It was November 1974. Forty years ago. I was meeting an award-winning writer for lunch at the Black Dog Tavern. A great excuse to come to the Vineyard. I was living in Cambridge and working with a group with ties to the Orson Welles Film School. We were in pre-production, making a documentary on the Hollywood Blacklist.

Our film, to be called Hollywood On Trial, was going to examine the impact of the Red Scare on the movie industry and how it dis-employed people, ruined reputations and shredded the constitution. These were the dark days of democracy — approximately 1947 to 1962. To initiate a blacklist, to deprive people of their chosen livelihoods, is technically illegal. Nevertheless, it happened. There is no way to deny it. And so a bunch of us young turks, determined to create a climate where this could not happen again, decided this period when people saw Communists under their beds and industrial rats and congressional roaches ran amok had to be exposed for the benefit of the next generation.

As the project’s writer, I was coming to the Vineyard to coax Millard Lampell to be interviewed in our film. Mr. Lampell, who died in 1997, was on the Island visiting his friend and fellow writer John Hersey, the Pulitzer Prize winner who lived for many years in Vineyard Haven and died in 1993. Mr. Lampell had adapted Mr. Hersey’s inspirational novel about the Warsaw Ghetto, The Wall, first as a stage play and then as a TV drama. Mr. Hersey was packing up to go to his winter residence in Key West. The next day, Mr. Lampell planned to travel back to his home in the Delaware River Valley in an area that rustically resembled a large chunk of the Vineyard.

Why did we want Millard Lampell in our film? Because his story was unique, crossing different artistic lines and climaxing with a momentous televised event.

We met at The Black Dog, at this time open less than four years. We ordered lunch and swapped stories. He was old enough to be my father so I did most of the listening ­— about the career path that came to haunt him in mid-century America, a country in the grips of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Wisconsin’s Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s inquisitions.

In 1940 Mr. Lampell had the audacity to form the Almanacs, a folk-singing group with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays. They sang against poverty, hunger and intolerable working conditions. Unfortunately for them, to some people in power supporting the working class and underdogs, along with speaking in favor of peace and against prejudice, became synonymous with Communist collusion. The Almanac singers were now on the subversive label.

Mr. Lampell had also written poems, short stories, films, radio and TV plays. He had a major success in 1945 with his Abraham Lincoln cantata, The Lonesome Train, written with Earl Robinson and recorded by Burl Ives. But by the end of the 1940s, success made no difference. Work dried up, calls went unreturned. Producers told him he was on “that list.” In 1952 he was subpoenaed by a Senate committee but refused to cooperate. In Mr. Lampell’s words, this became “a time of suspicion, anonymous accusation and nameless anxiety.” In short, Kafka had entered the building.

During those years he eked out a living under a pseudonym, ghostwriting scripts, including work for educational programs and British television. Finally, as the 1960s progressed, the blacklist was shredded in a series of lawsuits. Mr. Lampell began writing again under his own name. In 1966 he won an Emmy for writing Eagle In a Cage, a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV drama about Napoleon. When he got his award in a live TV broadcast, he said, “I think I ought to mention that I was blacklisted for 10 years.” The celebrity-filled room burst into applause of relief. It was quite a moment.

A few months after that Black Dog lunch, I was in the Delaware River Valley sitting at a picnic table in Mr. Lampell’s sumptuous yard, capturing on film his story of survival. That Emmy broadcast sequence along with the interview made for compelling moments in Hollywood On Trial. In 1977 our film was one of the five nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar.

The film’s title, by the way, originated as the title of the 1948 book written by the then-soon-to-be-blacklisted screenwriter Gordon Kahn, who happens to have been the father of Tony Kahn, my fellow panelist on NPR’s Says You and the best man at my wedding 33 years ago. Ah, the sweet cologne of collusion.

A fitting conclusion to this memory. When it came time for the Oscar ceremony, the Vineyard’s own Lillian Hellman was chosen to be the presenter for the documentary category. She too had been famously blacklisted after refusing to go along with the House hearings. But then, as soon as cynical me heard Ms. Hellman was to be the presenter, I figured that was Hollywood’s subtle way of saying the Oscar was not going to a film about the blacklist. One acknowledgment to that era was enough. And I was right. The Oscar, deservedly, went to Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA, a stinging look at the socio-economic impacts of the 1973 Kentucky coal miners’ strike ­— a film that had it been made in the 1950s would have resulted in the filmmaker receiving a Congressional subpoena.

Arnie Reisman and his wife, Paula Lyons, regularly appear on the weekly NPR comedy quiz show, Says You! He also writes for the Huffington Post.