Blacklist-era screenwriter Joan Scott dies

In 1950s Hollywood, screenwriter Joan Scott seemed so adept at turning out tough-guy scripts that she became known as "the girl who writes like a man." What the studios didn't know was that she wasn't the writer. Her husband was.

She was married to Adrian Scott, a screenwriter who was blacklisted after refusing to cooperate with the communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee. Cited for contempt of Congress, he went to prison as one of the Hollywood 10.

When he was released, he was unemployable, so Joan Scott became his "front," taking his work to story conferences, keeping track of the revisions and giving him the notes at home so he could do the rewriting. When his work made it onto television shows, she took the credit under a pseudonym, Joanne Court.

Those were bitter years with one unintended benefit: "It was how I learned to be a writer," she told the Los Angeles Times years later.

Scott, who had a colorful career in her own right scripting stories for such popular shows as "Lassie" and "Have Gun -- Will Travel," died June 19 in Woodland Hills, said her friend, Candy Tanaka. She was 91 and had vascular dementia.

Blacklisted herself, Scott fought to gain proper recognition of her work from the Writers Guild of America, which in 1980 began restoring credits to the authors of hundreds of screenplays who had been forced to use aliases or fronts during the McCarthy era. She also was a technical adviser with a small walk-on part in the 1991 blacklist film "Guilty by Suspicion," which starred Robert De Niro.

In the 1990s the guild changed the screenwriting credits for the 1962 MGM release "Cairo" and the 1960 Disney film "The Magnificent Rebel" from Joanne Court to Joan Scott.

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Adrian Scott died in 1972 at 61.