HUAC

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives, created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having fascist and communist ties.

Beginning on October 20, 1947 (77 years ago), the committee held nine days of hearings into alleged communist propaganda and influence in the Hollywood motion picture industry. After conviction on contempt of Congress charges for refusal to answer some questions posed by committee members, "The Hollywood Ten" were blacklisted by the industry. 

"The Hollywood Ten" consisted of the following producers, directors and screenwriters: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo.

Studio executives told the committee that wartime films—such as Mission to Moscow, The North Star, and Song of Russia—could be considered pro-Soviet propaganda, but claimed that the films were valuable in the context of the Allied war effort, and that they were made (in the case of Mission to Moscow) at the request of White House officials. 

In response to the House investigations, most studios produced a number of anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda films such as The Red Menace (August 1949), The Red Danube (October 1949), The Woman on Pier 13 (October 1949), Guilty of Treason (May 1950), I Was a Communist for the FBI (May 1951, Academy Award nominated for best documentary 1951), Red Planet Mars (May 1952), and John Wayne's Big Jim McLain (August 1952).

Eventually, more than 300 artists – including directors, radio commentators, actors, and particularly screenwriters – were boycotted by the studios. Some, like Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Alan Lomax, Paul Robeson, and Yip Harburg, left the U.S or went underground to find work. 

Others like Dalton Trumbo wrote under pseudonyms or the names of colleagues. Only about ten percent succeeded in rebuilding careers within the entertainment industry.

Trumbo continued working clandestinely on major films. His uncredited work won two Academy Awards for Best Story: for Roman Holiday (1953), which was presented to a front writer (Ian McLellan Hunter), and for The Brave One (1956), which was awarded to a pseudonym used by Trumbo.  

When Trumbo was given public screen credit for both Exodus (by Otto Preminger) and Spartacus (by Kirk Douglas) in 1960, it marked the beginning of the end of the Hollywood Blacklist.  He finally was given full credit by the Writers' Guild for Roman Holiday in 2011, nearly 60 years after the fact, and 35 years after his death.