Later Life
After completing his sentence, Trumbo could not get work in California, so he sold his ranch and his family moved to Mexico City with Hugo Butler and his wife Jean Rouverol, who had also been blacklisted. He recalled earning $1750 average fee for 18 screenplays in two years and said, "None was very good." In Mexico he wrote 30 scripts under pseudonyms, such as Gun Crazy (1950), based on a short story by MacKinlay Kantor, who was the front for the screenplay. It was not until 1992 that Trumbo's role was revealed.
Gradually the blacklist began to be weakened. With the support of Otto Preminger, Trumbo was credited for his screenplay for the 1960 film Exodus, adapted from the novel by Leon Uris. Shortly thereafter, Kirk Douglas made public Trumbo's credit for the screenplay for Spartacus (1960), an event which has been cited as the beginning of the end of the blacklist. Trumbo was reinstated in the Writers Guild of America, West, and was credited on all subsequent scripts.
In 1971, Trumbo directed the film adaptation of his novel Johnny Got His Gun, which starred Timothy Bottoms, Diane Varsi, Jason Robards and Donald Sutherland.
One of Trumbo's last films, Executive Action (1973), was based on various conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination.
His account and analysis of the Smith Act trials is entitled The Devil in the Book.
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