Norma Barzman, a blacklisted screenwriter who spent almost three many years in exile and later pressured Hollywood to reckon with its red-baiting previous, has died at her Beverly Hills dwelling. She was 103.
Energetic till late in life, Barzman died Dec. 17, 2023, in response to a social media publish from her daughter Suzo Barzman.
“I misplaced an enormous piece of my coronary heart Sunday afternoon,” Suzo Barzman wrote in a Dec. 19 Instagram publish. “My mom Norma Barzman died at dwelling peacefully surrounded by household. … Had a protracted life filled with tales and accomplishments.
“Her sharpness and pleasure was intact to the tip. Each time somebody requested her secret to longevity she would simply reply that she beloved each a part of life, individuals and by no means stopped working. I’m grateful to have been capable of spend these final years together with her. I’ll miss her deeply however she is going to reside on in me.”
Barzman’s early features within the movie enterprise, like these of different blacklisted writers, evaporated quickly after the Home Un-American Actions Committee launched a purge of suspected Communists from Hollywood starting within the late Forties, and she or he devoted her later years to exposing the period’s hurtful and infrequently career-altering practices.
However she all the time maintained that her profession was stymied by one thing extra: She was a girl in male-dominated Hollywood.
“The blacklist can solely be partially blamed,” she advised an interviewer for the 1997 blacklist chronicle “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist.”
“A lot of the issue resulted from the place of girls and from my not having fought adequately sufficient for my rights,” she added.
She mentioned she was denied screenplay billing for certainly one of her first profitable screenplays, “By no means Say Goodbye” (1946), written with husband Ben Barzman, not due to her membership within the Communist Social gathering however as a result of the studio didn’t need a lady’s identify within the credit.
After shifting together with her household to Europe in 1949 to keep away from being subpoenaed by HUAC, which had launched an investigation into suspected Communist infiltration of Hollywood two years earlier, she mentioned she grew to become a retiring housewife. A mom of seven, she lived in her husband’s shadow, contributing to his work however neglecting her personal ambitions. The couple returned to Los Angeles in 1976.
Norma Barzman, photographed at dwelling in 2000, misplaced a lot of her writing profession to the Hollywood blacklist of the late Forties and ‘50s
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Occasions)
Solely in her later years did Norma Barzman flourish anew as a author and activist. She grew to become a columnist for the Los Angeles Occasions and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, accomplished two memoirs and advocated on behalf of writers whose careers had been ravaged by the blacklist.
In 1999, she helped lead a marketing campaign in opposition to the awarding of an honorary Oscar to Elia Kazan, the celebrated director who knowledgeable on associates suspected of being Communists. Although Kazan obtained his Oscar, many attending the awards ceremony refused to applaud and a whole lot of protesters gathered exterior the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that evening.
Barzman later spoke on nationwide tv, accusing Kazan of looking for to advance his profession in Hollywood on the expense of his former associates. The episode prompted a wave of blacklist remembrances, and the Barzmans had been among the many writers honored with a lifetime achievement award from a UCLA graduating class in screenwriting. Kazan died in 2003.
Barzman’s recollections of the blacklist years, although, all the time remained entwined together with her struggles as a girl in Hollywood. Feminism was excessive on the record of causes she had turn into a Communist, she wrote. She had been struck by how girls within the Soviet Union labored alongside males. And when requested about her years in exile, she responded that she resented most “that being away had disadvantaged me of taking part within the American girls’s motion.”
Born Norma Levor in New York Metropolis on Sept. 15, 1920, Barzman attended Radcliffe Faculty. As a younger lady she moved briefly to Paris, the place she spent a lot of her childhood.
After a brief marriage to mathematician Claude Shannon, she ended up in Los Angeles, the place a cousin, Henry Myers, had solid a profitable profession in Hollywood. She acquired a job as a reporter on the Los Angeles Examiner and commenced working as a screenwriter. She met Ben Barzman at a celebration to help Russian conflict reduction, married him in 1943, and shortly after joined him as a member of the Communist Social gathering.
When editors on the Examiner advised the paper’s proprietor, William Randolph Hearst, that Barzman was a Communist, Hearst shrugged. “I don’t care if she’s a Communist, she’s reporter, and I by no means hearth reporter.”
The Barzmans supported the “Hollywood 10,” a gaggle of writers and administrators linked to the Display Actors Guild who had been subpoenaed by HUAC however refused to cooperate with its investigation. Studios refused to rent writers named as Communists or fellow vacationers, and previously profitable writers similar to Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. had been drummed out or relegated to writing below faux names.
The Barzmans prevented being pressured to call names by remaining in England throughout a filmmaking journey in 1949. They stayed abroad, dwelling in Paris and the South of France, after others in Hollywood recognized them as Communists and the federal government suspended their passports. Years later, when she obtained the FBI recordsdata on her husband and herself, Barzman found that brokers had tailed them for years in Europe.
Ben Barzman, whose profitable movies embody “The Boy With Inexperienced Hair,” continued to jot down uncredited movies for European filmmakers whereas his spouse’s profession foundered.
His uncredited contributions, later restored, embody “El Cid,” starring Sophia Loren and Charlton Heston, “The Locket” and “Luxurious Women.”
Barzman mentioned it was solely after her husband died in 1989 that she got here “blossoming out” and commenced writing once more.
Her 1990 columns for the Los Angeles Occasions mixed humor with reflections about growing older. She additionally grew to become “a keeper of the blacklist flame,” mentioned Larry Ceplair, co-author of “The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics within the Movie Neighborhood 1930-1960.”
Barzman continued to work and contribute to blacklist retrospectives properly into her 90s. She wrote two memoirs, “The Crimson and the Black Checklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate” and “The Finish of Romance: A Memoir of Love, Intercourse and the Thriller of the Violin.”
In reviewing her Hollywood memoir, the New York Occasions wrote: “The e book can be a testomony of anger towards the squalid congressional committee that made bean soup of the First Modification and towards the boys who held her again.”
Barzman advised Ceplair that she had ceased involvement with the Communist Social gathering in 1949 however didn’t absolutely abandon her former emotions towards Communism till 1968. Though she reproached herself for being “blind,” some critics discovered fault together with her unapologetic stand.
Barzman countered that the Communist scare “mutilated and degraded our tradition for generations.”
Her writings blended political reflection with explorations of her struggles as a spouse and mom. In 2000, she defined her activism to a reporter this fashion:
“It’s a must to work at issues, whether or not it’s a wedding or a democracy.”
Barzman is survived by her seven kids, together with Suzo Barzman and writer-director Paolo Barzman.
Leovy is a former Occasions employees author. Employees author Carlos De Loera contributed to this report.
