FOREWORD

THERE’S ONE CONSTANT THAT YOU can find to define a person’s character.

It’s not how you perform when things are easy; it’s how you handle yourself when it’s tough.

Everyone can be fearless and forthright when the stakes are low . . . but when it’s your livelihood or even your life on the line, or your family’s or your friends’ . . . that’s when you understand the kind of mettle you’re made of.

Kirk Douglas’ mettle is made of pretty stern stuff. Unlike so many characters we see in movies, he didn’t necessarily start out championing a cause. His path to glory rests more at the feet of characters like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. He hadn’t sought out the fight . . . it found him . . . and like Atticus, he did what he knew he had to . . . what was right.

It’s hard to imagine now what the weight of McCarthyism meant to so many. It’s difficult to picture loyal Americans pulled before Senate subcommittees and being asked to name their friends’ names or go to jail. Being tried in public without the ability to face the charges brought against you . . . a lot of very good people buckled under that weight.

The ones who didn’t suffered, long after McCarthy was holding hearings . . . for that matter long after he was even alive.

Dalton Trumbo was one of the most respected writers in Hollywood . . . and continued to write under pen names for years after going to jail for refusing to incriminate his coworkers.

In December 2011, his name was placed where it always should have been . . . as a credited writer on the film Roman Holiday.

But long before December 2011, Kirk Douglas stepped out of the dark and, as the producer and star of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, gave Dalton Trumbo screen credit for the first time since he was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

I guess it sounds small now. A screenwriter getting credit for a film he actually wrote . . . but in the history books, it’s marked as the moment that the Hollywood blacklist ended.

Kirk Douglas is many things. A movie star. An actor. A producer. But he is, first and foremost, a man of extraordinary character. The kind that’s formed when the stakes are high. The kind we always look for at our darkest hour.

GEORGE CLOONEY