The farmhouse sits on a sleepy back road near the Ashokan Reservoir, its front porch halfhidden by an immense rhododendron. Screenwriter Zach Sklar opens the kitchen door, wearing a Saratoga Racetrack tee-shirt. He’s lean and fine-featured, with a welcoming smile tempered by a guardedness that seems hard-wired into his posture.

Pancho, a cocker spaniel rescued from an abusive home, frisks around, wagging his tail. Sklar’s longtime partner, film composer Sarah Plant, is pan-frying matzo brei at the stove, and the smell of caramelized onions sweetens the air. A health-conscious vegetarian, Sklar tries to avoid both sugar and gluten, but he’s treating himself to a brownie today.

The living room is low-key and homey. The only clues to its owners’ professions are a 3-D mockup of a cinema with a marquee reading Eat Drink Man Woman (Plant was associate music director) and a magnum champagne bottle with a logo for JFK (Sklar wrote the screenplay with director Oliver Stone).

“I grew up with a lot of writers,” he says, settling into a chair with his contraband brownie within easy reach. “We had a surrogate family that was built around two things: Most of them had been in the Communist Party, and most of them were writers.”

Sklar’s father, a politically active New York playwright and novelist, was wooed to Hollywood with others like Clifford Odets. Though George Sklar’s Broadway plays “Laura” (written with Vera Caspary) and “Merry-Go-Round” (written with Albert Maltz) and his novel The Two Worlds of Johnny Truro were optioned by studios, he spent most of his time as a salaryman, doing endless rewrites to support his family.

The youngest of three children, Zach was born in 1948. A year later, George Sklar was named before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Refusing to testify, he was blacklisted alongside Dalton Trumbo, Waldo Salt, Ring Lardner Jr., and other noted screenwriters. “My entire life was after he was out of film,” Sklar says.

His mother, Miriam Blecher Sklar, a former Martha Graham dancer, became the family breadwinner, teaching modern dance classes for children and later for adults. “She was a very gifted teacher. People loved her,” says Sklar, “But she kept her dance life totally separate from us. She never danced at home. We never danced.”

Her husband became a recluse. “He crumbled a bit psychologically,” Sklar says, emotion choking his voice. “He didn’t fight back. He didn’t wilt—didn’t name names or sacrifice his principles—but he didn’t leave the house.”

He also never discussed his political affiliations, so his children would not have to lie if they were questioned. After his death in 1988, Sklar and his siblings—playwright Daniel Sklar and writer Judith Sklar Rasminsky—were sorting their father’s possessions when his Communist Party card fell out of a book. “I just gasped,” Sklar recalls. “He never told, even long after the blacklist was over.”

Like many blacklistees, George Sklar warned his children against political activism, cautioning them not to sign petitions or get their pictures taken. “Of course, the first thing I did was sign petitions and go to demonstrations,” says Zach, who came of age during the Vietnam era.

He attended the newly formed University of California at Santa Cruz, which he describes as “a very communal-minded place” in Reagan-governed California. “But I was frightened. That was one of the big messages—not subconscious, it was pounded into me. ‘Don’t accept the way things are. Fight for justice, but you can get hurt. Be careful.’ It was a very schizophrenic message. When I did things, it was always, always a way of overcoming that fear.”