Walt Disney as a friendly witness in front of the House Un-American Activities Comittee
I once wrote a paper about the Blacklist in school. It was nearly 30 pages long, with extensive research and citations. The title of that paper (double meaning and all) now rests atop this story because after staring at a blank page, I think the best stuff I remember about the original paper approximates how I feel about Peter Askin's film Trumbo. I urge anyone reading this to watch the movie and not just "Google" or "Wikipedia" (since these words are now verbs) Robert Rich.
When I submitted the paper, which dealt with how the memes and ideologies from the days of the Blacklist continue to the present (this was 1999 or 2000), I was told it was too overtly political. Growing up in Texas was like living in an alternate universe. They meant that I was somehow defending or promoting Communism, which was completely off-base.
I think I ended up neutering it into an examination of how the Blacklist affected modern Hollywood or something similarly uninteresting. I still managed to sneak some provocative stuff in, like the idea that conservative politics couldn't ever take over Hollywood due to the fact that conservatives are inherently not capable of being adept at humor. I phrased it differently, but that was the idea. There's no nuance to conservative "humor" naturally, since the word nuance is "too French" to be deemed acceptable.
Trumbo began life as a staged reading written by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo's son Christopher. The story of the Hollywood blacklist in the film is made up of talking head interviews, recordings of interviews with Dalton Trumbo himself, and readings of letters Trumbo wrote to friends, family, and adversaries. The letters are read by David Strathairn, Donald Sutherland, Joan Allen, Michael Douglas, Paul Giamatti, Nathan Lane, Josh Lucas, and Brian Dennehy (as well as Danny Glover in a deleted segment).
Trumbo wrote one of my favorite films, Lonely Are The Brave. It's a movie that many "teabaggers" and Libertarian-leaning Republicans would resist believing was written by one of the Hollywood Ten, "pinko commie", whatever. The documentary released on DVD by Magnolia is indeed very good, and is a fitting tribute to one of Hollywood's most talented screenwriters who fought against the persecution of perceived "thought crimes". Extras include a deleted reading by Paul Giamatti and the collected deleted readings done by Danny Glover.