Martin Scorsese portrays a fictional director called "Joe Lesser". This character is based on director Joseph Losey, who left Hollywood in the 1950s rather than face the HUAC examinations.
Blacklisted writer and director Abraham Polonsky wrote the original screenplay for the film. When Irwin Winkler decided to re-write the script by changing David Merrill from a Communist to a more generic liberal, Polonsky had his name removed from the film's credits. "I wanted it to be about Communists, because that's the way it really happened. They didn't need another story about a man who was falsely accused", he said in an interview in the New York Times.
David Merrill's climactic courtroom speech is an almost verbatim lift of a speech made by lawyer Joseph N. Welch in a McCarthy hearing in the 1950s.
According to the article "McCarthyism Made Simple" by Jonathan Rosenbaum published in "The Chicago Reader", this picture was "the first Hollywood feature devoted in its entirety to the film industry blacklist." The earlier Martin Ritt-directed film The Front (1976) dealt with television.