James
Dalton Trumbo was
born in Montrose, Colorado on 5th
December, 1905.
Educated at the University of Colorado. Trumbo wanted to be a writer
and by the early 1930s his articles and stories appeared in Saturday
Evening Post, McCall's Magazine,
Vanity
Fair
and the film magazine, the Hollywood
Spectator.
In 1935 Trumbo published his first novel, Eclipse,
a satire
about a self-made businessman. Trumbo's most popular novel, Johnny
Got His Gun, about a disfigured British officer in the
First World War, won a National Book Award in
1939.
In the 1930s Trumbo worked
on several movies including Love
Begins at Twenty (1936), Road
Gang (1936), Devil's
Playground (1937), Fugitives
For a Night (1938) and Career
(1939). Trumbo, who joined the Communist
Party in 1943, was also active in
the Screen Writers Guild.
Other films written by Trumbo included Five
Came Back (1939), Curtain
Call (1940)
and Kitty Foyle
(1940), a film for which he was nominated for an Academy Award Oscar,
A Guy Named Joe
(1943), Tender Comrade
(1943) and Thirty
Seconds Over Tokyo (1944).
After
the Second World War the House
of Un-American Activities Committee began an investigation
into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. In September 1947, the
HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These people
attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses".
During their interviews they named several people who they accused
of holding left-wing views.
Trumbo appeared
before the HUAC on 28th October, 1947, but like
Alvah Bessie, Herbert
Biberman, Albert Maltz, Adrian
Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Lester
Cole,
Edward Dmytryk, John
Howard Lawson
and Ring
Lardner Jr,
he refused to answer any questions.
Known as the Hollywood
Ten,
they claimed that the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution
gave them the right to do this. The
House
of Un-American Activities Committee
and the courts during appeals disagreed and all were found guilty
of contempt of Congress and Trumbo was sentenced to ten months in
prison.
Blacklisted
by the Hollywood studios, Trumbo
moved to Mexico with Ring
Lardner Jr
and Albert
Maltz,
where he continued to write under assumed names. He won two Academy
Awards for the screenplays: Roman
Holiday (Ian McLellan Hunter,
1953) and The Brave
One (Robert Rich, 1956).
In 1960 Trumbo became the first blacklisted writer to use his own
name when he wrote the screenplay for the film Spartacus.
Based on the novel by another left-wing blacklisted writer, Howard
Fast, Spartacus
is a film that examines the spirit of revolt. Trumbo refers back to
his experiences of the House of Un-American
Activities Committee. At the end, when the Romans
finally defeat the rebellion, the captured slaves refuse to identify
Spartacus. As a result, all are crucified. Ironically, much of Spartacus
was filmed on land owned by William Randolph
Hearst. It was Hearst's newspapers that played such an important
role in making McCarthyism possible.
After the blacklist was lifted, Trumbo wrote the screenplay for Lonely
Are the Brave
(1962), The
Sandpiper
(1965) and The
Fixer
(1968). In 1970 Trumbo's anti-war novel, Johnny
Got His Gun,
was republished. The book had been withdrawn during the Second
World War, had a tremendous impact on the generation being drafted
to fight in the Vietnam War. In 1971
Trumbo directed a film based on the book, Johnny
Got His Gun.
In 1973 Trumbo helped to write the political thriller, Executive
Action,
which dealt with an alleged conspiracy to murder John
F. Kennedy.
Dalton
Trumbo
died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California, on 10th September,
1976.
Dalton Trumbo receiving his 1956 Oscar
for Brave One from Walter
Mirisch in 1975
(1) Dalton Trumbo, letter to
Albert Maltz (12th January, 1972)
Whatever else may be said of
Communists and the goals they pursued. I think you and I can agree
that those who joined the Party were animated by a sincere desire
to change the world and make it better, even at the cost of affiliating
with an organization that had, from its beginnings, been subject to
constant federal harassment, popular hatred, and sometimes physical
violence. The impulses which caused them to affiliate with the Communist
Party were good impulses, and the men and women who acted on them
were good people.
(2)
Dalton Trumbo was interviewed by Victor Navasky while he was writing
his book, Naming Names (1982)
Kazan is one of those for
whom I feel contempt, because he carried down people much less capable
of defending themselves than he. And he could have at a minimum continued
in the theatre, perhaps with somewhat diminished activity, but his
reputation would have withstood this blow. But he brought down people
in the theatrical and film world who had much more to lose than he
and much less ability to function than he. And that is not nice. I
just say that that's not a nice thing. That's the way I feel about
him.
(3) Dalton
Trumbo, speech to the Screen Writers Guild when accepting the Laurel
Award in 1970.
The
blacklist was a time of evil, and that no one on either side who survived
it came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had
passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted
as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances
compelled him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty,
courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity,
good and bad on both sides.
When you who are in your forties or younger look back with curiosity
on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, it will do
no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because
there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than
others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were
all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled
to say things he did not want to say, to do things that he did not
want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to
exchange. That is why none of us - right, left, or centre - emerged
from that long nightmare without sin.
(4)
Albert Maltz, one of the Hollywood
Ten, was interviewed by the New York Times in 1972.
There is currently in vogue a
thesis pronounced by Dalton Trumbo which declares that everyone during
the years of blacklist was equally a victim. This is factual nonsense
and represents a bewildering moral position.
To put the point sharply: If an informer in the French underground
who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally
a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand.
Adrian Scott was the producer of the notable film Crossfire
in 1947 and Edward Dmytryk was its director. Crossfire won
wide critical acclaim, many awards and commercial success. Both of
these men refused to co-operate with the HCUA. Both were held in contempt
of the HUAC
and went to jail.
When Dmytryk emerged from his prison term he did so with a new set
of principles. He suddenly saw the heavenly light, testified as a
friend of the HUAC,
praised its purposes and practices and denounced all who opposed it.
Dmytryk immediately found work as a director, and has worked all down
the years since. Adrian Scott, who came out of prison with his principles
intact, could not produce a film for a studio again until 1970. He
was blacklisted for 21 years. To assert that he and Dmytryk were equally
victims is beyond my comprehension.
(5)
Dalton Trumbo, letter to Albert
Maltz
(29th December, 1972)
I
confess that among those who turned informer there are two or three
whose deaths I once actually fantasized, and whom I still view with
nothing short of horror. As for the others, I do not associate with
them and cannot bring myself to trust them.
In a country which, after a reasonable period of punishment, returns
murders and rapists to society on the humane theory that it is still
possible for them to become decent and even valuable citizens. I have
no intention of fanning the embers of justifiable hatred which burned
so brightly twenty-five years ago.
(6)
Dalton Trumbo, introduction to Johnny Got His Gun, when it
was republished in 1970.
Numbers
have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American
dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our
morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit
that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.
An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh,
124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000
years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children who will
never be born.
Let us use his same arithmetic for World War I; 9,000,000
dead young men equal 1,350,000,000 pounds of bone and flesh, 27,900,000
pounds of brain matter, 11,250,000 gallons of blood, 414,000,000 years
of life that will never be lived, and 22,500,000 children who will
never be born. The dry if imposing figure "9,000,000 dead"
seems a little less statistical when we view it from this perspective.
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