Dalton Trumbo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dalton Trumbo

Trumbo with Wife Cleo at House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, 1947
Born James Dalton Trumbo
December 9, 1905
Montrose, Colorado
Died September 10, 1976 (aged 70)
Los Angeles, California
Spouse(s) Cleo Beth Fincher

Dalton Trumbo (December 9, 1905 – September 10, 1976) was an American screenwriter and novelist, and a member of the Hollywood Ten, a group of film professionals who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 during the committee's investigation of Communist influences in the motion picture industry.

Contents

[edit] Career

Born in Montrose, Colorado, Trumbo attended the University of Colorado for two years (the central fountain at the University was named in his honor in the mid-1990s). He got his start working for Vogue magazine. He started in movies in 1937; by the 1940s, he was one of Hollywood's highest paid writers for work on such films as 1940's Kitty Foyle, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945).

Trumbo's 1939 anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, won a National Book Award (then known as an American Book Sellers Award) that year. The inspiration for the novel came to Trumbo when he read an article about a soldier who was horribly disfigured during World War I.

[edit] Involvement with Communism

Trumbo aligned himself with the Communist Party USA before the 1940s, although he did not join the party until later. After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, American Communists argued that the United States should not get involved in the war on the side of Great Britain, since the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of nonaggression meant that the Soviet Union was at peace with Germany. In 1941, Trumbo wrote a novel The Remarkable Andrew, in which, in one scene, the ghost of Andrew Jackson appears in order to caution the United States not to get involved in the war; in a review of the book, Time Magazine sarcastically wrote, "General Jackson's opinions need surprise no one who has observed George Washington and Abraham Lincoln zealously following the Communist Party Line in recent years."[1]

Shortly after the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, Trumbo ordered all copies of Johnny Got His Gun to be recalled and stopped any further publication of the book. After receiving letters from individuals requesting copies of the book, Trumbo contacted the FBI and turned these letters over to them, questioning the correspondents' loyalty to the Allied war effort.[2] After two FBI agents showed up at Trumbo's home he then felt as if he had done the wrong thing by going to them. He says in the introduction to "Johnny Got His Gun", "their interest lay not in the letters but in me".[3]

In the early 1940s, Trumbo wrote in the Daily Worker, the Communist Party USA newspaper, that he had helped to keep various anti-Soviet Union books from being turned into films, including two books by Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar.[4]

Trumbo officially joined the Communist Party USA in 1943.[5]

[edit] Blacklisting

Main article: Hollywood blacklist

In 1947, Trumbo, along with nine other writers and directors, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an unfriendly witness to testify on the presence of Communist influence in Hollywood. Trumbo refused to give information. Though only convicted of contempt of Congress, he was blacklisted, and in 1950, spent 11 months in prison in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky.

After Trumbo was blacklisted, some Hollywood actors and directors, such as Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets, agreed to testify and to provide names of fellow Communist party members to Congress. Many of those who testified were immediately ostracized and shunned by their former friends and associates. However, Trumbo always maintained that those who testified under pressure from HUAC and the studios were equally victims of the Red Scare, an opinion for which he was severely criticized.

[edit] Later life

After completing his sentence, Trumbo and his family moved to Mexico with Hugo Butler and his wife Jean Rouverol, who had also been blacklisted. There, Trumbo wrote thirty scripts under pseudonyms, such as the co-written Gun Crazy (1950) (Millard Kaufman acted as a "front" for Trumbo). He won an Oscar for The Brave One (1957), written under the name Robert Rich.

Finally in 1960, with the support of Otto Preminger, he received credit for the motion-picture epic Exodus. Shortly thereafter, Kirk Douglas made public Trumbo's credit for the screenplay for Spartacus. This was the beginning of the end of the blacklist. He was reinstated in the Writers Guild of America, and was credited on all subsequent scripts. In 1993, Trumbo was awarded the Academy Award posthumously for writing Roman Holiday (1953). The screen credit and award were previously given to Ian McLellan Hunter. Hunter was a "front" for Trumbo. [6]

In 1971, Trumbo directed the film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun, which starred Timothy Bottoms, Diane Varsi and Jason Robards.

One of his last films, Executive Action, was based on various conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination.

His account and analysis of the Smith Act trials is entitled The Devil in the Book.

He is often quoted as having said, "I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of."

He died from a congestive heart failure at the age of 70.

[edit] Family

Trumbo had three children: one son, filmmaker Christopher; and two daughters, photographer Melissa, known as "Mitzi," and psychotherapist Nikola[7]. Mitzi once had a youthful relationship with actor/comedian Steve Martin, who later confessed that, at that time in his "tunnel-visioned life," he had never heard of Trumbo[8].

[edit] Works

Selected film works:

Novels, plays and essays:

  • Eclipse, 1935
  • Washington Jitters, 1936
  • Johnny Got His Gun, 1939
  • The Remarkable Andrew, 1940 (also known as Chronicle of a Literal Man)
  • The Biggest Thief in Town, 1949 (lay)
  • The Time Out of the Toad, 1972 (essays)
  • Night of the Aurochs, 1979 (unfinished, ed. R. Kirsch)

Non-fiction:

  • Harry Bridges, 1941
  • The Time of the Toad, 1949
  • The Devil in the Book, 1956
  • Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942–62, 1970 (ed. by H. Manfull)

[edit] See also

  • The Hollywood Ten documentary
  • "Trumbo" documentary
  • "Dalton Trumbo: Hollywood Rebel" biography by Peter Hanson

[edit] References

  1. ^ Counsel from Hollywood, Time Magazine, February 3, 1941
  2. ^ Dalton Trumbo. Johnny Got His Gun. Citadel Press, 2000, pg 5, introduction
  3. ^ Dalton Trumbo. "Johnny Got His Gun" introduction
  4. ^ Hollywood's Missing Movies, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, Reason, June 2000
  5. ^ Naming Names, Victor Navasky, 2003
  6. ^ “Great To Be Nominated” Enjoys a “Roman Holiday” AMPAS
  7. ^ Michael Cieply. ""A Voice From the Blacklist: Documentary Lets Dalton Trumbo Speak"", The New York Times, 2007-09-11. Retrieved on 2008-01-04. 
  8. ^ Steve Martin. "Personal History: "In the Bird Cage"", The New Yorker, 2007-10-29. Retrieved on 2008-01-04. 

[edit] External links