During his lifetime, Dalton Trumbo achieved almost everything a screenwriter could hope for. Trumbo won an Academy Award and a national book award. Twice he was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter. Blacklisted in the 1940s and 1950s, he became the...

Though he experienced success as a novelist and a screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976) is best known as a member of a group he would have preferred never existed-the "Hollywood Ten." After refusing to cooperate during the House Committee on...

Warren Beatty leaned down to chat face-to-face with Kirk Douglas. Sylvester Stallone chomped on pineapple and glanced across the bar at Clint Eastwood. Angela Lansbury gawked at Jack Nicholson. Julie Andrews laughed with Billy Crystal.The American Film Institute threw itself a 40th birthday party on...

Danièle Thompson’s Avenue Montaigne (Fauteuils d’Orchestre), from a screenplay by Ms. Thompson and her son, Christopher Thompson (in French with English subtitles), plays out as a perky Parisian Right Bank boulevard comedy with more than the usual traumatically life-altering situations among the self-consciously arty types...

Before anyone else declares that the art of letter-writing is lost in contemporary America, he had better read this volume of Dalton Trumbo's correspondence ["Additional Dialogue"]…. In his 64 years [Trumbo] has known quite a life—the munificently paid screen writer of hits like "Kitty Foyle" and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," author of the grim novel "Johnny Got His Gun," devoted paterfamilias, prisoner No. 7551 at the Federal Corre...

The correspondence collected in Additional Dialogue is largely the record of the aftermath of [Dalton Trumbo's] appearance before his Congressional inquisitors. For Mr. Trumbo, the question was how to survive—economically and morally—through the first decade of the Cold War, the McCarthy period, and the years of slow-motion while the silent generation was holding its tongue. The letters are evidence that he survived very well, despite official and amateur persecution that might well hav...

["The Remarkable Andrew"] includes two remarkable Andrews—one, young Andrew Long of Shale City, Col., and the other General Andrew Jackson. The tale combines stiff doses of the literal and the fantastical which effervesce into a high-powered satirical cocktail. As a means for Mr. Trumbo to blow off steam about the present bewildering condition of local and world affairs, young Andrew is put through a very curious experience. An honest, hardworking, sane young clerk in the offices of the...