 1997 book about the Hollywood blacklist that included a lengthy interview with Gordon.

In an interview Friday with The Times, Ellen Gordon read from the telegram summoning her father to the hearings and remembered how he hid from the subpoena server. Her parents told Ellen, then 2, "not to open the door to the magazine salesman" at their front door.

Unable to find work because of the blacklist, Gordon became "the world's worst plastics salesman" in downtown Los Angeles, he said in a 2000 Times story. His boss was Ray Marcus, a friend whose name he would use as an alias on several scripts. "Raymond T. Marcus" was his original credit on "Hellcats of the Navy" (1957), which starred Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy Davis.

Through a friend, Gordon met film producer Philip Yordan, who would become known for acting as a front for blacklisted colleagues. Gordon moved to France and then Spain to work for him from 1960 to 1973.

As a writer and producer, Gordon made such science fiction classics as "The Day of the Triffids" (1962) and such big-screen spectacles as "El Cid" (1961) and "55 Days at Peking" (1963).

He was proudest of his films, such as "Horror Express" (1973), that had cult reputations, McGilligan said.

Yordan often took the screen credit while Gordon wrote the scripts, but the arrangement allowed Gordon to make movies, and $2,000 a week, in the 1960s.

"The living was good in Spain," Gordon recalled in "Tender Comrades." It led him to title his memoir "Hollywood Exile, or How I Learned to Love the Blacklist" (2000).

"It's ironic but true, because when I escaped and went to Europe, I finally became a success," Gordon said in the 2000 Times story.

Decades would pass before his achievements were publicly acknowledged as his own by the Writers Guild of America.

As of 2000, 10 screenwriting credits had been restored to Gordon, more than any other writer, said Dave Robb, a journalist who covered Hollywood and became a friend of Gordon.

"The action by the guild comes about 40 years too late to help my Hollywood career," Gordon told the New York Times in 1997 after seven credits had been restored.

"I sure am angry at the way I was treated by all the major studios," he said. "They blacklisted me, and I couldn't get any work in this damn town."

Gordon was born Oct. 29, 1918, in New Britain, Conn., to William and Kitty Gordon, Russian Jewish immigrants. His father ran a hardware store.

Growing up in New York City, Gordon developed an early fascination with the movies. He studied English and film at City College of New York, earning a bachelor's degree in 1937.

With his childhood friend Julian Zimet — who would collaborate on movies with Gordon and also be blacklisted — he established a film-appreciation group called the Film and Sprocket Society at the college, Ellen Gordon said.

When he arrived in Los Angeles, Gordon had $16 in his pocket and got a job at Paramount as a script reader, the 2000 Times story said.

Active in the Screen Readers Guild, he served as its president and helped negotiate the organization's first contract with the film studios, according to "Tender Comrades."

Gordon joined the Communist Party at 22, when he was just getting his start in Hollywood.

It "was certainly not a path to success," he wrote in his memoir. "Right or wrong, people were there because they were outraged about the existing woes and evils of the world and wanted to do something to correct them."

In 1946, he married Jean Lewin, a fellow activist who ran the Hollywood Canteen, a wartime club for servicemen. She died in 1995.

From 1947 to 1952, Gordon worked as a freelance scenarist, before opportunities started to vanish.

"He was bitterly funny and extremely modest about his screenwriting career," McGilligan said. "He knew the blacklist had kept him from doing great things…. He could be very funny on the subject, but he never forgave his enemies."

Gordon's only survivor is Ellen, a registered nurse case-manager at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Services are pending.

Cached Saturday, May 12, 2007, from
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=print_story&articleid=VR1117964802&categoryid=25

Posted at Variety.com Fri., May 11, 2007, 5:27pm PT

Bernard Gordon, 88, screenwriter

Scribe was blacklisted in the mid-'50s

By VARIETY STAFF

Bernard Gordon, one of the last of the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters, died May 11 in Los Angeles after a long battle with cancer. He was 88.

Gordon, whose films included "55 Days at Peking," "The Thin Red Line," "Battle of the Bulge" and "Day of the Triffids," was blacklisted in the mid-'50s when someone told the House Un-American Activities Committee that he was a member of the Communist Party.

"I was working at Warner Bros. when it was alleged that I was a member of the party, and they fired me," he recalled in a 1996 interview for Cineaste magazine. According to Wikipedia, he had briefly joined the party during the 1940s.

Gordon then went to work for $50 a week as a salesman for a company in downtown Los Angeles that made plastic covers for mattresses and toasters.

"I was the world's worst salesman," he often laughed.

Gordon, who had written three films in the early '50s before being blacklisted, returned to screenwriting under an assumed name. Gordon was one of the most prolific of the blacklisted writers. In 1957 alone, Columbia Pictures released four films he had written or co-written under the name Raymond Marcus: "Escape From San Quentin," "The Man Who Turned to Stone," "Zombies of Mora Tau" and "Hellcats of the Navy," the only film that Ronald and Nancy Reagan ever appeared in together.

Under that pseudonym he also wrote "Chicago Confidential," a 1957 United Artists release; and co-wrote "The Case Against Brooklyn," a 1958 Columbia picture, and "Earth vs. Flying Saucers," a 1956 Col film.

Under the pseudonym John T. Williams, he wrote "The Law vs. Billy the Kid," a 1954 film for Col Pictures.

For some writers, the blacklist ended in 1960 when Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas gave blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo screen credit for "Exodus" and "Spartacus," respectively. But for others, the blacklist lingered on for several more years.

In 1962, when "Day of the Triffids" was released, the writing credit was given to the producer, Philip Yordan, even though the script was actually written by Gordon. He received on-screen credit for "55 Days at Peking" and the first screen adaptation of "The Thin Red Line." He produced several Westerns in Spain as well as sci-fi thriller "Horror Express" with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

The WGA, which has been correcting the credits of blacklisted writers since 1980, subsequently changed the credit of "Day of the Triffids" -- and a dozen other films Gordon wrote under pseudonyms and fronts -- to reflect his authorship.

Gordon was one of the most prolific of the blacklisted writers, and has had more blacklisted credits restored by the WGA than any other writer.

Gordon was born in New Briton, Conn., and attended the City College of New York, where he made a film with his longtime friend and collaborator, Julian Zimet. His first produced screenplay was boxing pic "Flesh and Fury" with Tony Curtis.

In 1999, Gordon led the protest against the awarding of an honorary Oscar to director Elia Kazan, who named names during the blacklist.

Gordon, who remained political to the end of his life, wrote two books about his life, "Hollywood Exile, or How I Learned to Love the Blacklist," and "The Gordon File: A Screenwriter Recalls Twenty Years of FBI Surveillance."

He is survived by a daughter.

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