D.Trumbo: great screenwright blacklisted

Dalton Trumbo (1905-76) was born in Montrose CO, son of shoeshop worker Orus and his wife. When Trumbo was 3, his fam­ily moved to nearby Grand Junction, and meanwhile he wrote as a cub reporter for a local paper. Trumbo continued journalism at the Uni of Colorado, and in 1925 had moved to Los Angeles. When dad died, Trumbo worked in a bakery for 10 years to help sup­port his mother and siblings. Meanwhile he wrote heaps of short stories.

Trumbo began writing profession­ally in the 1930s, publishing articles in Saturday Evening Post, Vanity Fair and Hollywood Sp­ec­t­ator. He became The Spectat­or’s managing editor in 1934, pub­lished his first novel Eclipse, and worked as a script reader for Warn­er Bros.

In 1936, Trumbo received his first screenwriting credit for the crime drama Road Gang, and over the next decade became a suc­cessful and resp­ected writer in Holly­wood. A 2nd highspot was A Man to Remember (1938). In  the meantime, he married Cleo Fincher in 1939 and had 3 child­ren: Nikola, Chris­t­opher and Mitzi.

 Hollywood 10 charged with contempt in Nov 1947

He also succeeded with the anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun (1939). The novel won a National Book Award and has been adapted many times for radio, stage and screen. Although Johnny’s success earn­ed Trumbo fame, the work eventually gathered him unwanted attention as well. He receiv­ed fan let­ters from Nazi sympath­isers believed the writer was also pro-Nazi. So Trumbo reported the Nazis to the FBI but rather than pursue the Nazis, the Bureau investig­ated Trumbo!

The House Committee on Un-American Ac­tivities/HUAC was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyal activities by public employees and org­anisations suspected of having Communist ties. More about this later.

The 1940 romantic drama Kitty Foyle, starring Ginger Rogers, earned Trumbo his first Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay. Another much praised WW2 drama was Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Mitchum.

Like many intellectuals, Trumbo had joined the Comm­unist Party in 1943 for a few years, and during his career, had frequ­en­t­ly proposed leftish political positions. From 1946 on, the number of FBI ag­ents doubled, as part of President Truman’s loyalty-security programme, identifying gov­ernment employees with communist sympathies.

In Oct 1947, as postwar paranoia about Comm­un­ism was surging in USA. Trumbo was among 10 Hollywood directors and writers, The Holly­wood Ten, called to testify before the HUAC. The Committee had to investigate whether Communist sympathisers had pro­p­ag­and­ised audiences. The HUAC began to sub­poena screen writers and directors to test­ify about alleged communist links.

Dalton Trumbo might have been Hollywood's most famous screenwriter of his generat­ion, yet he too had to testify before the HUAC. They all refused to give up the names of colleagues with ?comm­unist sym­p­athies; Trumbo was imprisoned for 11 months, guil­ty of Contempt of Con­gr­ess. After re­lease, he was Black­listed by the major studio heads and could not work in his own name.

Dalton Trumbo grilled by the House Un-American Activities Committee

28th Oct 1947. NBC News

Other witnesses called in front of the committee, including Elia Kazan, director of On The Waterfront, named names and could continue working. The playwright Arthur Miller, who had been life­long friends with Kazan, never spoke to him again. But Trumbo couldn’t find work in California so the family moved to Mexico City. There he continued to write screen­plays, which he could sell using pseudonyms. 

Dalton Trumbo (glasses) prepared to fly to Wash DC to begin gaol

with family and protesters Los Angeles Airport, 1950.
SFGATE

Sen Joe McCarthy launched his most brutal campaign in 1950, when he accused 200+ state department staff of being communists. In Mexico City, Trumbo continued to write screen­plays which he was able to sell by getting other writers to front for his work. Dur­ing this time, Trum­bo wrote 10+ screenplays that were made into films, including the clas­s­ic Oscar-winning Roman Holiday (1953), starring Gre­g­­ory Peck and Audrey Hepburn.

After years of working in exile, Trumbo at last returned to Hollywood, when his screenplay for The Brave One (1956), under the nick Robert Rich, received an Ac­ad­emy Aw­ard. But his earnings dwindled: over a two year period, Trumbo wrote 18 screenplays cheaply.

Trumbo was known for writing in his bathtub.
X.com

When McCarthy died in 1957, there was a sense of joy because the senat­or had managed the whole disaster. By 1959, HUAC was denounced even by for­m­er Pres Truman as “a most un-American thing”.

Trumbo was chosen by Kirk Douglas to write the screenplay for Spar­t­acus, which went on to win four Academy Awards!! Trumbo was also hired to write the adap­t­ation for the best-selling novel about the State of Is­rael, Exodus, directed by Otto Prem­in­g­er. The Blacklist had lost all credibility!

Throughout the rest of his life, Trumbo continued his successful output and was re­in­st­at­ed in the Writers Guild of America. Of the many screen­plays that he wrote in this post-Blacklist era, some high­lights were the Dou­glas west­ern Lonely Are the Brave (1962), Golden Globe–nominated crime drama The Fixer (1968), and a prison clas­sic Pap­illon (1973) with Steve McQueen & Dustin Hoffman. Revisiting his old, once troubled works, Trumbo wrote and directed a 1971 film adaption of Johnny Got His Gun, and received two awards at the Cannes Film Fes­tival. And in 1975, he finally received his Oscar for The Brave One.

A heavy smoker Trumbo was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1973. He died in care in Sept 1976 in Los Angeles.

In 1993, 40 years after the film’s release, Trumbo was posthumously awarded an Oscar for his Roman Holiday screenplay. Since his death, Trumbo has been the hero of other peoples’ works, incl­uding a 2003 Broadway play: Trumbo: Red, White and Black­listed. In Sept 2015, a new bio­graphical drama cal­l­ed Trumbo premiered at the Toronto Intern­ational Film Festival. The ex­traordinary story of his defiance in the face of political oppression was key.

You might like to see the 2015 film, Trumbo, based on the 1977 biography by Bruce Alexander Cook.