Carl Foreman remembers the 1952 era (the "Hollywood Blacklist" / 1st Amendment claimants)

 Hollywood: The Oral History  (2022)

From 1952, I found myself living

in England as a result of the 

Hollywood blacklist, and I got

by in one way or another and I

was always looking, since I was

surveying and so forth, and writing

under assumed names, or whatever, to 

avoid the blacklist.  Because the 

Blacklist followed people everywhere,

I felt inhibited about writing something

original.  That was one of the penalties

of being blacklisted. . .Every blacklisted

Hollywood writer went through a severe

period, a period when he or she could

not write.  Now some recovered from it,

and some never did recover from it.  Once

I was working on a screenplay and it was

just no good.  I had a conference with this

producer, very nice guy, very sympathetic,

and he said in a very terribly well-meaning

way "Look, why don't you forget all this

stuff?  Why don't you make peace with those

people over there?  Do what they want you

to do.  Name a few names.  Get yourself off

the blacklist, and get that weight off your

shoulder."

WHAT HE DIDN'T KNOW WAS. . .about

6 months before, they had pulled my passport.

And I wasn't telling that to anybody because

there was no point in spreading this around.

It was bad enough to have them (the State Dept.

in D.C.) do that, and I was suffering the

consequences of that, which meant that I

couldn't travel.  When we parted that night and

I went upstairs to bed, I literally didn't sleep

all night long.  I was awake constantly,

and I was scared.  I knew fear, real fear.

And I hadn't written a good scripts, either.