Doubtfully blacklisted: Roman Bohnen




Roman Bohnen, actor. Bohnen’s film career started in 1937. His death by heart attack is yet another blamed on the McCarthy era. Bohnen was one of the founders as well as a director of the LA-based Actors' Laboratory Theatre a “politically active” theatre company and acting school founded in January 1941. The Actors' Lab was never denounced as a communist organization, at least by the federal government’s HUAC or the state of California’s version of the HUAC.
 In 1948, Bohnen and at least eight other directors of the Actors lab received subpoenas from the state of California’s version of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The public stopped supporting the theater when it found out that the theater's leadership had been called in to admit or disavow their membership in the communist party. Rightfully, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service subsequently withdrew the group's tax exempt status, and the Veterans Administration canceled its contracts with the group. The Lab closed in 1950.
A heavy smoker, Bohnen died of a heart attack, on stage, in 1949. Of course, as soon as he died, in fact, the very day he died, the story arose that the stress of being signaled out as a communist by the government killed him. Bohnen in the year and a half that Bohnen lived between the time he was subpoenaed, Bohnen worked regularly. He was never blacklisted.

Just because someone’s name appeared in Red Channels, that doesn’t mean they were blacklisted. It just means there name appeared in Red Channels.
Just because a person said they were blacklisted doesn’t mean they were. Many people in Hollywood have lied about being blacklisted over the years.
If  a person was actually blacklisted…and not many were actually blacklisted….it was the studios and TV sponsors who blacklisted them. Not the United States federal government.
If a person claims the blacklist ruined their career, they should be able to prove they had a career before the blacklist.