He died of pneumonia, Loomis said.
Bernstein was best known for being blacklisted during the Hollywood “Red Scare” of the 1950s. Trapped in the anti-communist movement punctuated by the notorious accusations of Senator Joseph McCarthy against the U.S. State Department, Bernstein wrote under pseudonyms for years.
He also published with the help of friends and associates known as “fronts,” who listed their names as the alleged authors of Bernstein’s work.
He reappeared as the screenwriter for the 1959 film “That Kind of Woman,” starring Sophia Loren and directed by Sidney Lumet.
His professional recovery, Bernstein’s outstanding works throughout the 1960s and 1970s, included “Fail Safe,” “Paris Blues,” “The Molly Maguires” and “Yanks.” Bernstein also worked on “Something’s Got to Give,” the unfortunate image of Marilyn Monroe that was never completed due to her death in August 1962.
He won an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for “The Front,” a 1976 film starring Woody Allen that satirized the impact of the McCarthyism era on writers in the industry.
In 1997, Bernstein was nominated for an Emmy Award for Writing for “Miss Evers’ Boys,” an HBO film about Tuskegee’s famous syphilis experiments.
Prior to his screenwriting successes, Bernstein attended Dartmouth College, served in World War II as a correspondent for the military newspaper Yank, and wrote for The New Yorker.
Bernstein had been a longtime member of the Writers Guild of America, East, which in 2017 received its name in order to “honor writers who have demonstrated with creativity, grace and courage the will to face social injustice in the face of adversity. “