Hollywood: Out of the Shadow

A man and his wife, one evening last week, left their home in a working-class neighborhood of East Los Angeles, crossed town and stepped into the glare of a Hollywood premiére. After 13 years of a shadow career filled with aliases and under-the-desk assignments, Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was also stepping into the open. He had written the picture, Exodus, under his own name; and on the blacklist that had featured him for so long, the print was quickly fading.

Most renowned of the Hollywood Ten —writers cited in 1947 for contempt of...