Screenwriter and producer Richard Collins has died at the age of 98. Collins, who started out working at Columbia Pictures as a script reader, was the last surviving member of the "Hollywood 19," the nickname given to the "unfriendly witnesses" who were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during its investigation of Communism's infiltration of the movie industry, which ended in 10 of them being sent to prison for refusing to "name names." ...
When he was first subpoenaed by the Committee... Collins stood with the rest of the Hollywood 19 in refusing to cooperate. He never served jail time for his defiance, but the effect on his career - which was already suffering even before the blacklist - led him to quit the party and, after four more years of rough times, decide that his best move would be to name names after all. By that time, his ex-wife, Dorothy Comingore - an actress best known for playing the character modeled on Marion Davies in Citizen Kane - had also been called before HUAC and been branded an unfriendly witness, subsequently having custody of her children stripped from her and never working again. (Comingore's story inspired a similar character in the 1991 movie Guilty By Suspicion, starring Robert De Niro and Annette Bening.)
Stuck with raising their kids all by himself and desperate for work, Collins returned to HUAC in 1951 and named two dozen colleagues - including his former partner [Paul] Jarrico and novelist Budd Schulberg, an old friend from college - as having "subversive" political ties. Instantly, he was able to go back to work, eventually finding a niche as a producer on TV series such as Bonanza and Matlock. One of his other most notable post-blacklist jobs was writing the original treatment for the 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, a movie that has since been interpreted both as an attack on the soul-deadening effects of Communism and as a satire of the cowardice and conformism that fed the hysterical anti-Communism of the blacklist era. ...
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http://www.avclub.com/articles/rip-richard-collins-blacklisted-screenwriter,92610/
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