After "The Brave One' won the Oscar for Best Screenplay, independent producer Edward Nassour sued its producers the King Brothers over plagiarism. It seems the script for "The Brave One' bore an uncanny resemblance to that for "Ring Around Saturn," a stop-motion animation feature Nassour had been working on with a script written by Paul Rader. The rights were originally owned by Jesse L. Lasky, who had wanted to produce it as "Valley of the Mist." The King Brothers settled the dispute by paying out to Nassour the sum of $750,000 in an out-of-court settlement. It turned out that blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo had written the script for "The Brave One" using the pseudonym of Robert Rich.
Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted, and Robert Rich was the front/pseudonym used for this film. Because of this, there was no one to accept the Oscar and a search was done to find Rich.