Colorado-born Dalton Trumbo began his professional life as a newspaper reporter and editor and, like a lot of people in those professsion, was drawn into the movie business in the mid '30s. His career as a screenwriter was rather routine during the later part of the decade, his most important scripts being Five Came Back (1939) and Kitty Foyle (1940). With the outbreak of World War II, the flashes of seriousness and spirituality that had shown up in his early work became more pronounced, and he wrote such classics as the fantasy A Guy Named Joe (1943) and the fact-based Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), which emphasized the need for sacrifice in order to win the war. Following the end of the war, Trumbo's career was blighted by the increasingly unfriendly political climate in Hollywood, where the studio heads had no use for men of ideas and ideals such as him. And then, in 1947, the roof fell in on him when he was called to testify about the alleged communist infiltration of the movie business and — along with nine others — refused to testify. Trumbo, who was suspect for his otherwise innocuous 1943 script for …  » Read more