On February 28, screenwriter Sheldon Markowitz, age 89, will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Many film industry insiders feel Markowitz is getting the award in response to the negative publicity that was generated in 1999 when the Academy gave the same special Oscar to director Elia Kazan.
"It's the only fair thing to do," actor Tim Robbins said at this year's nominees luncheon, "a kind of rebalancing, if you will."
Kazan was an award winning screenwriter and director who was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the late 1940s. His cooperation with the committee by "naming names" of possible communists and subversive threats in the film industry immediately removed his own name from the infamous blacklist- but it left a shadow over his subsequent career.
Markowitz, on the other hand, was not only blacklisted in the forties, but in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. In 1988, he finally retired from screenwriting. When he was signed to RKO Pictures in the forties, Markowitz was already, as they say, "out" as far as his leftist political leanings went. He openly admitted being a Communist and worked diligently in those early years to affiliate the Screenwriters Guild of America with the fledgling Marxist Liberation Writers Union.
None of the screenplays he wrote ever saw the light of day at RKO. After he was fired from there, he continued to write and try to sell his work in Hollywood. Anarchist Press recently came out with a collection of those early non-produced screenplays, which include the titles: Andy Hardy and Dialectical Materialism, How Red Was My Valley, and The Pride of the Bolsheviks.
By the sixties, when a more liberal attitude was permeating the studios and the country as a whole, Markowitz made a complete 180 degree turn and became a born-again Christian. Once again, he was out of step with the prevailing attitudes in Hollywood. But, somehow, he never became depressed or lost hope. He continued to write every day from his little studio apartment in Torrance. And. his work continued to be ignored. By 1970, his screenplay Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice Will Die In Hell! came close to being picked up by the Disney Studios but Markowitz nixed the deal when he was informed that Disneyland regularly stayed open on the Sabbath.
On Oscar night, Sheldon Markowitz, will have his triumphant night. And, although no film clips will be shown from his career, because no films were ever made, the Hollywood elite will be on their feet to applaud this courageous survivor of the infamous blacklist.
