The story of the development of the script for Gun Crazy is not always so clear cut, thanks to the circumstances of the Hollywood Blacklist, when film industry professionals were drummed out of the business for refusing to answer questions before Congress about their left-wing political activities and to name the names of possible Communist Party members. Even as late as 1968, when Peter Bogdanovich first interviewed him, director Joseph H. Lewis talked about Millard Kaufman working with him on the screenplay, when in fact Kaufman was just a front for blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. Bogdanovich spoke to Lewis again in 1994, by which time Trumbo had been dead almost 20 years and his blacklisted credits largely restored, but neither Lewis nor Bogdanovich corrected the information; the book containing the interviews, Who the Devil Made It (Knopf, 1997), made no mention of Trumbo's part in the production.

The source material for the film was a ten-page Saturday Evening Post story by novelist MacKinlay Kantor (Andersonville, Glory for Me, which became the film The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946).

According to Bruce Cook's 1977 biography of Dalton Trumbo, the idea for the picture began with the King brothers-Frank, Maurice, and Herman-who supported themselves early on as bootleggers and got into motion pictures at the end of Prohibition. Their first jobs were under contract to Poverty Row studios PRC and then Monogram, where they had a big hit (on a small budget) as producers of the crime biography Dillinger (1945). The success of that film convinced them to go independent, but their first release, The Gangster (1947), was a disappointment. They were shopping around for new projects, and new talent, around the time of the first House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings.

According to Cook, Frank King contacted Trumbo the day after the writer returned from the hearings in Washington, where he had been cited for contempt of Congress for being one of several people (soon to be known as the Hollywood Ten) who refused to answer the committee's questions. Trumbo realized he would likely not find work at any of the major studios, despite having been one of the most sought-after and successful screenwriters in Hollywood before the political debacle. The Kings realized it, too, and as Frank said later, "We just had a short budget to make a picture and saw this as an opportunity to get a fine writer to work for us whom we could not otherwise afford."

The Kings offered Trumbo a modest $3,750 to be paid to him over a period of 18 months. In debt and facing legal expenses for his contempt appeal (he would eventually go to jail for ten months), Trumbo quickly accepted. "A lot of independents never paid more than that," Trumbo is quoted in Cook's book. "When I and others plummeted in value, we naturally found ourselves in this new market, and naturally these independent producers availed themselves of our services because they felt that for this money, they could get better work. So there wasn't really this brutal exploitation of black market writers that has sometimes been referred to."

The decision to use a front as the screenplay credit was not only to protect the Kings but Trumbo himself, who was still hoping to legally force MGM to reinstate his contract or make a settlement, so he could not be seen to be violating that contract in any way by working elsewhere. Writer Millard Kaufman offered his name as the front.

According to director Joseph H. Lewis in his 1968 interview with Peter Bogdanovich, the Kings approached him with a 375-page script (roughly five hours of screen time) that MacKinlay Kantor had written based on his own story. Lewis said it was his task to trim it down to a filmable 140 pages, which he claimed Millard Kaufman did. In Danny Peary's book Cult Movies (Dell, 1981), he quotes a conversation he had with Lewis about Kantor's script: "It was a good story with the characters well laid out. And it served as the basis for the film. But we had to cut it down, and I used a director's prerogative to embellish it a bit. I can honestly say that I made the film twice as good as the Kantor script. But he never spoke to me again." Neither Peary nor Lewis make any mention of Trumbo's part in the writing.

So was Lewis simply unaware of Trumbo's involvement, even as late as the 1960s and 70s? Glenn Erickson, who provides the commentary on the Gun Crazy DVD, supposes Lewis never knew Kaufman was fronting for Trumbo because he never said anything to the contrary, even when it was no longer necessary to cover it up. Other reports have stated that no one involved in the production knew Trumbo was writing it, and that Lewis only ever dealt with Kaufman.

Several changes were made to the original story before it was brought to the screen. In print, the tale was told entirely as a series of newspaper reports by Bart's friend Dave, who remained in the adaptation to screen, although in a much diminished capacity. The two main characters in the story are named Nelson and Antoinette (not Bart and Annie Laurie) and are never married (a change necessitated by the Production Code). In fact, her character does not appear all the way through the story, and much of the ending is only about Nelson. The scene of the boys trying to shoot a mountain lion in the movie was originally a rabbit hunt in the snow.

by Rob Nixon