Fact1: Miller asks friend Howard Prince to sign name in exchange for percentage of money, Fact2: scripts are submitted to network producer Phil Sussman, Fact3: Hecky In to clear name from is instructed to find out more about Howard Prince 's involvement with Communist Party blacklist, Fact4: club owner fires him denouncing him as communist son of bitch, Fact5: HUAC questioning including being asked to speak ill of dead Hecky Brown and being threatened with legal consequences for admission of having placed bets in capacity as bookie
Output: In New York City, 1953, at the height of the political witchhunts of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, television screenwriter Alfred Miller Michael Murphy is blacklisted and cannot get work. He asks his friend Howard Prince Woody Allen, a restaurant cashier and smalltime bookie, to sign his name to Millers television scripts, in exchange for a percentage of the money Miller makes from them. Howard agrees out of friendship and because he needs the money. The scripts are submitted to network producer Phil Sussman Herschel Bernardi, who is pleased to have a writer not contaminated by the television blacklist. Howards script also offers a plum role for one of Sussmans top actors, Hecky Brown Zero Mostel. Howard becomes such a success that Millers two fellow screenwriter friends hire him to be their front too. The quality of the scripts and Howards ability to write so many impresses Sussmans idealistic script editor, Florence Barrett Andrea Marcovicci, who mistakes him for a principled artist. Howard begins dating her but changes the subject whenever she wants to discuss his work. As investigators try to expose and blacklist Communists in the entertainment industry, Hecky Brown is fired from the show, because six years earlier, he marched in a May Day parade and subscribed to The Daily Worker, albeit merely to impress a woman he fancied. In order to clear his name from the blacklist, Hecky is instructed to find out more about Howard Princes involvement with the Communist Party, so he invites him to the Catskills, where Hecky is booked to perform on stage. The club owner shortchanges Hecky on his promised salary, and when Hecky confronts him, the club owner fires him, denouncing him as a communist son of a bitch. The professional humiliation and the inability to provide for his wife and children take their toll, and, as a result, Hecky kills himself by jumping out of a hotel window. Howard witnesses the harsh results of the rightwing Freedom Information Services. Suspicion is cast his way and he is called to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee HUAC. He ends up revealing privately to Florence that he is not a brilliant writer at all, but just a humble cashier. Howard decides that he will respond to the Committees questions evasively, enabling him to neither admit nor deny anything. After briefly enduring the HUAC questioning – including being asked to speak ill of the dead Hecky Brown, and being threatened with legal consequences for his admission of having placed bets in his capacity as a bookie, Howard takes a stand, telling the Committee that he does not recognize their authority to ask him such questions, and telling them to go fuck yourselves before leaving the interrogation room. As the film ends, Howard is taken away in handcuffs by the authorities, with Florence kissing him goodbye and many protesters cheering him on.