The Red and the Blacklist
The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate
August 2004
Trade Paperback · 464 Pages
$16.95 U.S. · $23.95 CAN
ISBN 9781560256175
Nation Books
Trade Paperback · 464 Pages
$16.95 U.S. · $23.95 CAN
ISBN 9781560256175
Nation Books
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Description
When Norma Levor first hit Hollywood, she was a vivacious 21-year-old, fresh out of Harvard and her first marriage. Within an hour of being unleashed on Hollywood society she was squabbling with a left-wing screenwriter named Ben Barzman, who claimed technology had made modern cinema way too tough for women. Angry, Norma plunged a lemon-meringue pie into his face. Three months later they were married by a defrocked rabbi.
So begins Norma Barzman's extraordinary memoir, The Red and the Blacklist, which fizzes with the wit and energy of classic Hollywood comedies, yet is also laced with the fear and claustrophobia of film noir. As the McCarthyite witch hunt gathered momentum in the postwar years, Norma and Ben were driven from Hollywood into an emotionally difficult thirty-year exile in France.
The Red and the Blacklist is a unique record of the political tempests of the time, marked by the author's dazzling power of reflection and insight, and animated by a larger-than-life cast of supporting characters including Pablo Picasso, Harold Robbins, Sophia Loren, Charlton Heston, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Losey, John Wayne, Anthony Quinn, Groucho Marx and—in a delightful cameo—a very young Marilyn Monroe.
Norma Barzman is a screenwriter and novelist who lives in Beverly Hills. She is the author of the celebrated memoir The Red and the Blacklist. She has worked for the Los Angeles Examiner, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. She was the wife of blacklisted screenwriter Ben Barzman.
So begins Norma Barzman's extraordinary memoir, The Red and the Blacklist, which fizzes with the wit and energy of classic Hollywood comedies, yet is also laced with the fear and claustrophobia of film noir. As the McCarthyite witch hunt gathered momentum in the postwar years, Norma and Ben were driven from Hollywood into an emotionally difficult thirty-year exile in France.
The Red and the Blacklist is a unique record of the political tempests of the time, marked by the author's dazzling power of reflection and insight, and animated by a larger-than-life cast of supporting characters including Pablo Picasso, Harold Robbins, Sophia Loren, Charlton Heston, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Losey, John Wayne, Anthony Quinn, Groucho Marx and—in a delightful cameo—a very young Marilyn Monroe.
Norma Barzman is a screenwriter and novelist who lives in Beverly Hills. She is the author of the celebrated memoir The Red and the Blacklist. She has worked for the Los Angeles Examiner, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. She was the wife of blacklisted screenwriter Ben Barzman.