Blacklisted, Episode 5

How I Killed Hugh G. Foster

By: Tony Kahn

Narrated by: Tony Kahn, Ron Leibman, Stockard Channing, Carrol O'Connor

Episode Five: Gordon Kahn arrives with his family in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the winter of 1955. Soon after, a "friend" informs on him to the state Attorney General, a nationally known Red Hunter named Louis Wyman. Wyman launches an investigation that becomes front-page news. FBI surveillance and wiretaps are resumed; the children are beaten up at school and Kahn is threatened with twenty years in prison for refusing to cooperate. Kahn's wife Barbara looks for work as a schoolteacher and learns she has been blacklisted, too. Kahn, earning a small living under the pseudonym of Hugh G. Foster, gives up hope of getting back his name.

This program is part of a series of six half-hour dramas about one of the darkest periods for the First Amendment in American history: the Hollywood blacklist. Gordon Kahn's son, Tony Kahn, produced the series. It is available in its an entirety under the title Blacklisted.

©1997 Tony Kahn Productions

Critic reviews

"A remarkable story of a son's unrelenting search for his father and his ability to turn that search into art." (The Boston Globe)