A prolific letter-writer his entire life, Trumbo’s son Christopher, collected these missives of his father’s ideas and politics, his irascible personality, conversations with notable collaborators like Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas, and his campaign to break the blacklist, to compile an honest portrait. While the biopic, directed by Jay Roach, focuses on Trumbo’s battle against HUAC and the resulting fallout, historian Larry Ceplair and Trumbo’s late son, Christopher, have written a recently released biography that gives a full account of Trumbo’s life and impact on American culture, politics, and the film industry.ĭalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical follows the beleaguered screenwriter from his youth in Grand Junction, Colorado to his film career both on and off the blacklist and his death in 1976-seventeen years before he would receive a posthumous Oscar for writing Roman Holiday (1953). Now, Trumbo’s fight is about to hit the big screen with Trumbo, a new Bryan Cranston-starring biopic set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. It just happened in my case that the original fight once undertaken, expanded marvelously into what seemed like many fights.” “I’ve always thought of my life as a sequence of conflicts, each a separate battle, segregated in my mind under the heading, “My fight with these guys” or “My fight with those guys.”. In 1962, in a cover letter attached to an archive of his papers donated to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, he addressed this theme that dominated his adult life: As a result of refusing to answer questions, he was sentenced to prison for a year, blacklisted from working in Hollywood, and, after a thirteen year struggle, fought his way back to become one of the most sought-after and respected screenwriters in the industry.Ī fight was something Trumbo was not afraid of.
Trumbo, who was a member of the Communist Party, was soon called to testify to his political affiliation before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
In the article “A Vote for Joe Stalin,” Wilkerson claimed that those listed were a threat to the “free world” and the “millions of readers” dependent on the free trade of ideas. Among the notable figures included on this list was screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who at the time was the acclaimed writer of films like Kitty Foyle (1940) and novels such as Johnny Got His Gun (1939).
On July 29, 1946-sixty-nine years ago today-Billy Wilkerson, founder of The Hollywood Reporter, published an editorial naming 11 alleged Communists working in Hollywood.
0 kommentar(er)
