During the McCarthy era, Kazan informed on various members of the theatrical and motion picture community. Giving this award to him is tantamount to saying that what Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Martin Dies, and the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee did was, after all, not so bad, and let's forget it. 

It can't be forgotten, and it won't, despite Kazan's decades-long insistence that he did nothing wrong; that, in fact, he was being patriotic by informing on his friends; that he would do it again. 

I had the privilege to study with Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism. Siegel was a person most passionately devoted to human justice. I once heard him say, and I love him for it, that if a wrong was done in this world, no matter how long ago, it is still a wrong, and it has to be seen and honestly regretted, sincerely revoked, not lied about or smoothed over. 

If the Motion Picture Academy insists on giving this award to Elia Kazan, and I fervently hope it will not, I make the following proposal: As Kazan is onstage having accepted his Oscar, he should remain there, statuette in hand, while the Academy then awards honorary Oscars to all the men and women on whom Kazan informed, who were blacklisted, hounded for years, whose careers were ruined, who went to jail, whose lives were ended. 

There will be an award, for example, for J. Edward Bromberg who, though ill, courageously refused to betray his friends and died shortly after; and for Morris Carnovsky and Phoebe Brand, two people I knew and worked with, who suffered under the blacklist for decades, and many others. 

These honorary Oscars should be presented, with tremendous remorse and dignity, to their next of kin. 

If what I am proposing takes place, it will be rather beautiful and will do something, not everything, to make people in the film industry, the theater world, and America itself cleaner and honestly prouder.