'The irony was that at this time the Communist Party was legal. People were sent to prison for refusing to say if they were communists.' –– Sidney Sheldon

It was, in effect, a huge smoke-filled California courtroom, noisy to the point where even the sound of the gavel from the raised desk could barely be heard. It was an unusual courtroom and a very unusual 'defendant'. In the dock was Hollywood itself – placed on trial by the US Congress and, in the summer of 1953, finally coming close to succumbing to a death sentence, a sentence of shame. The UnAmerican Activities Committee finally decided that it had done its job: it had looked for reds under the bed in the film capital and said it had found them. Hollywood was now pronounced 'clean', yet it had never been dirtier.

This is the true story of how J. Parnell Thomas, chairman of the Committee (the House of Representatives version of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witchhunts) made a national name for himself by ruining the lives of hundreds of people in the movie industry. Two years later, Thomas would be jailed for embezzling government money but in August 1953 he was riding high. 'Hollywood on Trial' relates the story of the victims of this witchhunt. Through the Committee many of Hollywood's leading lights were denied the right to work. Stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson were denied the passports that would have allowed them to leave America, Oscar-winning writers were forced to give their scripts to noneities to offer in their own names and then shared the proceeds. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye and John Huston went to Washington in defence of the 'Hollywood Ten', the first writers to be blacklisted, yet when Bogart and Bacall were questioned, they too buckled in. The humiliations continued until the end of the Fifties. The scars, however, have remained to this day.