Blacklist myth: I. Kirk Douglas broke the supposed Hollywood Blacklist



Kirk Douglas spent most of his career after 1960 telling anyone who would listen that he ended the supposed blacklist by hiring a known communist, Dalton Trumbo, as the screenwriter for the film Spartacus. In 1991, Hollywood’s Writers Guild of America, frantic to keep the blacklist myth alive,  gave the actor a special award for  "a singular act of courage."  Myth supporters, the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter, Turner Classic Movies and Bill Maher, couldn’t praise Douglas enough.
Douglas loved it of course. It soothed his enormous ego and made him look like one of the fearless hero’s he portrayed in film. History had rewritten the facts. By then, the supposed Hollywood blacklist had taken on a mythical status and those who were supposed to have been blacklisted are now cultural heroes, martyrs for the cause of civil liberties.
However, after Spartacus, according to Trumbo, Douglas couldn’t get far enough away from the writer. When Trumbo wanted credit for re-writing Douglas's next picture, Town Without Pity, Douglas said he didn’t want to become association to closely with Trumbo because it could harm his career. Trumbo was not given credit for the work.
At the same time, Douglas used his considerable clout in Hollywood to continue the myth that he and he alone had ended the supposed blacklisting era.
Edward Lewis said that Douglas repeatedly tried to get him to go along with the tale and that when he refused, Douglas threatened him professionally. Douglas also clamped down on Trumbo and later on his family to push his narrative.
If the award for defying the studios should go to anyone, it should be director Cecil B. de Mille, an arch-conservative, who hired and credited the otherwise unemployable actor Edward G. Robinson and composer Elmer Bernstein for his 1956 film, The Ten Commandments.
Douglas also liked to point out that he employed other talents who were known communist, neglecting to add that he paid them a fraction of what they would have earned had they not on the studio’s don’t-hire list. Douglas also paid Dalton Trumbo a fraction of what he was used to making on a big budget film like Spartacus.
The supposed blacklist was, according to the then influential Time magazine, over by 1959. The studio went back to hiring communists to make their pictures for them.
"They're all working now, all these Fifth Amendment communists, and I don't think that anything I say about it will make much difference. We've lost the fight and it's as simple as that." Leading anticommunist actor Ward Bond in 1959. 
With that in mind, Douglas arrived very late to the scene, in 1960, when it didn’t really matter who he hired. Besides, it was producer Ed Lewis who hired Trumbo and not Douglas and Douglas consented only after the studio, Universal-International, conducted polls that showed if Trumbo’s name was on a film or not. It’s also important to point out that director Otto Preminger announced in January 1960 that he was hiring and would give writing credits to Trumbo for his film, Exodus. No one seemed to care one way or the other. Nine months later, Douglas announced that he too was hiring Trumbo for Spartacus.