"Careers were made on my talent"

I can't get that phrase out of my head. When I was reading Inside Out I kept feeling torn between blacklisted writers compared to the fronts they needed in order to have a career. At first, I found myself wanting to side with both parties. I hated that a writer had to give up the rights to their work and that someone would put their name on something that didn't belong to them. At the same time, some fronts were helping blacklisted writers out of generosity. However, in Bernstein's book and heavily in the movie "The Front", we see that some fronts let success get to their head. I really like that the movie portrayed that duality between the writers and the front. The writers couldn't produce work or an income without the front, essentially they needed the front. However, the front was able to make a profit from a writers talent while simultaneously doing them a favor. The lines get tangled and the movie portrays this vividly. The more I learned about fronts, the more I sided with the blacklisted writers.

When I was reading Bernstein's memoir I would often feel angry when he would describe the fact that he needed a front for his work. There is a scene when the three writers are meeting up with Howard Prince (the front) and the one writer wants to strangle his neck because Howard is trying to call all the shots without even doing any work. If I was a writer, I would get that angry too! The movie shows this uncertainty of how far the fronts could take things, and also confronts the question of how much did the writers owe to the fronts?

Woody Allen's character of Howard Prince in the movie really reminded me of a front that Bernstein had described in Inside Out. Bernstein mentioned a woman named Ada who had no ambitions of being a writer yet once she received all the compliments from his work, "she was convinced that she had really written The Bridge of San Luis Ray" (240). Soon after she went off to Hollywood convinced that she was a brilliant writer, however once she was there she didn't do so well since she had to actually be a writer. I see a reflection of this when Howard Prince is bombarded to rewrite a television show while at the studio and this look of panic overtakes him. There was even Bernstein's front Rita who had blamed him for her false happiness (171). It was like the fronts were taking on the persona of a writer, only to have that persona overtake them and make them believe they were the ones achieving this success all on their own. I guess I'm just amazed at how far some of the fronts took it and also at how much blame they put on the writers. I feel sympathetic for the writers. They were on a blacklist, they had to share a portion of what they got paid, they weren't making as much money now, they had to give up their rights to their work, and the list goes on. Maybe it's the writer in me that doesn't feel compassion for the fronts, but either way I think they got the better bargain.