When the BBC interviewed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo beside his Hollywood swimming pool in 1960, he had just written the scripts for two of the year's biggest movies. Despite this runaway success, interviewer Robert Robinson observed in him a "certain reticence", guessing that he had "no wish to revive old feuds". It was no wonder he felt a little bruised.
Jailed, blacklisted by Hollywood and forced to work in secret under a series of fake names, Trumbo had spent the past 13 years being battered by the US anti-communist witch hunt. All he had done was refuse to tell a US government committee in 1947 if he was a communist, as he felt under the First Amendment he had the legal right to hold any political views he wanted.
Of course, Trumbo had been a member of the Communist Party but that wasn't the point, and in any case, he was far from a stereotypical "Red". He later told the BBC: "I never felt the slightest guilt about making what I earned – the pictures were making millions. If I got a small part, fine, I enjoyed it. The idea of guilt, I'm not puritanical, would have startled me."