Walter Saul Bernstein

Walter Bernstein was American screenwriter and film producer who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s.

He attended Dartmouth College, where he got his first writing job, as a film reviewer for the campus newspaper. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1940.

In February 1941, Bernstein was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he attained the rank of Sergeant. He spent most of his time in service as a correspondent for the Army newspaper Yank, filing dispatches from the Mideast, North Africa, and southern Europe. Many of his articles on his wartime experiences appeared in The New Yorker and were later published in his first book, Keep Your Head Down, in 1945.

Bernstein first came to Hollywood in 1947. One of his early credits was for the film Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (Universal, 1948). He subsequently returned to New York, where he wrote for The New Yorker and other magazines, and worked as a scriptwriter in the early days of television. 

In 1950, because of his  left-wing political affiliations, he was blacklisted. He still managed to write for television, using pseudonyms and "fronts" (others whose names appeared on his work). Among the TV programs he contributed to in this way were Danger, You Are There, and Colonel March of Scotland Yard. 

Bernstein's screenwriting career rebounded when director Sidney Lumet hired him to write the screenplay for the Sophia Loren movie That Kind of Woman. Later Bernstein worked openly on Paris Blues (1961), Fail-Safe (1964) and other films. He also contributed, without credit, to the screenplays of The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Train (1964), and he was one of several writers who wrote the script for Something's Got to Give, which was left uncompleted when its star, Marilyn Monroe, died in 1962.

Paris Blues was the first of several films on which Bernstein collaborated with director and friend Martin Ritt. They also worked together on The Molly Maguires (1970) and The Front (1976) -- a drama about a restaurant cashier, played by Woody Allen, who is hired to act as a "front" for blacklisted television writers. The Front earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and the WGA Award for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen. 

In 1980, Bernstein directed his only feature film, Little Miss Marker, a remake of a 1934 film based on a Damon Runyon story.

In 1996, Bernstein published the book Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. In this memoir, he acknowledged that he joined the Young Communist League at Dartmouth in 1937 and the Communist Party itself in the 1940s.

In 1994, he received the Ian McLellan Hunter Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement in Writing, from the Writers Guild of America East. In 2008, the WGAE presented Bernstein with their Evelyn F. Burkey Award, given "in recognition of contributions that have brought honor and dignity to writers everywhere."