Gordon, Bernard 1918-2007

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born October 29, 1918, in New Britain, CT; died of bone cancer, May 11, 2007, in Los Angeles, CA. Author. Blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer for much of his career, Gordon was a screenwriter who wrote such films as The Day of the Triffids (1962) and The Thin Red Line (1964). After earning a B.A. in English from the City College of New York in 1937, he moved to Los Angeles and got a job as a script reader. Active in the Screen Readers Guild, where he was president, he joined many others in Hollywood at the time and became a Communist Party member in 1940. He was declared unfit for military duty during World War II, and so spent the war working on films. In 1941 he found work as a story editor for Paramount Pictures, while also breaking into scriptwriting. He was blacklisted in the 1950s after being subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Despite never being asked to testify, he was labeled a Communist sympathizer and thus was unable to find work. A major cause of his blacklisting was film director Elia Kazan, who gave the committee a list of names of people he knew had been members of the Communist Party. Unable to find Hollywood work, Gordon worked as a plastics salesman for several years. His boss was a friend named Ray Marcus, and the writer used Marcus's name as a pseudonym to get some of his scripts sold. Alternatively, he had film producer Philip Yordan take credit for his writing and then send the money to Gordon. Gordon moved to Spain in 1960 and lived there for the next thirteen years, working for Yordan and actually earned more money than he ever did in Hollywood. This fact would inspire the title of his first autobiography, Hollywood Exile; or, How I Learned to Love the Blacklist: A Memoir. Among his many films are Flesh and Fury (1952), Crime Wave (1954), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), El Cid (1961), which he also produced, and Battle of the Bulge (1965). He eventually did see his name credited on these works, but not for many decades. Although Gordon had managed to survive the experience of being unjustly blacklisted, he remained somewhat bitter, especially toward Kazan. And so when Kazan was to receive an Academy Award in 1999, Gordon organized protestors at the award ceremony. Kazan found himself standing at the podium, accepting a lifetime achievement award to subdued applause. Gordon also published The Gordon File: A Screenwriter Recalls Twenty Years of FBI Surveillance (2004), which is based on his actual FBI file.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Gordon, Bernard, Hollywood Exile; or, How I Learned to Love the Blacklist: A Memoir, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1999.

Gordon, Bernard, The Gordon File: A Screenwriter Recalls Twenty Years of FBI Surveillance, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 2004.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, May 13, 2007, Section 4, p. 6.

Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2007, p. B10.

New York Times, May 14, 2007, p. A21; May 22, 2007, p. A2.

Times (London, England), May 24, 2007, p. 73.

Washington Post, May 15, 2007, p. B9.