In April 1970, Dalton Trumbo was awarded the Laurel Award from The Writers Guild of America. During his acceptance speech he spoke of the 277 members of the guild who went to War during the 1940's. He spoke of a number who lost there lives and then went on to mention that a mere 6 years later, 43 of these writers would be denounced, stripped of their names and have their passports confiscated. Dalton Trumbo was one of those 43.
Trumbo's ambition after leaving the University of Colorado was to become 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, an anti war novel about a disfigured British officer in the First World War, won a National Book Award in 1939. However, the book was withdrawn during the Second World War. Republished in 1971, it gained a large following amongst the generation being sent to fight in Vietnam. After the war, Trumbo had moved on to writing screen plays and by 1945 was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood.
In 1947 House of Un-American Activities Committee, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry, and in particular it's screen writers. McCarthy seemed obsessed with exposing and spotlighting "subversive elements". The HUAC interviewed 41 people working in Hollywood. These people became known as "friendly witnesses", and during their interviews they named several people who they accused of holding left-wing views. Trumbo was one of those named. When asked to attend the hearings and answer questions about his political affiliations, Trumbo, sighting the first amendment to The Constitution, refused to confirm or deny that he had ever been a member of the Communist party. Of course he had been a member like a lot of artists and intellectuals of the time. Many joined as a direct result of the rise of fascism throughout Europe. He believed that a man's political convictions were a private matter and "nobody's bloody business".
Alongside Trumbo, nine other screen writers followed the same course and they collectively became known as "The Hollywood Ten". Trumbo believed this to be a fundamental freedom of speech issue (this explains why he cited the first amendment, "The right to freedom of religion and freedom of expression from government interference", rather than the fifth amendment, "The right not to be incriminated"). After the hearings, at a meeting at The Waldorf Hotel, Eric Johnston, the President of The Motion Pictures Association of America went on to say that although the MPAA didn't believe in black listing the Hollywood Ten, they would not employ anyone who had anything to do with communism and no compensation would be payed to the writers. The Hollywood Ten were out of work, banned and banished from Hollywood. On leaving the hearings Trumbo was famously heard to say, "This is the beginning of an American concentration camp for writers", he would later be proved right.
In 1950, two of the ten, Jack Lawson and Trumbo himself were tried and found guilty of contempt of Congress and all ten were sentenced to ten months in prison. During their incarceration, the "Emergency Detention Act" was passed. Camps that had been used as internment centres for Japanese Americans during WW2 were turned into concentration camps for American radicals. On there release from jail in 1951, Trumbo and four friends, Ring Lardner Jr., Hugo Butler and Ian Hunter decided the only course of action was to go on the run and resettle in Mexico, taking with them what little belongings they had left and their families.
For the first year in Mexico, Trumbo and his fellow writers soaked up the Mexican culture, drank a lot and did little work. What work they did do across the border in the U.S.A. they rarely got payed for. By their second year, and after a failed attempt at breaking into the Mexican film industry as screen writers, Trumbo and his family were completely broke and were forced to move back North. Trumbo was torn with regret and failure and realized the only thing he could do was start all over again, from the bottom, writing screen plays and scripts under assumed names. At the time he described himself has, "Broke as a bankrupts bastard". In the first 18 months since his return he wrote 12 scripts working himself to the bone, but still found himself having to borrow from friends and family to support his family.
The effect on Trumbo's family was that it unified them into a tightly bonded unit, however, wherever they went trouble dogged them. Even his children were vilified by teachers and PTA parents alike, being forced to move from one school to another.
At this time, The House of Un-American Activities gave people in the movie industry the choice of working if they agreed to name the names of those involved with Communist party. Many like Elia Kazan and Walt disney did just this, but Dalton Trumbo refused, instead continuing to work under assumed names. In 1957, Trumbo wrote the screen play for the film "The Brave One" using the name of a friend called Robert Rich. The film won an oscar for best screen play but in the meantime Robert Rich had died, so people naturally wanted to know who this 'Robert Rich' was. The oscar went unclaimed, but speculation was rife and Trumbo was interviewed and asked if he was the rightful winner. He neither admitted nor denied it, but it became obvious that he had written the screen play. This, in a way was the beginning of the end of the Hollywood blacklist.
In 1960, Kirk Douglas asked Dalton Trumbo to write the screen play for the Stanley Kubrick film "Spartacus". The famous scene where the slaves are offered their freedom so long as Spartacus reveals himself, seems now an allegory for those dark times of McCarthyism and black listings.
In 1971, Dalton Trumbo directed his only motion picture, his version of his novel "Johnny Got His Gun", featuring Jason Robards and Sam Bottoms, and two years later he wrote "Executive Action", which dealt with an alleged conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy.
When asked about the blacklist after receiving his Laurel Award, Trumbo was quoted as saying, "The blacklist was a time of evil...no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil...(Looking) back on this time...it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims."
Dalton Trumbo. 5th December, 1905 – 10th September, 1976.
