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Jay Roach’s Trumbo (2015) depicts a dark era in the history of Hollywood that resulted in the loss of employment for hundreds of people.

The film industry occupied a heroic place in the US during World War II because of its enthusiasm for the war effort, but its left-leaning policies aroused suspicion during the Cold War. Tensions between Congress and Hollywood came to a high point in October of 1947 when the US House of Representative’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched a probe of communist influence in the motion picture business. Eleven members of the Hollywood film industry—Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, Dalton Trumbo, and Bertolt Brecht—publicly denounced the tactics of the committee as a Communist witch hunt by refusing to answer questions regarding their Communist affiliation. They accused the committee of violating the Bill of Rights with their inquiry.

A month later, Congress voted them in contempt of Congress. By that time Bertolt Brecht had fled the country. The remaining 10 were convicted in federal court the following year and were given sentences from six months to one year in prison.

While just ten people went to prison, the ramifications of the blacklist spread throughout the industry. The industry guilds and studios, which long had a history of appeasing Middle America (the origins of the Hayes Office and the motion picture code), reacted fearfully by instituting a blacklist for those in Hollywood who wouldn’t publicly cooperate with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The blacklist was expanded far beyond the original round of dissidents because staying in Hollywood’s good graces required one to name Communist sympathizers. Nearly 300 people would find themselves on the blacklist through the assistance of the Hollywood Reporter and the anti-communist publication Red Channels, and thousands more were affected in some way. Ultimately, twice that many would be implicated and lose work. The blacklist is generally considered to have lasted until 1960 when Spartacus (1960) and Exodus (1960) concurrently broke its power by featuring blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo in the opening credits.

Perhaps the biggest loss to Hollywood was the literal draining of talent that the blacklist wrought. Some people like actress Lee Grant achieved greater heights after being blacklisted, eventually winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1975 and an Emmy in 1966. “You have to understand how motivated I was. I had 12 years to make up for, and nothing was going to stop me,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

But a lot of blacklisted writers left the industry altogether. Alvah Bessie and Samuel Ornitz never worked in Hollywood again, while others like Howard Lawson and Lester Cole had to move abroad to preserve their writing careers. Famous figures like Casablanca (1943) writer screenwriter Howard Koch, actor John Garfield, and Oscar-winning actresses Gale Sondergaard and Anne Revere had their Hollywood careers effectively ended. Garfield died in 1952 before he could get back into Hollywood, and it took Revere 20 years to return to TV and screen.

Many blacklisted writers found work under a number of pseudonyms during the blacklist years, but it is debatable whether their experiences informed their work and made it better or inhibited their talents. It could be argued that Dalton Trumbo did some of his most groundbreaking work before the blacklist. His Kitty Foyle (1940), a film with a strong female protagonist, came out at a time when very few movies discussed abortion. Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945) embedded a collectivist or socialist message in a seemingly typical film. At the same time, using a pseudonym while blacklisted, Trumbo did win two Oscars for films—The Brave One (1956) and Roman Holiday (1953)—that most consider to have stood the test of time. He was pushed by Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas into writing two of the most seminal films of the 1960s, Exodus and Spartacus, but it should be noted that those films came about through the initiatives of two men who wanted to end the blacklist and return to Trumbo the freedom to write top-grade material that he didn’t have during the blacklist.

We often forget that the 1950’s were a very radical time in film. While TV of the decade comfortingly affirmed family values, Douglas Sirk showed the typical American family through a much more critical lens in films like Imitation of Life (1959) and Written on the Wind (1956), while iconoclastic filmmakers like Otto Preminger and Nicholas Ray, with his Johnny Guitar (1954) and Rebel without a Cause (1955), thrived. At the same time, this development was due to a loosening of code restrictions and not particularly the blacklist.

It should be noted also that one of the most progressive filmmakers during the period of the blacklist – both in terms of socially conscious messages and cinematic style—was Elia Kazan, who is viewed by some as one of the biggest villains of the blacklist era for his decision to name names. Yet Kazan’s films of the period were subversive and seminal. Kazan approached topics such as racism in Pinky (1949), anti-semitism in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), the complexities of herosim in war in Viva Zapata (1952) and a triple whopper of homosexuality, depression, and domestic violence in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Ironically, Kazan’s greatest masterpiece, On the Waterfront (1954) was meant as a defense for his action of naming names so it could be argued that the greatest cinematic work of the 1950s came about as a defense to one of the most reprehensible acts in Hollywood history.

Any viewer who wants to understand more of the period should look into films like High Noon (1952), Salt of the Earth (1954), and Rio Bravo (1959) for cinematic works that were directly influenced by the blacklist.

To arrive at a conclusion on whether the blacklist improved the quality of films in any indirect way is difficult, if not impossible, to determine, as we can never know what Trumbo and his colleagues would have produced in an alternate history. We do know, however, that the blacklist damaged a number of lives and kept great talent away from contributing to the movie industry.