Orson may have have had trouble making movies, but that had to do with how he made movies...thumbing his nose at the studios in terms of controlling his own material...and not his political views.

In the 70's my husband and I and others made the first documentary on the blacklist called The Hollywood Ten....it was nominated for an Academy Award for 1976. It also has some wonderful footage of Dalton Trumbo, who was quite ill at the time, in which his great narrative gift is amply displayed. There is alos additional footage of him that wasn't used in the film at the University of Wisconsin Fil Archives. Also lots of footage of the HUAC hearings which were copies from the Library of Congress, which is fortuante since the ones at the Library subsequently burned.

We live in an era where we must be very careful of minimising the villains of our history because the same things are being done today in the fight against "Terrorism" as were done to fight "Communism."

We have people being denied due process, people saying that there are some people out there who are above (The president for example) and below (Osama for example) the law.

We have attacks on civil liberties such as the right to privacy (Telecoms immunity) a fair trial (Habeas Corpus) and, most importantly in this case, free speech.

Jack Thompson has allies in the Senate, Joseph Lieberman and Hillary Clinton are only two amongst them. He is the inheritor of the same fears as that motivated the blacklist - that people can't tell reality from fantasy.

There is a definite movement within America to censor our speech and by minimising the evils of men such as McCarthy, who used communists in the arts as wedge issues, we weaken our arguments against this movement.

We have seen where the scape-goating politician will take us before, and it is never anywhere good.

But because we are leftwing, because we are "nice" about history and try to excuse evil with trite phrases like "nobody was innocent" we let the scapegoating politician rise again, and again, and again and we constantly end up wasting effort fighting old battles and losing our ability to fight the new ones.

Dalton Trumbo is kind of a hero of mine. "Johnny Got His Gun" was the first real novel I ever read(via my curiosity about the Metallica song and video "One"), and served as my gateway to literature . Today I am a High School English teacher, and one of my favorite and most successful units is the one I do on Bradbury's "Farhenhiet 451" and Miller's "The Crucible." Trumbo is a presence in many of these classes. I suppose you could say he continues to have an influence.

On another note, I have to mention the film "Gun Crazy." It's one of the great forgotten Noir films of the '40's. It's cool and ironic, not to mention funny with all the in-your-face with phallic references.

I look forward to seeing this film. On the same topic, I remember seeing a good doc on PBS' "American Masters" about the fractured friendship between Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan that is also a good overview of that era.

That in today's world, no one. NO ONE. would stand up to Congress? In 2008 there would never be a black list because there would be no need. Those who could leave the US and maintain their careers would, everyone else would cave and do a gameshow.

Did you know Bertolt Brecht was forced to appear before the committee too? Brecht really was a commie. In fact, his work is probably the greatest attempt to "dramatize" the idea of social equality using the communist model and will be handed down as such for generations. (Take a closer look at THE THREE PENNY OPERA)

He pretended not to understand anything anybody was saying, and so completely confused them they told him to go home and never bothered him again. It's one of the least known but most poignant stories from the era--though Trumbo's says so much more, and the timing is certainly right.

If anybody thinks "witch-hunts" are now out of the question, they aren't paying attention. It's the same right wing mentality at work playing on the fears of the unsuspecting. It happened during the 60's and the story still hasn't been told. Sometimes I even wonder if Salon isn't monitored.

I am a Red-diaper baby (now pushing 70!) whose father was black-listed from his ever-so-sensitive job as a public school music teacher in Detroit. He had also been a CPUSA member from about 1933 to 1943. His real "crime was to help organize the American Federation of teachers in the '30s, at a time and place where union activity was dangerous (this was the Detroit of Father Coughlin and the Silver Shirts, a home-grown group of Fascists).

The Hollywood Ten were practically members of our household when I was 10. Less welcome were the FBI agents who regularly harrassed my mother, who had become a citizen as a minor when her father was naturalized (they came from Ukraine in 1921, when she was 6). She had no derivative papers to prove her status, and deportations were not unknown at the time.

My best friend in the 5th grade was the son of a CPUSA official who was hiding from an indictment -- in the vain hope that when things cooled down he could get a fair trial. Eventually he turned himself in and did hos 3 years in Milan Federal. Meantime, every few weeks a pair of Hoover's best would "shadow" us, a couple of 11--tear-olds on our way to Brady Elementary School, in a yellow convertible with the top down.

By the time HUAC came to town with a summons for my father, I was in high school, and a found out later that most of the teachers sympathized but were afraid to say anything. The only one who actually was harrassed was my then 7-year-okd sister, who was taunted by classmates who undoubtedly picked up their cues from their families' dinner conversations.

MY father "testified", took the 5th Amendment 30+ times and was fired. He went into the roofing business with my ubcle and did quite well as a capitalist.

May parents worst sin I think was idealism and naivete, and eventually my father received a citation from the City Council for his work in advancing race relations. None of the horror stories about Communists found any support in our lives, in fact we came out of it quite well. Indeed, circumstance had me back in Detroit in 1969 when I was hanging around an inner city church (ministered by a Harvard Divinity grad who was a Mayflower descendant) that was home to a number of radical groups and I got my picture taken by a Red Squad cop leaving the building, quite proud that I had made it into the files on my own and not just as my father's son.

I've managed to go on without having my life shadowed all that much by these memories, although I know some who did not get off so easily. I have a particular contempt for people like David Horowitz who took their paranoid extremism from the far Left to the far Right, maintaining their style of discourse --- frothing hysteria --- intact. Like those who easily transferred their demonization of Communism to Islam with scarcely a pause for breath.

I like to call myself a passionate centrist. That means I'll probably be swallowed up by the absolutists on all sides, convinced that they alone have the solution to all societies ills. I do fear for the future of my grand-daughter, even though her parents are quite prosperous (irony of ironies, my son who was my Dad's favorite is a rising Wall Street attorney) .