ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 2, 1996 TAG: 9612030151
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: FRAZIER MOORE ASSOCIATED PRESS
As if an afterthought, Walter Bernstein ends his new book ``Inside Out'' with a vignette from the first day filming his 1976 movie, ``The Front.''
``I feel calm,'' Bernstein writes, ``but my face is dotted with bits of Kleenex where I have cut myself shaving. I look like someone to be avoided.''
But then, being someone others avoid summarizes a decade of Bernstein's life - not to mention that very film.
Starring Woody Allen, ``The Front'' is a comedy about an anything-but-funny piece of America's past: the anti-communist hysteria that gripped the nation in the 1950s, and the resulting blacklist of scores of actors, directors and writers.
The censured writers' ranks included Bernstein, who, within the confines of fiction, was telling his own story in his script for ``The Front.'' Here was a promising young screenwriter abruptly blacklisted in 1950, whereupon he spent the decade writing in the shadows, selling scripts for such TV series as ``Danger'' and ``You Are There'' through subterfuge.
``It's hard to tell people, to get them to accept what this country went through,'' says Bernstein now. ``I tell young people how former friends would cross the street to avoid being seen with you. They say, `Aw, go on.'
``The country was terrorized!''
Now Bernstein tells that story as personal history in the funny, infuriating and valuable ``Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist'' (published by Alfred A. Knopf).
Bernstein tells of the Depression and World War II in drawing him into the Communist Party, which he joined after the war, then quit, disillusioned, a decade later.
He tells of the magic of Hollywood, where he briefly worked in the late 1940s, and, back in Manhattan, of the blooming possibilities of the new TV medium, for which he landed writing assignments - just as he began to hear vague talk of lists that now included his name.
Thereafter, Bernstein would be dependent on a ``front'' - someone, usually a nonwriter, who could brand each script with his own non-troublesome name.
Or hers. A dizzy dame named Rita once served as Bernstein's front, at least until her analyst recommended she drop the masquerade and try to focus full-time on her real identity.
As for Bernstein, it was only after 1958, when he was ``cleared,'' that he recovered such a basic right.
Today Bernstein continues to thrive as himself, a veteran screenwriter duly credited with such features of the past three decades as ``Fail-Safe,'' ``Semi-Tough'' and ``The House on Carroll Street.''
This TV pioneer has also returned to television for a number of HBO projects, including his just-filmed script based on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and starring Laurence Fishburne and Alfre Woodard.
But over the past five years Bernstein stole time from his screenplays to craft the prose of ``Inside Out,'' which he takes pains to describe as something other than a book about the period.
``It's about ME in the period,'' he says during a chat in his Upper West Side apartment, ``and what happened to me.''
And despite the pain and anger those memories still evoke, Bernstein cops to certain - what's this?! - tender feelings, as well, for that miserable time.
``Most of my friends were fellow victims of the blacklist,'' he explains, ``and for me a very, very important part of the period was our support system - people working together and helping each other.''
As an example, for a while Bernstein and two other blacklisted writers shared with one another any excess work any one of them might land, so that all could make ends meet.
``Crazy times,'' Bernstein says. ``But I miss that camaraderie.''
Some of that camaraderie was recaptured on the set of ``The Front,'' which rallied several veterans of the real-life persecution it dramatized. Along with Bernstein, they included once-blacklisted actors Zero Mostel and Herschel Bernardi and the film's once-blacklisted director, Martin Ritt.
``It was a very happy experience,'' Bernstein recalls. ``We all kind of looked at each other and said, `We made it. We're here.'''
Twenty years later, Bernstein's book ``Inside Out'' carries the same bracing subtext: He's here. By contrast, most of those who advanced the witch hunt have long ago passed from the scene, forgotten, along with the Red Scare they pandered to.
Which, of course, is all the more reason to read a book like ``Inside Out:'' to stay wise to what those scoundrels did, and what their like could do again.
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Bernsteinby CNB