Just watched TRUMBO on PBS

About the screen writer who was blacklisted in the 50s.

It was fascinating but, again, I had to think of how could anyone be asked about his political beliefs, and be thrown to jail. So what if someone supported communism: they were are allies just few years earlier and they were the only venue to express one's belief that, yes, all men are created equal and should be treated as such.

Some of the people who were dragged to "testify" in front of the committee invoked not the 5th Amendment, but the First: their right to express their thoughts and beliefs.

Really a must see. Perhaps with some warning for young kids: a great letter that he wrote to his son about the pleasure of masturbation..

there about HUAC and - coincidentally - the Joe McCarthy debacle. You can't believe what was done in the name of "protecting our country from Communists."

It was a shameful, horrifying time in our history, and everyone is, I believe, obligated to learn as much as they can about it, to make sure it never happens again.

When Michelle Bachmann makes her noises about testing Congressmen for their patriotism, she's making all the same noises as did those zealots back then.

Dalton Trumbo got such a lousy rap. A lot of people took their own lives. Families were ruined, lives destroyed.

And for what?

Trumbo was released from prison and no one really wanted anything to do with him, he went to a major restaurant - Chasens? and was all by himself. Spencer Tracy stopped by his table and - in a loud voice that everyone could hear - chatted him up. He was always grateful.

That gets mentioned in a lot of books.

Hepburn wrote a letter to try and spring Ring Lardner, jr.

his personal life, his struggles, and his ultimate triumph are an admirable example to everyone of the power of belief -- belief in your self, belief in your ideals, belief in the power and righteousness that is the U.S. Constitution. It's why I use him for my avatar.

HUAC robbed us of so much, especially the creative output of so many worthy men. Had Trumbo not been forced to leave the country and pen screenplays using Fronts, he might have finished what was truly his masterpiece, Night of the Aurochs. As it is, we have the fragments Robert Kirsch pulled together in the years after Dalton's death and from them we can envision what a taut, well-structured tale it would have been. For those unfamiliar with this work, unlike Johnny Got His Gun, which told of war through the experiences of a victim, Aurochs tells of war through the evil eyes of the perpetrator, in this case that of a Nazi named Grieben, whose destiny it was to become a commandant at Auschwitz.

"The thing I am after here," wrote Trumbo, the devil I am trying to catch, is that dark yearning for power that lurks in all of us, the perversion of love that is the inevitable consequence of power, the exquisite pleasures of perversion when power become absolute."

Taken together, Johnny and Aurochs would have crafted a magnificence view of war's dual nature -- the intensity of the passions it stirs, the depths of despair it inspires. But Trumbo was robbed of his prime earning years, and his decision -- late in life -- to bring Johnny to the screen, kept him too long from Auroch's task.

Yet another reason to assiduously defend the First Amendment, for its denial was the root cause of Trumbo's and the other Nine's woes.

For those interested, Additional Dialogue, a collection of Dalton Trumbo's letters written during his years of exile and struggle, provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind of this extraordinarily talented writer and passionate adherent to American ideals. It was the work on which Dalton's son, Christopher Trumbo, based his play, Trumbo, which was then turned into the screenplay you just watched.

'Johnny Got His Gun' is the work I am familiar with.

Yes, I will try to search for the letters.

They showed a clip from the movie Spartacus, which did give him credit, and when all of them start to stand up saying "I am Spartacus" you could feel how much this must have meant to him.

Maybe because I was surrounded by John Birchers in Orange County, CA, the hotbed of conservatism....I remember a brief foray my folks had into bircherism. They had a meeting at our house. I talked to my dad recently about this, and he said when he tried that water with his big toe, he never wanted to get any wetter! love him.

to be surrounded by so many people with so much hate.

no raised voices. Very much like you see in movies like 'Pleasantville'- I already knew I was an odd duck. I wanted to be a gypsy, or a cancan girl, or a flapper, or a cat. And I started plotting my getaway when I was about 10. I lived on my bicycle, my rollerskates and when I could, on a horse. I was 'outa there' in 1966.

The stepford wives another movie with similar tone. And some of mad men, now. You hear some of them talking so civilly about people they think are 'red'- better dead that red....

Also, when I was about 6 I found a civil defense pamphlet, outlining what the effects would be in concentric circles emanating from the civic center in LA, were there a bomb strike there. an H bomb, I guess. Scared me shitless!

but my husband whined, "I don't want to watch anything about politics."

Woody Allen in a 1976 movie as a Manhattan lunch counter cashier who fronts for blacklisted writers. Zero Mostel stars as the host of a television anthology series who gets cross-wise with HUAC because of some meetings he attended 20 years earlier. A terrific dramatization of the things people had to do and the fixes they were in.

The real kicker to the movie, though, is the closing credits that shows many of the actors and behind-the-scenes people who worked on the production and their dates of being blacklisted. Holy crap, there are dozens!