The full inside story of the Hollywood blacklist operated during the hunt for communists in the 40s and 50s is to be told for the first time by one of the main participants.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which joined studios, unions, many politicians and the media in hounding and blacklisting suspects, announced this week that it is compiling a big exhibition presenting the full history of one of the industry's darkest periods.
It will consist of films, documents, photographs, testimonies and tapes which have not been brought together before.
Its decision was welcomed by surviving victims of the blacklist as a final acknowledgement of the industry's role in a crusade that led to jail and exile for writers and directors.
"The rift the blacklist created in Hollywood hasn't healed, even though more than 50 years have passed," the academy's president, Robert Rehme, said.
"Maybe it can never heal. But any era with that long-lasting impact needs to be carefully studied."
Norma Barzman, who with her husband Ben was blacklisted and went into exile in France, said yesterday that she had urged the academy to make some acknowledgement of the period.
She acted after the academy controversially honoured the director Elia Kazan in 1999. Kazan gave evidence against his colleagues to the House committee on unamerican activities, identifying them as communists.
Ben Barzman's Hollywood screenwriting career was cut short by the committee, which from 1947-54 investigated between 1947 and 1954 "the extent of communist infiltration in the Hollywood motion picture industry". He died in 1989.
A similar crusade in 1952-54 by the investigations sub-committee of the Senate also took its toll, and made Senator Joseph McCarthy famous, but the House committee began first and probed deepest and longest.
The Barzmans lived for more than 30 years in exile, and Ben worked on various films anonymously. His screenplays included El Cid ( 1961), Time Without Pity (1956), The Ceremony (1963) and the Heroes of Telemark (1965).
"Never in a million years would we have thought then that this [academy project] could happen," Norma Barzman said.
"Really, this is their way of apologising."
The exhibition is to tour museums and universities, she said. "My object is to get young people to know about what happened."
Lia Jarrico, whose late husband Paul was also blacklisted, said yesterday: "I'm very happy that they are putting it [the blacklist] in its place in history. It was a long struggle."
The academy did recognise what had happened to her husband.
In 1997 he and Ring Lardner Jnr were honoured at a special event: the culmination of 20 years of campaigning by the Jarricos for blacklisted writers to have their work properly credited.
The day after the testimonial, Paul Jarrico - who was nominated for an Oscar for Tom, Dick and Harry in 1941 and later produced Salt of the Earth - was killed in a car accident.
"The academy played an appaling role during the the blacklist," a blacklisted writer still in the business said.
"The academy and the unions and the studios and the local red squads were all scratching each other's backs so I am very happy they are doing this."
All the Hollywood Ten - jailed in 1948 for refusing to cooperate with the House committee - are now dead, but he added, "one or two of the stool pigeons are still alive."
The exhibition is being assembled by Larry Ceplair, co-author of The Inquisition in Hollywood, one of the main studies of the period.
He said: "The lessons of that time should not be forgotten ... a time in the United States when one's political past could be used to intimidate, coerce and even destroy".
