Like several of the blacklisted screenwriters during the 1950s, Dalton Trumbo assumed a pseudonym after he was sentenced to jail for contempt of Congress, and continued to write as before. But with the use of his name denied him, he went from being the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood to accepting the pay of a drudge. Then, in 1956, as if to generalize from Anita Loos's observation that the harder she worked, the luckier she got, Trumbo got lucky. His screenplay for The Bold and the Brave, written under the pseudonym Robert Rich, won an Oscar for the best screenplay of the year.

After enjoying speculation that Robert Flaherty, Orson Welles, Jesse Laskey, Jr., Willis O'Brien, or Paul Tader was the real Robert Rich, Trumbo revealed his identity in 1959. Never one to pass up an opportunity to resist authority, Otto Preminger announced that Trumbo...