| 1914, March 23 |
Nedrick Young was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
|
| Before 1941 |
Acted in films and on the stage in New York.
|
| circa 1941-1945 |
Served overseas in the U.S. Army as an orientation officer.
|
| circa 1945 |
Went to Hollywood to continue career as an actor and to write.
|
| 1946 |
Received his first film credit as screenwriter for Decoy (Monogram).
|
| 1948 |
Received film credit as screenwriter for Rusty Leads the Way (Columbia).
|
| 1949-1950 |
Was under acting contract to Warner Brothers, which was reportedly grooming him as a possible replacement for Humphrey Bogart. Acted in various minor roles in Warner films.
|
| 1951 |
Received film credit as screenwriter for Passage West (Paramount).
|
| 1953, April 8 |
Pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked by the House Committee on Un-American Affairs to testify about Communist infiltration in the motion picture industry. Consequently he was blacklisted and forced to work at a variety of jobs such as luggage salesman, junk man, and bartender.
|
| date unknown |
His wife, actress Frances Sage, was also blacklisted.
|
| 1957 |
Forced MGM to live up to its contractual obligation and credit him for the screenplay of Jailhouse Rock.
|
| 1958 |
Using the pseudonym of Nathan E. Douglas, he collaborated with Harold Jacob Smith on the screenplay of The Defiant Ones, produced by Stanley Kramer. Starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, the film dealt explicitly with racial tensions.
|
| 1959 |
The Defiant Ones won the New York Film Critics Award, an award from the Screen Writers Guild, and an Academy Award. In honoring Nathan E. Douglas, who was publicly revealed to be Young, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences rescinded a 1957 decision to render ineligible for award any person who had refused to disavow membership in the Communist Party before a Congressional committee.
|
| 1960 |
Again under the pseudonym of Nathan E. Douglas, Young collaborated with Harold Jacob Smith on the screenplay of another Kramer production, Inherit the Wind. This film received international acclaim and was the first to win two awards from the Berlin Film Festival. The nomination of Douglas and Smith for an Oscar for Best Screenplay sparked an American Legion campaign against Kramer and other producers who employed blacklisted writers.
|
| 1961, January |
Young joined Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Mary Virginia Farmer, Alvin Hammer, John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Robert L. Richards, Frederick I. Rinaldo, Shimen Ruskin, Gale Sondergaard, and Philip Stevenson in an anti-trust suit against the major motion picture studios of the Motion Picture Producers' Association. The twelve charged that they had been blacklisted and thus prevented from marketing their material since November 1947. They claimed 7,650,000 dollars in damages.
|
| 1963, January 7 |
Frances Sage Young committed suicide, leaving her two children, James and Elizabeth, to Young's care.
|
| 1965 |
Young et al. settled out-of-court for 80,000 dollars. At that time, Young was under contract to Universal and was still using the Nathan E. Douglas pseudonym.
|
| 1965 |
Married television actress Elizabeth MacRae.
|
| 1967, Fall |
Wrote a screenplay, “Teeth of the Dragon,” that was purchased by ABC-TV.
|
| 1968, September 16 |
After several years of heart trouble, Young died suddenly of a heart attack. He left unfinished a screen adaptation of Ed McBain's novel The Sentries.
|
| 1968, December 4 |
ABC aired “Teeth of the Dragon” as a World Premiere movie entitled Shadow on the Land. For the first time since Jailhouse Rock (1957), Young received credit under his real name.
|
