I filed my taxes in my customarily last-minute fashion, and it got me in the mood for some tax blogging. Via Sarah Jaffe, I came upon the following interesting passage from Victor Navasky’s history of the Hollywood blacklist, Naming Names:

Conversely, during the blacklist years, which were also tight money years for the studios, agents often found it simpler to hint to their less talented clients that their difficulties were political rather than intrinsic. Since agents as a class follow the money, it is perhaps a clue to the environment of fear within which they operated that, for example, the Berg-Allenberg Agency was, even in late 1948, ready, eager, willing, and able to lose its most profitable client, Dalton Trumbo (at $3000 per week he was one of the highest paid writers in Hollywood) — and this even before the more general system of blacklisting had gone into effect.

The first thing that struck me about this that wow, that’s a lot of money. It’s not clear where the figure came from. But Navasky did interview Trumbo for the book, so I have to assume it came from the man himself. Now, presumably Trumbo wasn’t working all the time, but rather getting picked up for various jobs with slack periods in between. But supposing for a moment that he did: $3,000 a week (or $156,000 a year) would be a pretty cushy life now, so it would have been an astronomical amount of money in 1948. (And it’s highly likely that there were people in Hollywood who were making that much. Ben Hecht is said to have gotten $10,000 a week.)