Roy Brewer, a fervent anti-communist who headed the stagehands union and became one of the most powerful labor leaders in Hollywood during the blacklist era, died Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 97.

Brewer, a friend and later political appointee of President Reagan, fought communist infiltration of the movie business and backed efforts to keep suspected subversives from working.

“I don’t think you can stop anybody from singing the praises of Russia, if they believe it is a good country. I think it is a part of our fundamental law that a man has got a right to say what he believes,” Brewer told the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947.

“But when he participates in American institutions and deliberately tries to subvert those institutions to become an instrument of a foreign power, that is something that is fundamentally wrong and has to be stopped,” he said.

Afraid of being accused of sympathizing with communists, studios refused to hire hundreds of dissident or suspect actors, directors and others on what was known as the Hollywood blacklist.

Brewer was said to be so powerful, however, that his word could resuscitate a career.

A Nebraska-born former movie projectionist, Brewer got into union organizing as a teenager and rose swiftly through the ranks.

Between 1945 and 1953, he was a representative of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

He was sent to the Hollywood local, which had a powerful role in the movie industry because its rank-and-file included a variety of stagehands and crafts workers.

During a strike and studio lockout in 1946, Brewer sided with producers against a competing union that he contended was communist-influenced. Clashes with rivals and law enforcement left dozens of people hurt and led to 1,000 arrests.

His daughter, Ramona Moloski, said her father persisted because he believed in what he was doing.

“His mission in life was to defeat the communism,” she said.

In a 1998 article on the blacklist era, the Screen Actors Guild said Brewer “effectively used red-baiting tactics, and a conspiratorial arrangement” to scuttle an opposing union.

Brewer joined efforts with guilds representing producers and other workers to form the Motion Picture Industry Council, with the stated goals of bringing the “communist problem” to the attention of studio executives and clearing repentant ex-communists for employment.

Brewer’s ally in the fight was Reagan, then a Screen Actors Guild executive. In 1983, when Reagan was president, he appointed Brewer to a labor relations panel.