Windows in Walter's living room on the Upper
West Side of Manhattan overlook Central Park.

Eventually, most people retire. Not Walter Bernstein.

A man of short stature, high energy, and relaxed manner, Walter passed his 90th birthday last August with no change in his basic routine since 1947. That’s when he started writing screenplays for the movies and television. He has never stopped. He has written 25 films, and worked with the leading directors in America, some of whom became close friends.

Right now he is writing a script for Home Box Office based on the famous 1950 Senate race in California between Richard Nixon and Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon won after a campaign that accused Douglas of being a Communist, a smear that launched his political career and made his name forever anathema to liberals across the country.

Not least of those offended was Walter Bernstein, who in fact once was a member of the Communist party, and was blacklisted in the McCarthy era in Hollywood because of it. Political interests have never left him and have been the springboard for some of his screenplays, although his Communist sympathies ended with a thud in 1956 with the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Now he considers himself a “democratic socialist.”

As with many writers of his generation, the Depression and the Spanish Civil War were the major ideological influences. The social and political concerns they inspired have found their way into many of his scripts – and earlier magazine articles as well. But he has also written comedies, mysteries and dramas, for both movies and television. One of his comedies, Little Miss Marker, he also directed. It was the fourth remake of a Shirley Temple movie, with a cast that included Walter Matthau, Julie Andrews and Tony Curtis.

In his study Walter continues writing screen
plays as he has been doing for over 60 years.

Walter was born in Brooklyn on August 20, 1919, went to public schools and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1940. While in college he joined the Young Communist League, which worked out well during World War II when he became a correspondent for the Army newspaper Yank. It helped him get the assignment to interview Josep Tito, the Yugoslav Communist partisan leader, in 1944.

By the time he was 28, Walter was well-established as a magazine writer, with pieces in The New Yorker, Argosy, Life, Sports Illustrated and Colliers. A collection of his essays on World War II, published under the title Keep Your Head Down, led to a 10-week contract as a writer for Columbia Pictures, and his film-writing career was launched.

“Since I was a kid I’ve been in love with movies – the way they tell a story, going into a theater,” he says. “I grew up as a word person, related to books. People today grow up more related to images. They know that language. I had to learn it.”

The learning began under the tutelage of the Columbia Pictures writer, director and producer Robert Rossen. Since then Walter has distilled the principles he learned into three words: character, conflict, meaning. He stresses them these days in daytime classes he runs for screenwriting students at New York University.

His first film was Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, written in collaboration with Ben Maddow for a newly formed independent firm company headed by Harold Hecht, Walter’s agent, and the actor Burt Lancaster, who starred in it with Joan Fontaine. It was an adaptation of a British thriller novel, and it borrowed heavily from Alfred Hitchcock, Walter says.

Soon after that Walter returned to the East Coast and found steady work writing for television. Under his own name and subsequently under various pseudonyms he wrote scripts for such shows as You Are There, Playhouse 90, and Studio One. He also adapted Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey for the producer David Susskind, and Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. Sidney Lumet, the director of You Are There, became an admired friend. “He took on a lot of gutty subjects,” Walter says.

Back in Hollywood after the anti-Communist hysteria had subsided, Walter wrote a string of screenplays from 1959 to 1985. He had a taste for fiction based on fact. “At a certain point you’ve got to emancipate yourself from fact, and yet not violate the truth too much,” he says.

Poster for French showing of Fail-
Safe, translated as Point Limite.

That point of view came into play in the screenplay for Fail-Safe, based on a novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. It was an anti-bomb book – and movie – with a grim plot. An American bomber is heading for Moscow with orders, issued through a technical error, to wipe it out with an atomic bomb. American leaders become aware of the error, but the pilots are trained to interpret any last-minute order to halt the mission as a Soviet trick. With the attack inevitable, the Russians are warned, and the American President succeeds in convincing the Russians of the error – and thus avoiding retaliation and world nuclear war -- by ordering the destruction of New York City. Henry Fonda played the President, and Dan O’Herlihy and Walter Matthau had leading roles. Sidney Lumet directed.

In The Front, in 1976, Walter found a way to make a political point in a comedy. This original screenplay tells the story of a small-time bookie, Howard (Woody Allen), who helps out a blacklisted friend by signing his own name to his friend’s scripts. As Howard becomes a “success,” other blacklisted writers hire him. Meanwhile, a blacklisted actor, Hecky Brown (Zero Mostel), suffers professional destruction and eventually commits suicide. In the end, Howard takes a stand, confronts the Un-American Activities Committee, gets himself arrested and convicted of contempt of Congress, and accepts his punishment with pride.

Roger Ebert dismissed The Front as “the adventures of a schlemiel in Wonderland.” Vincent Canby in The New York Times gave it a more respectful review. In 1977 the movie brought Walter an Academy Award nomination for original screenplay. In The Molly Maguires Walter dealt with labor strife in the Pennsylvania coal mines in 1876. And in Miss Evers' Boys he took up the mistreatment of black men suffering from syphilis in the 1930's.

Walter can cook, and says he is a
good one but his wife is a great one.

But not every Bernstein script has so serious a theme. The film Semi-Tough, starring Burt Reynolds, Kris Kristofferson and Jill Clayburgh, is a satire of pro football based on a novel of the same name by Dan Jenkins. Something’s Got to Give, in 1962, was Marilyn Monroe’s last movie, and a remake of the 1942 comedy My Favorite Wife. The production was disrupted by the star’s personal problems. She died on August 5 of that year.

Among the directors with whom Walter worked were Martin Ritt, Michael Ritchie, George Cukor, Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet. “They became friends,” he said.

Of actors Walter says, “Most are very professional. If they are temperamental, it’s because they are insecure.” Marilyn Monroe expressed her insecurity at times simply by not showing up on the set. “She would talk about herself in the third person,” he said. “She was very smart about herself.” But she was a pro when she was working, as was Woody Allen, who once told his director, “I am here to act. Tell me what to do and I will do it.”

Walter has won a number of awards, among them a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America East and the Ian McLellan Hunter Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement in Writing. He has also written a book about the blacklisting period, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist, which has been re-issued in paperback. He is married to Gloria Loomis, a literary agent, and has five children with two previous wives, and four grandchildren.

In the study of his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Walter follows a daily routine. In the morning he is at his desk writing, usually till midafternoon, with only a break for lunch. He works from an outline, and if he completes three pages “that’s a lot.” The routine varies only when he has to teach a screenwriting class at New York University.

“Writing is all I ever wanted to do,” he said. He has no plans to stop.

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