New York Times drama critic Bruce Weber writes, near the beginning of his review of a new off-Broadway show based on the letters of the late Hollywood screenwriter and author Dalton Trumbo, that Trumbo was "a leading member of the Hollywood 10, a group of writers, producers and directors who, after appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington in 1947, were branded as Communist sympathizers and blacklisted by the studios." Rather than answer the question whether these career-crippling accusations were justified or not, Weber ends his notice: "The theater makes you hungry for the whole truth, no matter how eloquent one side of the story is." Let us review the films and the facts about Communism and Hollywood to see what is merely eloquent and what is the truth.
Trumbo and eight of the other "Ten" not only were Communist sympathizers, they were or had been card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA. Which means, as scholars John E. Haynes and Harvey Klehr have documented using the archives of the Soviet Communist Party, that Trumbo and company were participants—witting or unwitting—in a secret conspiracy, directed and financed by the Kremlin, to overthrow the United States government. (See The Secret World of American Communism and, with Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism, both published by Yale University Press.)
