Dalton Trumbo(1905-1976)
- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Dalton Trumbo, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, arguably the most
talented, most famous of the blacklisted film professionals known to
history as the Hollywood 10, was born in Montrose, Colorado to Orus
Trumbo and his wife, the former Maud Tillery.
Dalton Trumbo was raised at 1124 Gunnison Ave. in Grand Junction,
Colorado, where his parents moved in 1908. His father, Orus, worked in
a shoe store. Dalton, the first child and only son, was later joined by
sisters Catharine and Elizabeth. The young Dalton peddled the produce
from his father's vegetable garden around town and had a paper route.
While attending Grand Junction High School (Class of 1924), he worked
at The Daily Sentinel as a cub reporter. Of his early politics, a much
older Dalton Trumbo told how he asked his father for five dollars so he
could join the Ku Klux Klan, a mass organization after the First World
War. He didn't get the five dollars.
While at university, he realized that his calling was as a writer. He
worked on the school's newspaper, humor magazine and yearbook, while
also toiling for the Boulder Daily Camera. He left school his first year
to follow his family to Los Angeles. The family moved due to financial
difficulties after his father had been terminated by the shoe company.
In L.A., Dalton enrolled at the University of Southern California but
was unable to complete enough credits for a degree. Orus Trumbo died of
pernicious anemia in 1926, and Dalton had to take a job to become the
breadwinner for his widowed mother and two younger sisters. Dalton
Trumbo took on whatever jobs were available, including repossessing
motorcycles and bootlegging, which he quit because it was too
dangerous. Eventually, Trumbo took a job at the Davis Perfection Bakery
on the night shift and remained for nearly a decade. Trumbo continued
to write, mostly short stories, becoming more and more anxious and
eventually desperate to leave the bakery, fearing that he would never
achieve his destiny of becoming an important writer. During this time,
he sold several short stories, written his first novel and worked for
the "Hollywood Spectator" as a writer, critic and editor. His work also
appeared in "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue" magazines. Trumbo's first novel,
"Eclipse" (1934), was set in fictional Shale City, Colorado (a thinly
veiled Grand Junction) during the 1920s and 1930s, with characters who
resembled notable community members. One of its main characters, John
Abbott, is modeled after Trumbo's father. Dalton had tried, perhaps
unfairly he admitted later, to avenge his father on the town where he
had failed.
In 1934, Warner Bros. hired Trumbo as a reader, a job that entailed
reading and summarizing plays and novels and advising whether they
might be adapted into movies. It lead to a contract as a junior
screenwriter at its B-pictures unit. In 1936, the same year he of his
first screen credit for the B-move
Road Gang (1936), Trumbo met his future
soulmate Cleo Fincher and they married two years later. Daughter Nikola
was born in 1939 and son Christopher in 1940. A daughter was added,
Mitzi, the baby of the family.
He wrote the story for Columbia's Canadian-made
Tugboat Princess (1936), clearly
influenced by
Captain January (1936), which had
been made into a silent in 1924 before being remade with superstar
Shirley Temple, substituting a tugboat in the original with a
lighthouse. His screenplays for such films as
Devil's Playground (1937)
showed some concern for the plight of the disenfranchised, but the
Great Depression still existed, and social commentary was inevitable in
all but fantasies and musicals.
After leaving Warners, he worked for Columbia, Paramount, 20th
Century-Fox, and beginning in 1937, M.G.M., the studio for which he
would do some of his best work in the 1940s. By the late 1930s, he had
worked himself up to better assignments, primarily for RKO (though he
returned to Warners for
The Kid from Kokomo (1939)),
and was working on A-list pictures by the turn of the decade. He won
his first Oscar nod for RKO's
Kitty Foyle (1940),
for which Ginger Rogers won the Academy
Award for best actress as a girl from a poor family who claws her way
into the upper middle class via a failed marriage to a Main Line
Philadelphia swell.
By the time of America's entry into World War II, Trumbo was one of the
most respected, highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood. He had also
established a name for himself as a left-wing political activist whose
sympathies coincided with those of the American Communist Party
(CPUSA), which hewed to the line set by Moscow.
Trumbo was part of the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition of
communists and liberals in the late 1930s, at the time of the Spanish
Civil War. The Popular Front against Nazism and Fascism was been torn
asunder in August 1939 when the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with
Nazi Germany. Many party members quit the CPUSA in disgust, but the
true believers parroted the party line, which was now pro-peace and
against US involvement in WWII.
Trumbo reportedly did not join the Party until 1943 and harbored
personal reservations about its policies as regards enforcing
ideological conformity. However, the publication of his anti-war novel
"Johnny Got His Gun" in 1939 coincided with the shift of the CPUSA's
stance from anti-Hitler to pro-peace, and his novel was embraced by the
Party as the type of literature needed to keep the US out of the war.
Trumbo agreed with the Party's pro-peace platform. The book, about a
wounded World War One vet who has lost his limbs, won the American Book
Sellers Award (the precursor to the National Book Award) in 1939. In a
speech made in February 1940, four months before the Nazi blitzkrieg
knocked France out of the war, Trumbo said, "If they say to us, 'We
must fight this war to preserve democracy,' let us say to them, 'There
is no such thing as democracy in time of war. It is a lie, a deliberate
deception to lead us to our own destruction. We will not die in order
that our children may inherit a permanent military dictatorship.'"
His speech was a rebuke to New Deal liberals. The Party began
demonizing President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who
hated Hitler and was pro-British, as a war-monger. The Party ordered
its members to henceforth be pro-peace and anti-FDR in their work and
statements. In June 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, the
CPUSA shifted gears to become pro-war, supportive of FDR's aggressive
behavior towards Nazi Germany.
Shortly after the German invasion, Trumbo instructed his publisher to
recall all copies of "Johnny Got His Gun" and to cease publication of
the book. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German
declaration of war against the U.S. catapulted the U.S. into both the
Asian and European theaters of World War II, the book - always popular
with peace-lovers and isolationists who opposed America's involvement
in foreign wars - suddenly became popular among native fascists, too.
However, it proved hard to get a copy of the book during the war years.
Trumbo joined the CPUSA in 1943, the same year
Victor Fleming's great patriotic war
movie A Guy Named Joe (1943),
with a Trumbo screenplay, appeared on screens. In 1944, Original Story
was a separate Oscar category and
David Boehm and
Chandler Sprague were nominated in that
category for an Academy Award. Trumbo's screenplay was overlooked. Like
other communist screenwriters, he proved to be an enthusiastic writer
of pro-war propaganda, though except for the notorious pro-Stalin
Mission to Moscow (1943), few
films displayed any overt communist ideas or propaganda. One that did
was Tender Comrade (1943) , which
Trumbo wrote as a Ginger Rogers vehicle
for RKO. Directed by his future Hollywood 10 comrade
Edward Dmytryk, it depicted a mild form
of socialism and collectivization among women working in the defense
industry. He also wrote the patriotic classic
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)
for M.G.M., which was based on the Doolittle Raid of 1942.
Trumbo voluntarily invited FBI agents to his house in 1944 and showed
them letters he had received from what he perceived were pro-fascist
peaceniks who had requested copies of "Johnny Got His Gun", then
out-of-print due to Trumbo's orders to his publisher. He turned those
letters over to the FBI and later kept in contact with the Bureau, a
fact that would later haunt blacklisted leftists, urging that the
F.B.I. deal with them. His actions conformed to the CPUSA policy of
denouncing anyone who opposed the war.
In 1945, the last year of the war, MGM released the Margaret O'Brien /
Edward G. Robinson vehicle,
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945),
penned by Trumbo. Robinson was a future member of the Hollywood
"gray-list" with those, like Henry Fonda who
were suspected of leftist sympathies or for being Fellow Travelers, but
who could not be officially blacklisted. Drawing on his own rural
childhood, it was a picture of a young girl's life on a farm in rural
Wisconsin. The year 1945 was crucial for Trumbo and other Hollywood
party members in terms of the CPUSA's desire to have their work reflect
the party's ideological agenda.
HCUA was originally created in 1934 as the Special Committee on
Un-American Activities to look into the activities of fascist and
pro-Nazi organizations. Then popularly known as the McCormack-Dickstein
Committee, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities exposed
fascist organizations, including a planned coup d'etat against
President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the
so-called Business Plot. Later on, it became known as the House
Un-American Activities Committee or the Dies Committee after the new
chairman, Martin Dies. HCUA originally was tasked with investigating
the involvement of German Americans with the Nazis and the Ku Klux
Klan.
HCUA became a standing committee in 1946, still tasked with
investigating suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that
attacked "the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution." The
focus was solely on the communists and their allies, so-called Fellow
Travelers who made common cause with communists during the War Years.
Fellow Travelers was a loose term that seemed to embrace many liberal
FDR New Deal Democrats.
HCUA subpoenaed suspected communists in the entertainment industry.
Trumbo's screenplay for
Tender Comrade (1943), which
concerned three Army wives who pool their resources while their
husbands are away fighting was denounced as communist propaganda.
However, writer-producer
James Kevin McGuinness, a
conservative who was a friendly witness before HCUA, testified that
left-wing screenwriters did not inject propaganda into their movie
scripts during World War II. McGuiness testified "[The movie industry]
profited from reverse lend-lease because during the [war] the Communist
and Communist-inclined writers in the motion picture industry were
given leave of absence to be patriotic. During that time...under my
general supervision Dalton Trumbo wrote two magnificent patriotic
scripts, A Guy Named Joe (1943)
and
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)."
Appearing before HCUA in October 1947 with
Alvah Bessie,
Herbert J. Biberman,
Lester Cole,
John Howard Lawson, 'Ring Lardner Jr'
, Albert Maltz,
Adrian Scott, and
Samuel Ornitz, Trumbo - like the others -
refused to answer any questions. In a defense strategy crafted by CPUSA
lawyers, the soon-to-be-known-as "Hollywood 10" claimed that the First
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse to
answer inquiries into their political beliefs as well as their
professional associations. One line of questioning of HCUA was to ask
if the subpoenaed witnesses were members of the Screen Writers Guild in
order to smear the SWG. It was a gambit played by the Committee as it
knew that which of the 10 were in the unions, and it knew which were
communist. As Arthur Miller has
pointed out, HCUA left the Broadway theater alone, despite the fact
that there were communists working in it, because no one outside of the
Northeastern U.S. really cared about theater or knew who theatrical
professionals were, and thus, it could not generate the publicity that
HCUA members craved and courted through their hearings.
HCUA cited them for contempt of Congress, and the Hollywood 10 were
tried and convicted on the charge. All were fined and jailed, with
Trumbo being sentenced to a year in federal prison and a fine of
$1,000. He served 10 months of the sentence. The Hollywood 10 were
blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, a blacklist enforced by the very
guilds they helped create. Trumbo and the other Hollywood 10
screenwriters were kicked out of the Screen Writers Guild
(John Howard Lawson had been one of
the founders of the SWG and its first president), which meant, even if
they weren't blacklisted, they could not obtain work in Hollywood.
Those who continued to write for the American cinema had to do so under
assumed names or by using a "front", a screenwriter who would take
credit for their work and pass on all or some of the fee to the
blacklisted writer. Later, as one of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo claimed
for himself the mantle of "Martyr for Freedom of Speech" and attacked,
as rats, those who became informers for HCUA by naming names. In 1949,
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote in
The Saturday Review of Books, that Trumbo was in fact NOT a free speech
martyr since he would not fight for freedom of speech for ALL the
people, such as right-wing conservatives, but only for the freedom of
speech of CPUSA members. The anti-communist Schlesinger, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning Harvard historian, thought Trumbo and others like him
were doctrinaire communists and hypocrites. In response, Trumbo wrote a
scathing letter to The Saturday Review to defend himself,
characterizing himself as a paladin championing free speech for all
Americans under the aegis of the First Amendment, which the Hollywood
10 claimed gave them the right to refuse to cooperate with HCUA.
After his blacklisting and failure of the Hollywood 10's appeals, the
Trumbo family exiled themselves to Mexico. In Mexico, chain-smoking in
the bathtub in which he always wrote, usually with a parrot given to
him by 'Kirk Douglas' perched on his shoulder, Trumbo wrote
approximately thirty scripts under pseudonyms and using fronts who
relayed the money to him. His works included the film noir classic
Gun Crazy (1950)
(AKA Gun Crazy), co-written under the pseudonym
Millard Kaufman, Oscar-winning
Roman Holiday (1953) (with
screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter as
a front), and
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955)
for director Otto Preminger and upon
which blacklisted Oscar-winning screenwriter
Michael Wilson also worked).
At the 1957 Academy Awards, Robert Rich won the Oscar for best original
story of 1956 for
The Brave One (1956). Rich was
not present to accept the award, which was accepted on his behalf by
Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Screen Writers
Guild. When journalists began digging in to the background of the
phantom Mr. Rich, they found out he was the nephew of a producer.
Suspicion then arose that Rich was a pseudonym for the blacklisted
Trumbo.
Though Hollywood has always been inundated with writers, Trumbo, even
while blacklisted, was prized as a good writer who was fast, reliable
and could write in many genres. Despite being a communist, Trumbo's
favorite themes were more in the vein of populism than Marxism. Trumbo
celebrated the individual rebelling against the powers that be.
With rumors circulating that Trumbo had written the Oscar-winning
The Brave One (1956), it
triggered a discussion in the industry about the propriety of the
blacklist, since so many screenplays were being written by blacklisted
individuals who were being denied screen credit. The blacklist only
worked to suppress the prices of screenplays by these talented writers.
In 1958, Pierre Boulle won the Oscar for
the screenplay adapted from his novel
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957),
which was unusual since Boulle could not speak nor write in English,
which may have been the reason he did not attend the awards ceremony to
pick up the Oscar in person. It was immediately realized that the
screenplay had likely been written by a blacklisted screenwriter. It
was - Michael Wilson and
Carl Foreman.
Kirk Douglas hired Trumbo to write the script for Spartacus in 1958. In
the summer of 1959 Otto Preminger hired Trumbo to write the script for
Exodus. On January 20, 1960, the New York Times carried the story that
Otto Preminger had hired Dalton Trumbo to write the script for Exodus,
and that he would start shooting in April. On August 8, of the same
year Kirk Douglas announced in Variety that Trumbo had written the
script for Spartacus. Both pictures opened in the winter of 1960.
Trumbo wrote many more screenplays for A-list films, including
Lonely Are the Brave (1962),
The Sandpiper (1965), Hawaii
(1966) , and _Fixer, The (1968). In 1970, he was awarded the Laurel
Award for lifetime achievement by the Screen Writers Guild. He made a
famous speech that many saw as a reconciliation of the two sides of
fight. In 1971, he wrote and directed the movie adaptation of his
famous anti-war novel,
Johnny Got His Gun (1971). His
last screenwriting credit on a feature film was for
Papillon (1973), in which he also had a
cameo role.
A six-pack-a-day smoker, he developed lung cancer in 1973. Two years
later, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
(which had supported the black list),
Walter Mirisch, personally delivered a
belated Oscar to Trumbo for his
The Brave One (1956) script, now
officially recognized by AMPAS as his creation. Eighteen years later,
AMPAS would award him a posthumous Oscar for
Roman Holiday (1953).
Dalton Trumbo died from a heart attack in California on September 10,
1976. At his memorial service,
Ring Lardner Jr., his close friend and
fellow Hollywood 10 member, delivered an amusing eulogy. "At rare
intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so
manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of
human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of
others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding
community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes
in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."
talented, most famous of the blacklisted film professionals known to
history as the Hollywood 10, was born in Montrose, Colorado to Orus
Trumbo and his wife, the former Maud Tillery.
Dalton Trumbo was raised at 1124 Gunnison Ave. in Grand Junction,
Colorado, where his parents moved in 1908. His father, Orus, worked in
a shoe store. Dalton, the first child and only son, was later joined by
sisters Catharine and Elizabeth. The young Dalton peddled the produce
from his father's vegetable garden around town and had a paper route.
While attending Grand Junction High School (Class of 1924), he worked
at The Daily Sentinel as a cub reporter. Of his early politics, a much
older Dalton Trumbo told how he asked his father for five dollars so he
could join the Ku Klux Klan, a mass organization after the First World
War. He didn't get the five dollars.
While at university, he realized that his calling was as a writer. He
worked on the school's newspaper, humor magazine and yearbook, while
also toiling for the Boulder Daily Camera. He left school his first year
to follow his family to Los Angeles. The family moved due to financial
difficulties after his father had been terminated by the shoe company.
In L.A., Dalton enrolled at the University of Southern California but
was unable to complete enough credits for a degree. Orus Trumbo died of
pernicious anemia in 1926, and Dalton had to take a job to become the
breadwinner for his widowed mother and two younger sisters. Dalton
Trumbo took on whatever jobs were available, including repossessing
motorcycles and bootlegging, which he quit because it was too
dangerous. Eventually, Trumbo took a job at the Davis Perfection Bakery
on the night shift and remained for nearly a decade. Trumbo continued
to write, mostly short stories, becoming more and more anxious and
eventually desperate to leave the bakery, fearing that he would never
achieve his destiny of becoming an important writer. During this time,
he sold several short stories, written his first novel and worked for
the "Hollywood Spectator" as a writer, critic and editor. His work also
appeared in "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue" magazines. Trumbo's first novel,
"Eclipse" (1934), was set in fictional Shale City, Colorado (a thinly
veiled Grand Junction) during the 1920s and 1930s, with characters who
resembled notable community members. One of its main characters, John
Abbott, is modeled after Trumbo's father. Dalton had tried, perhaps
unfairly he admitted later, to avenge his father on the town where he
had failed.
In 1934, Warner Bros. hired Trumbo as a reader, a job that entailed
reading and summarizing plays and novels and advising whether they
might be adapted into movies. It lead to a contract as a junior
screenwriter at its B-pictures unit. In 1936, the same year he of his
first screen credit for the B-move
Road Gang (1936), Trumbo met his future
soulmate Cleo Fincher and they married two years later. Daughter Nikola
was born in 1939 and son Christopher in 1940. A daughter was added,
Mitzi, the baby of the family.
He wrote the story for Columbia's Canadian-made
Tugboat Princess (1936), clearly
influenced by
Captain January (1936), which had
been made into a silent in 1924 before being remade with superstar
Shirley Temple, substituting a tugboat in the original with a
lighthouse. His screenplays for such films as
Devil's Playground (1937)
showed some concern for the plight of the disenfranchised, but the
Great Depression still existed, and social commentary was inevitable in
all but fantasies and musicals.
After leaving Warners, he worked for Columbia, Paramount, 20th
Century-Fox, and beginning in 1937, M.G.M., the studio for which he
would do some of his best work in the 1940s. By the late 1930s, he had
worked himself up to better assignments, primarily for RKO (though he
returned to Warners for
The Kid from Kokomo (1939)),
and was working on A-list pictures by the turn of the decade. He won
his first Oscar nod for RKO's
Kitty Foyle (1940),
for which Ginger Rogers won the Academy
Award for best actress as a girl from a poor family who claws her way
into the upper middle class via a failed marriage to a Main Line
Philadelphia swell.
By the time of America's entry into World War II, Trumbo was one of the
most respected, highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood. He had also
established a name for himself as a left-wing political activist whose
sympathies coincided with those of the American Communist Party
(CPUSA), which hewed to the line set by Moscow.
Trumbo was part of the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition of
communists and liberals in the late 1930s, at the time of the Spanish
Civil War. The Popular Front against Nazism and Fascism was been torn
asunder in August 1939 when the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with
Nazi Germany. Many party members quit the CPUSA in disgust, but the
true believers parroted the party line, which was now pro-peace and
against US involvement in WWII.
Trumbo reportedly did not join the Party until 1943 and harbored
personal reservations about its policies as regards enforcing
ideological conformity. However, the publication of his anti-war novel
"Johnny Got His Gun" in 1939 coincided with the shift of the CPUSA's
stance from anti-Hitler to pro-peace, and his novel was embraced by the
Party as the type of literature needed to keep the US out of the war.
Trumbo agreed with the Party's pro-peace platform. The book, about a
wounded World War One vet who has lost his limbs, won the American Book
Sellers Award (the precursor to the National Book Award) in 1939. In a
speech made in February 1940, four months before the Nazi blitzkrieg
knocked France out of the war, Trumbo said, "If they say to us, 'We
must fight this war to preserve democracy,' let us say to them, 'There
is no such thing as democracy in time of war. It is a lie, a deliberate
deception to lead us to our own destruction. We will not die in order
that our children may inherit a permanent military dictatorship.'"
His speech was a rebuke to New Deal liberals. The Party began
demonizing President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who
hated Hitler and was pro-British, as a war-monger. The Party ordered
its members to henceforth be pro-peace and anti-FDR in their work and
statements. In June 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, the
CPUSA shifted gears to become pro-war, supportive of FDR's aggressive
behavior towards Nazi Germany.
Shortly after the German invasion, Trumbo instructed his publisher to
recall all copies of "Johnny Got His Gun" and to cease publication of
the book. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German
declaration of war against the U.S. catapulted the U.S. into both the
Asian and European theaters of World War II, the book - always popular
with peace-lovers and isolationists who opposed America's involvement
in foreign wars - suddenly became popular among native fascists, too.
However, it proved hard to get a copy of the book during the war years.
Trumbo joined the CPUSA in 1943, the same year
Victor Fleming's great patriotic war
movie A Guy Named Joe (1943),
with a Trumbo screenplay, appeared on screens. In 1944, Original Story
was a separate Oscar category and
David Boehm and
Chandler Sprague were nominated in that
category for an Academy Award. Trumbo's screenplay was overlooked. Like
other communist screenwriters, he proved to be an enthusiastic writer
of pro-war propaganda, though except for the notorious pro-Stalin
Mission to Moscow (1943), few
films displayed any overt communist ideas or propaganda. One that did
was Tender Comrade (1943) , which
Trumbo wrote as a Ginger Rogers vehicle
for RKO. Directed by his future Hollywood 10 comrade
Edward Dmytryk, it depicted a mild form
of socialism and collectivization among women working in the defense
industry. He also wrote the patriotic classic
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)
for M.G.M., which was based on the Doolittle Raid of 1942.
Trumbo voluntarily invited FBI agents to his house in 1944 and showed
them letters he had received from what he perceived were pro-fascist
peaceniks who had requested copies of "Johnny Got His Gun", then
out-of-print due to Trumbo's orders to his publisher. He turned those
letters over to the FBI and later kept in contact with the Bureau, a
fact that would later haunt blacklisted leftists, urging that the
F.B.I. deal with them. His actions conformed to the CPUSA policy of
denouncing anyone who opposed the war.
In 1945, the last year of the war, MGM released the Margaret O'Brien /
Edward G. Robinson vehicle,
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945),
penned by Trumbo. Robinson was a future member of the Hollywood
"gray-list" with those, like Henry Fonda who
were suspected of leftist sympathies or for being Fellow Travelers, but
who could not be officially blacklisted. Drawing on his own rural
childhood, it was a picture of a young girl's life on a farm in rural
Wisconsin. The year 1945 was crucial for Trumbo and other Hollywood
party members in terms of the CPUSA's desire to have their work reflect
the party's ideological agenda.
HCUA was originally created in 1934 as the Special Committee on
Un-American Activities to look into the activities of fascist and
pro-Nazi organizations. Then popularly known as the McCormack-Dickstein
Committee, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities exposed
fascist organizations, including a planned coup d'etat against
President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the
so-called Business Plot. Later on, it became known as the House
Un-American Activities Committee or the Dies Committee after the new
chairman, Martin Dies. HCUA originally was tasked with investigating
the involvement of German Americans with the Nazis and the Ku Klux
Klan.
HCUA became a standing committee in 1946, still tasked with
investigating suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that
attacked "the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution." The
focus was solely on the communists and their allies, so-called Fellow
Travelers who made common cause with communists during the War Years.
Fellow Travelers was a loose term that seemed to embrace many liberal
FDR New Deal Democrats.
HCUA subpoenaed suspected communists in the entertainment industry.
Trumbo's screenplay for
Tender Comrade (1943), which
concerned three Army wives who pool their resources while their
husbands are away fighting was denounced as communist propaganda.
However, writer-producer
James Kevin McGuinness, a
conservative who was a friendly witness before HCUA, testified that
left-wing screenwriters did not inject propaganda into their movie
scripts during World War II. McGuiness testified "[The movie industry]
profited from reverse lend-lease because during the [war] the Communist
and Communist-inclined writers in the motion picture industry were
given leave of absence to be patriotic. During that time...under my
general supervision Dalton Trumbo wrote two magnificent patriotic
scripts, A Guy Named Joe (1943)
and
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)."
Appearing before HCUA in October 1947 with
Alvah Bessie,
Herbert J. Biberman,
Lester Cole,
John Howard Lawson, 'Ring Lardner Jr'
, Albert Maltz,
Adrian Scott, and
Samuel Ornitz, Trumbo - like the others -
refused to answer any questions. In a defense strategy crafted by CPUSA
lawyers, the soon-to-be-known-as "Hollywood 10" claimed that the First
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse to
answer inquiries into their political beliefs as well as their
professional associations. One line of questioning of HCUA was to ask
if the subpoenaed witnesses were members of the Screen Writers Guild in
order to smear the SWG. It was a gambit played by the Committee as it
knew that which of the 10 were in the unions, and it knew which were
communist. As Arthur Miller has
pointed out, HCUA left the Broadway theater alone, despite the fact
that there were communists working in it, because no one outside of the
Northeastern U.S. really cared about theater or knew who theatrical
professionals were, and thus, it could not generate the publicity that
HCUA members craved and courted through their hearings.
HCUA cited them for contempt of Congress, and the Hollywood 10 were
tried and convicted on the charge. All were fined and jailed, with
Trumbo being sentenced to a year in federal prison and a fine of
$1,000. He served 10 months of the sentence. The Hollywood 10 were
blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, a blacklist enforced by the very
guilds they helped create. Trumbo and the other Hollywood 10
screenwriters were kicked out of the Screen Writers Guild
(John Howard Lawson had been one of
the founders of the SWG and its first president), which meant, even if
they weren't blacklisted, they could not obtain work in Hollywood.
Those who continued to write for the American cinema had to do so under
assumed names or by using a "front", a screenwriter who would take
credit for their work and pass on all or some of the fee to the
blacklisted writer. Later, as one of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo claimed
for himself the mantle of "Martyr for Freedom of Speech" and attacked,
as rats, those who became informers for HCUA by naming names. In 1949,
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote in
The Saturday Review of Books, that Trumbo was in fact NOT a free speech
martyr since he would not fight for freedom of speech for ALL the
people, such as right-wing conservatives, but only for the freedom of
speech of CPUSA members. The anti-communist Schlesinger, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning Harvard historian, thought Trumbo and others like him
were doctrinaire communists and hypocrites. In response, Trumbo wrote a
scathing letter to The Saturday Review to defend himself,
characterizing himself as a paladin championing free speech for all
Americans under the aegis of the First Amendment, which the Hollywood
10 claimed gave them the right to refuse to cooperate with HCUA.
After his blacklisting and failure of the Hollywood 10's appeals, the
Trumbo family exiled themselves to Mexico. In Mexico, chain-smoking in
the bathtub in which he always wrote, usually with a parrot given to
him by 'Kirk Douglas' perched on his shoulder, Trumbo wrote
approximately thirty scripts under pseudonyms and using fronts who
relayed the money to him. His works included the film noir classic
Gun Crazy (1950)
(AKA Gun Crazy), co-written under the pseudonym
Millard Kaufman, Oscar-winning
Roman Holiday (1953) (with
screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter as
a front), and
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955)
for director Otto Preminger and upon
which blacklisted Oscar-winning screenwriter
Michael Wilson also worked).
At the 1957 Academy Awards, Robert Rich won the Oscar for best original
story of 1956 for
The Brave One (1956). Rich was
not present to accept the award, which was accepted on his behalf by
Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Screen Writers
Guild. When journalists began digging in to the background of the
phantom Mr. Rich, they found out he was the nephew of a producer.
Suspicion then arose that Rich was a pseudonym for the blacklisted
Trumbo.
Though Hollywood has always been inundated with writers, Trumbo, even
while blacklisted, was prized as a good writer who was fast, reliable
and could write in many genres. Despite being a communist, Trumbo's
favorite themes were more in the vein of populism than Marxism. Trumbo
celebrated the individual rebelling against the powers that be.
With rumors circulating that Trumbo had written the Oscar-winning
The Brave One (1956), it
triggered a discussion in the industry about the propriety of the
blacklist, since so many screenplays were being written by blacklisted
individuals who were being denied screen credit. The blacklist only
worked to suppress the prices of screenplays by these talented writers.
In 1958, Pierre Boulle won the Oscar for
the screenplay adapted from his novel
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957),
which was unusual since Boulle could not speak nor write in English,
which may have been the reason he did not attend the awards ceremony to
pick up the Oscar in person. It was immediately realized that the
screenplay had likely been written by a blacklisted screenwriter. It
was - Michael Wilson and
Carl Foreman.
Kirk Douglas hired Trumbo to write the script for Spartacus in 1958. In
the summer of 1959 Otto Preminger hired Trumbo to write the script for
Exodus. On January 20, 1960, the New York Times carried the story that
Otto Preminger had hired Dalton Trumbo to write the script for Exodus,
and that he would start shooting in April. On August 8, of the same
year Kirk Douglas announced in Variety that Trumbo had written the
script for Spartacus. Both pictures opened in the winter of 1960.
Trumbo wrote many more screenplays for A-list films, including
Lonely Are the Brave (1962),
The Sandpiper (1965), Hawaii
(1966) , and _Fixer, The (1968). In 1970, he was awarded the Laurel
Award for lifetime achievement by the Screen Writers Guild. He made a
famous speech that many saw as a reconciliation of the two sides of
fight. In 1971, he wrote and directed the movie adaptation of his
famous anti-war novel,
Johnny Got His Gun (1971). His
last screenwriting credit on a feature film was for
Papillon (1973), in which he also had a
cameo role.
A six-pack-a-day smoker, he developed lung cancer in 1973. Two years
later, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
(which had supported the black list),
Walter Mirisch, personally delivered a
belated Oscar to Trumbo for his
The Brave One (1956) script, now
officially recognized by AMPAS as his creation. Eighteen years later,
AMPAS would award him a posthumous Oscar for
Roman Holiday (1953).
Dalton Trumbo died from a heart attack in California on September 10,
1976. At his memorial service,
Ring Lardner Jr., his close friend and
fellow Hollywood 10 member, delivered an amusing eulogy. "At rare
intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so
manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of
human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of
others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding
community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes
in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."