Walter Bernstein, Blacklisted Screenwriter of ‘The Front,’

Walter Bernstein, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “The Front” who had spent years on the blacklist in Hollywood, has died. He was 101.

Bernstein died on Friday evening, in accordance with former WGA West President Howard Rodman.

In the 1950s, Bernstein was blacklisted from Hollywood after he was suspected to be a communist working within the leisure business.

“There was a little booklet called ‘Red Channels,’ which was a collection of about 150 names of people in the entertainment business, with a listing of their so-called ‘communist’ or ‘communist front’ associations, and if you were named you were automatically blacklisted,” Bernstein advised the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. “There were about eight designations for me — all true, all things I’d done. I’d written for communist magazines, I’d supported Russian war relief, I’d supported the loyalists in Spain.”

As a consequence, Bernstein stated he wanted to depend on a number of “fronts” to get work in Hollywood — an expertise that might later encourage Bernstein to jot down “The Front,” which starred Woody Allen because the good friend of a blacklisted TV screenwriter who turns into a “front” for the screenwriter, signing his title onto scripts in alternate for cash.

Still, Bernstein would spend practically a decade on the blacklist earlier than he wrote “The Front.” His comeback, so to talk, wouldn’t occur till 1959, when he was credited as a screenwriter on “That Kind of Woman,” a movie starring Sophia Loren and directed by Sidney Lumet.

Bernstein would then go on to jot down — and be credited for writing — movies like “Paris Blues,” “Fail-Safe” and “The Molly Maguires.”

In his tribute to Bernstein, Rodman described the screenwriter as a “fighter for social justice.”

“Without exaggeration: we shall not know his like again,” Rodman wrote. “Walter, at his core, was a fighter for social justice. From the time he was young, until his very last weeks. May his life be an example for all of us.”

Bernstein is survived by his spouse Gloria and his 4 kids.