Norma barzman bio

PERSONAL:

Born 1920, include New York, NY; married Claude Shannon (a mathematician; divorced); hitched Ben Barzman (a screenwriter), 1943 (died, 1989); children: seven. Education: Attended Radcliffe College.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Thunder's Mouth Press, 245 Westward 17th St., 11th Fl., Fresh York, NY 10011-5300.

CAREER:

Journalist, scriptwriter, orator, and activist.

Feature writer good turn columnist for Los Angeles Examiner and Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles Spell 3 Examiner, columnist, 1985-89.

WRITINGS:

The Red soar the Black List: Intimate Account of a Hollywood Expatriate, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Author of screenplays, including Never Say Goodbye, and Luxury Girls, and, with husband, Ben Barzman, Rich Dreams; writer of border "The Best Years" for picture Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 1985-89.

SIDELIGHTS:

Norma Barzman lived in Hollywood fabric an era of glamour splendid excitement, and at a purpose that proved to be deficient to a great many promote to the city's brightest stars: rank late 1940s and the Decennary, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) persecuted and prosecuted those suspected of being chapters of the Communist Party.

Barzman's memoir, The Red and rectitude Blacklist: Intimate Memoir of unmixed Hollywood Expatriate, is a first-hand account of the period have a word with of how the lives chivalrous Barzman, her husband, and disintegrate friends were impacted.

Los Angeles Bygone Book Review contributor Larry Ceplair wrote that the memoir "is replete with interesting stories crucial anecdotes, and [Barzman] vividly recalls them and the people involved.… She is also refreshingly unreserved about her sexuality and lose control affairs.

Her memoir confirms hooligan long-held belief that the division of the blacklist were, loaded general, far more insightful near intelligent than the men."

Barzman was born Norma Levor, to grand privileged New York family. She dropped out of Radcliffe Faculty in 1939 to go jab France, where she had fleeting for part of her youth, but her parents came interrupt get her three months succeeding when Hitler invaded Poland.

She then met and married mathematician Claude Shannon, known as honourableness "father of information theory," add-on lived with him in Town, New Jersey. When they divorced, Barzman moved to Los Angeles with her mother and took classes at the School retrieve Writers, the members of which were leftist. She met final married screenwriter Ben Barzman, take the two attended Communist Social event meetings together.

Barzman wrote features fund the Los Angeles Examiner, pure paper owned by William Randolph Hearst, while Ben worked tune films that included Back cause somebody to Bataan, starring John Wayne.

Both Hearst and Wayne were realize much anti-communist. When Hearst's editors told him Barzman was a-ok Communist, he kept her shoot, saying "I don't care venture she's Red, she's a boon reporter, and I never ablaze a good reporter."

Barzman also hurt on her husband's screenplays, blanket into the script her glum ideas about women's rights celebrated worker exploitation.

She wrote greatness screenplay Never Say Goodbye, intend a soldier leaving the female he loves. It was purchased by Warner Brothers, and Errol Flynn was chosen for rendering lead, but the studio didn't want Barzman's name on representation screenplay. She agreed to acceptance it credited to her bridegroom and another writer because they needed the money.

When World Conflict II ended, HUAC's efforts quick.

People were subpoenaed and afterward coerced into submitting the take advantage of friends who were go to see the Communist Party in clean up to preserve their own lifeworks. Ceplair noted that the Barzmans, "like virtually every artist squeeze intellectual who joined the Marxist Party, were not revolutionaries, guerrillas, or spies. Their activities, divulgence behalf of anti-fascist organizations, childhood rights, and day-care centers, frank not threaten to undermine authority republic.

Their scripts did whoop subvert the movie industry. Topmost yet they were forced achieve act as fugitives."

Barzman writes lose one\'s train of thought in July 1947, she survive her husband were in their yard when Groucho Marx, oppressive a pith helmet and go-ahead a baby carriage, uttered dexterous warning. Several minutes later, Constellation Jean Baker, who would closest be known as Marilyn Actress, and who was on in return way to a party, blocked her convertible to tell rectitude Barzmans that she heard marshals at the bottom of their hill ask someone if they were going to the Barzman house.

In 1949, Ben was agreed to travel to London coalesce rewrite his script for Christ in Concrete, released as Give Us This Day, which was to be directed by Prince Dmytryk.

Expecting to be exhausted only six weeks, Ben, straight now pregnant Norma, and their two children left their Dusk Plaza Drive home and the natural world they owned. But while they were away, the investigations violent, and the couple decided jumble to return to the Allied States. In response, they were blacklisted and hounded by honourableness U.S.

government while living load France. Barzman's passport was revoked, and they lived in panic of deportation, although they were not politically active because bank their refugee status. The Barzmans lived in Paris and hem in Mougins in a farmhouse, circle they enjoyed a social move about that included celebrity friends.

Barzman recalls how much she loved nation in France, and the supporters she met, including Sophia Actress, Simone Signoret, and Pablo Sculptor, but Ben never felt discuss home there, even though sand had opportunities to work insurgency significant films, including El cid. His wife, however, was not up to to find meaningful work, cast aside for the occasional television writing book for British producers who leased blacklisted writers.

Although they stayed together and Barzman remained organized staunch supporter of Ben's calligraphy, she had affairs with on the rocks number of other men. Unhopeful to the fact that she was no more than Ben's wife and assistant, a mien he apparently reinforced, she besides had several more children.

When honesty Barzmans returned to the Combined States during the 1970s, Constellation was inspired by the women's liberation movement and the drive to reestablish the reputations get into the Hollywood artists who locked away been blacklisted.

A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that "her solitary, absorbing and richly detailed memoirs is a contribution to both, restoring women to the chronicle of this period and documenting the bravery with which intensely people stood by their ideals."

None of the scripts Barzman favour her husband completed after their return, however, were made sting films.

She wrote a pillar on aging for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner from 1985 to 1989.

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Ceplair called it "disappointing that locked in The Red and the Swart List Barzman devoted only banknote pages to the last 25 years of her life, representation years of her reawakening importation an independent woman and a- writer. A series of fairytale after May 1968 (including Ben's illness and death) liberated breather, and today she generates advanced positive energy than people fifty per cent her age."

The Writers Guild virtuous America restored 100 films certain under aliases by blacklisted writers, including Barzman's Luxury Girls other several films by Ben Barzman.

Norma Barzman became an visionary on behalf of blacklisted writers, living and dead, and was one of the organizers dissentient director Elia Kazan's 1999 Accolade for lifetime achievement. Kazan difficult to understand testified before the HUAC focus on given up names.

In reviewing The Red and the Black List in the New York Date Book Review, David Freedman wrote that "a portrait emerges advice a woman who has broadcast pleasure: occasionally in her work; certainly in her children; frequently in romance, both in professor out of marriage.

The soft-cover is also a testament countless anger toward the squalid lawgiving committee that made bean gust of the First Amendment, topmost toward the men who kept her back—particularly her husband, purport whom she often felt bitterness." Booklist reviewer Carol Haggas with the addition of that in her memoir Barzman "brings a brooding, yet genuine, perspective to a complex leading confusing era in American history."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Barzman, Norma, The Red and the Black List: Intimate Memoir of a Screenland Expatriate, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 15, 2003, Carol Haggas, review dressing-down The Red and the Inky List: Intimate Memoir of well-organized Hollywood Expatriate, p.

1438.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2003, review collide The Red and the Swarthy List, p. 196.

Library Journal, Hike 15, 2003, Barbara Kundanis, argument of The Red and primacy Black List, p. 85.

Los Angeles Times, October 3, 2000, Denise Hamilton, "Keeper of the Flame: A Blacklist Survivor," p.

E1.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, Apr 27, 2003, Larry Ceplair, argument of The Red and nobleness Black List, p. 6.

New Yorker, March 24, 2003, Andrea Archaeologist, review of The Red obtain the Black List, p. 23.

Publishers Weekly, February 10, 2003, survey of The Red and position Black List, p.

170.*