* That was The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).

* In the beginning, it seems, the Ku Klux Klan even held some fascination for Dalton Trumbo. He was attracted by the military nature of the organization and wanted to wear the uniform. He nagged his father for the nineteen dollars it would cost to join. Finally, his father said that he could have it if he wanted, but that no Ku Klux Klansman had need of an education, so he could just forget about going to college. He made his point: Dalton gave up his ambition to be a Klansman.

* The same Jim Latimer who was so reluctant to talk to me in Grand Junction.

* The Film Spectator became the Hollywood Spectator in 1932.

* The unsigned review in the Times Literary Supplement had this to say about Eclipse: “In ‘Eclipse’ Mr. Dalton Trumbo has done more than write a well-constructed, interesting novel of modern life. He has by the implications of his story criticized the ethics, social and commercial, of the average American city. John Abbott, in his later days calls for our pity; but he received none—with a single exception—from the many people he had benefited. Once his prestige began to fail, the men and women he had so unselfishly helped turned against him. And in his treatment of that desertion lies the substance of Trumbo’s attack. It is true one of his minor characters, Hermann Vogel, is used to give voice to what are presumably the author’s own opinions, but his analyses are less effective than the inevitable development of the story. Mr. Trumbo is evidently an admirer of Sinclair Lewis’s novels and may possibly qualify, one day, to succeed him.”

* The studios’ blacklist in support of the Screen Playwrights lasted only about six or seven months, by Trumbo’s estimate. But the company union continued to receive favored treatment: “There was no method of adjudication. A young writer would come in, write an excellent script for $200 a week, leave, having made $1,200. A distinguished Screen Playwright would then come on, polish it, fix it up, get $50,000 and total credit.”

* But only partly. The remote and primitive quality of the Lazy-T made it especially desirable, for in that lay its mythic appeal to him. Living at the ranch, in circumstances not much different from those his grandfather Tillery had known in Colorado, must have seemed to him an act of loyalty to his western past. In fact, he brought his uncle Tom Tillery up to run the place and turn it into a working ranch. Cleo remembers Trumbo going out and kicking the dirt in front of the house and saying, “That’s mine.” And on more than one occasion he took the day to walk the boundaries of the ranch. Nikola and Christopher Trumbo were born during the time they were living there—in 1939 and 1940, respectively.

* Jean Butler also goes by Jean Rouverol.

* Dalton Trumbo not only wrote for the Screen Writer, he was also its founding editor (1945).

* So-called by California State Senator Jack Tenney in his yearly red-bound reports, Un-American Activities in California.

* In his book Inquisition in Eden.

* They were, in alphabetical order: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and of course, Dalton Trumbo.

* The novelist MacKinlay Kantor.

* Earl Felton.

* Biberman tells the fascinating story of the harassment and hostility experienced in the making of it in Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film. The book also includes Michael Wilson’s original screenplay for the picture.

* A name Trumbo was fond of. He used it for the protagonist of Eclipse and again in A Man to Remember.

* The problem came up another time when an original screenplay Trumbo had written during the blacklist period, The Cavern, finally went into production in 1965. The director of the picture, Edgar Ulmer, let it out during shooting that Dalton Trumbo was the author of the script. Acting on the same principle, Trumbo had advised Ulmer that his name was not to be associated with the picture.

* His favorite, because it says a lot about the kind of people who write such letters, was one he received while in jail. It was anonymous, signed only with the sender’s feces.

* As it happened, the Whites had no trouble in Highland Park during the years they lived there.

* The Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP).

* John Huston, who was set to direct the film, once told me in an interview unrelated to this book that of all the movies he had almost made (and in any major director’s career there are a score of them), Montezuma was the one he most regretted having fallen through. “It was a beautiful script,” Huston said. “It would have made a beautiful picture.”

* When asked by Carey McWilliams to review Howard Fast’s personal testament, The Naked God, for the Nation, Trumbo declared that the novelist’s ultimate disaffection was inevitable because of his mystical attachment to the Party: “He not only believed; he committed his last artistic resource to the service of belief.” Interestingly, however, Trumbo declined to review the book since he would have been forced to deal with his own scruples regarding the Party at a time when he felt it important to maintain solidarity because “people are still in jail or threatened by it.”

* As with every screenwriter, the number he wrote exceeded the number actually produced. He was involved in several projects during the sixties which, for one reason or another, were never done. Among them: Sylva, an adaptation of the novel by the French writer Vercors; The Dark Angel, on the siege of Constantinople; and Bunny Lake Is Missing, which Otto Preminger eventually produced though not from the Trumbo script.

* The author and chief promoter of this counter- auteur theory, a young critic named Richard Corliss, had surprisingly little good to say of Dalton Trumbo. In fact, he attacked him in his book Talking Pictures. In the normal course of things, this would be the proper occasion for me to defend Trumbo against Corliss and to refute whatever charges the critic has brought. This, however, is not so easily done—not because they are irrefutable but because they are not easily understood. That Corliss finds Trumbo unsatisfactory as a screenwriter is obvious from a casual reading of the essay, but he is maddeningly unspecific as to just why. He makes only two direct but practically unsupported statements about Trumbo’s work: (1) that he wrote “predictable, simple-minded scripts”; and (2) that “Trumbo’s most characteristic films are thinly disguised tracts.” (I shall be just as arbitrary: both statements are false.) The rest of the essay is all innuendo and disparagement-by-tone—a put-down masquerading as criticism.

* On January 11, 2011, Roman Holiday was submitted to the Guild by Tim Hunter on behalf of Christopher Trumbo, who passed away three days before. The Guild did indeed restore the credits for Roman Holiday as follows: Story by Dalton Trumbo; Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton.

* “Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun” is how the title appeared on the screen. In this rare instance, anything less would have been false modesty.