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Norma Barzman, a screenwriter who moved to Europe within the late Nineteen Forties slightly than be topic to the congressional investigations {and professional} ostracism that overtook her business for a decade, died on Dec. 17 at her dwelling in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 103 and extensively thought-about to be one of many final surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.
Her daughter Suzo Barzman confirmed the dying.
Mrs. Barzman and her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, had been among the many a whole lot of movie business figures — together with screenwriters, actors, administrators, stagehands and technicians — who discovered themselves iced out of Hollywood after World Battle II due to their unwillingness to debate their affiliation with the Communist Occasion or its many related entrance teams.
The Barzmans had been each longtime members of the get together, having joined within the early Nineteen Forties. Though their membership formally lapsed after they left the nation, they didn’t resign the get together till 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
“I’m very pleased with my years as a Communist,” Mrs. Barzman advised The Related Press in 2001. “We weren’t Soviet brokers, however we had been a bit of foolish, idealistic and enthusiastic, and thought there was an opportunity of constructing a greater world.”
For a time within the Thirties and ’40s, being a Communist, or simply sympathetic to the trigger, was thought-about de rigueur among the many Hollywood left. However with the onset of the Chilly Battle, attitudes started to shift. Rumors of a authorities crackdown percolated.
The couple had been sitting on their entrance garden in July 1947 when a girl in a convertible stopped to speak. After a guarded introduction — her title was Norma, too — she advised them that there was a police automotive on the backside of the hill, stopping anybody turning onto the road to ask them in regards to the Barzmans. Years later, they might notice that the opposite Norma had taken the stage title Marilyn Monroe.
That fall, the Home Committee on Un-American Actions known as a gaggle of screenwriters, administrators and producers to testify about their connections to the Communist Occasion. Ten of them refused to reply questions, and every was later present in contempt. Although the Barzmans weren’t amongst that group, which got here to be known as the Hollywood Ten, they feared they might be subpoenaed quickly.
A couple of weeks after the hearings, a gaggle of Hollywood executives launched the so-called Waldorf Assertion, which declared that the ten witnesses, in addition to anybody else who refused to debate their relationship to the Communist Occasion, can be blacklisted from the business.
Work for the Barzmans shortly dried up. Lastly, in 1949, a chance arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a movie in London, the place the blacklist didn’t attain. They set sail on the Queen Mary, anticipating a six-week journey.
They might not return to america till 1965, and they might dwell overseas till 1976.
After a number of years in London, they moved to Paris; they ultimately settled in Provence. They grew to become native celebrities of a kind — the household that defied the blacklist — and made buddies with the likes of the French actor Yves Montand and Pablo Picasso.
Mr. Barzman continued to jot down screenplays, normally for European productions, although typically with out credit score. Mrs. Barzman obtained some work, too, however it was more durable, particularly since she additionally was elevating seven kids.
One other buddy, Sophia Loren, “pinched my cheek at some point and known as me ‘la mamma,’ which drove me wild,” she mentioned in an interview for the e book “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist” (1997), by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle.
By the point the Barzmans returned to Hollywood within the Nineteen Seventies, the movie business and the neighborhood round it had modified considerably, and so they by no means managed to restart their careers.
“I’ve been so blessed, even after I was struggling,” she advised The Los Angeles Occasions in 2001. “So I wasn’t bitter then, and I’m not bitter now. I assume as a result of I nonetheless really feel there’s a lot hope. It’s important to work at issues, whether or not it’s a wedding or a democracy.”
Norma Levor was born on Sept. 15, 1920, in Manhattan — particularly, she preferred to recall, atop the kitchen counter of her mother and father’ house on Central Park West. Her father, Samuel, was an importer, and her mom, Goldie (Levinson) Levor, was a homemaker.
Norma enrolled at Radcliffe Faculty, however left in 1940 to marry Claude Shannon, a graduate pupil on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how who later grew to become identified for his work in computational linguistics.
They moved to Princeton, N.J., the place he had a fellowship on the Institute for Superior Examine and the place she labored for the financial department of the League of Nations, which had relocated there from Switzerland in the beginning of World Battle II.
The couple divorced in 1941, a yr after her father died. Looking for a recent begin, she moved along with her mom to Los Angeles — with a six-week cease in Reno, Nev., to finalize her divorce.
She labored as a options author for The Los Angeles Examiner whereas taking programs in screenwriting on the College for Writers, which was later added to the federal authorities’s checklist of subversive organizations.
“Shortly after I arrived, I got here to know that every one the progressive folks I preferred and who had been politically lively had been Communists,” she was quoted as saying in “Tender Comrades.”
She met Ben Barzman, one other aspiring screenwriter, at a celebration on the dwelling of Robert Rossen, one more screenwriter. Mr. Barzman insisted that fashionable films had been too complicated for girls to jot down. She pushed a lemon meringue pie in his face. They married in 1943.
Mrs. Barzman wrote the unique tales for 2 movies made in 1946: “By no means Say Goodbye,” a comedy starring Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker, and “The Locket,” a noir thriller starring Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum. In Europe, her work included one other screenplay, “Luxurious Women,” however her title was saved off it till 1999.
Mr. Barzman died in 1989. Alongside along with her daughter Suzo, Mrs. Barzman is survived by one other daughter, Luli Barzman; 5 sons, Aaron, Daniel, John, Paolo and Marco; eight grandchildren; and 6 great-grandchildren.
After returning to Los Angeles, Mrs. Barzman wrote a column on getting older for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a memoir, “The Crimson and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate” (2003).
She additionally grew to become outspoken in her criticism of the blacklist and the position many within the business performed in it. Larry Ceplair, a historian who has written extensively in regards to the blacklist, known as her the period’s “keeper of the flame.”
In 1999 she joined some 500 different folks exterior the Academy Awards ceremony, on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, to protest an honor being given to the director Elia Kazan.
To keep away from being added to the blacklist, Mr. Kazan had testified earlier than the Home committee, figuring out a number of buddies and colleagues within the business as former Communists and incomes long-lasting enmity from many in Hollywood.
Mrs. Barzman, who was there along with her teenage grandson, carried an indication that learn “Kazan Is a Fink.”
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