{"id":33187,"date":"2016-01-24T07:31:22","date_gmt":"2016-01-24T13:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=33187"},"modified":"2016-01-24T10:19:30","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T16:19:30","slug":"living-in-the-spotlight-and-the-shadows-jeff-smith-on-trumbo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2016\/01\/24\/living-in-the-spotlight-and-the-shadows-jeff-smith-on-trumbo\/","title":{"rendered":"Living in the spotlight and the shadows: Jeff Smith on TRUMBO"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Trumbo<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Trumbo004<\/a><\/p>\n

Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo; John Frankenheimer and Dalton Trumbo.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

DB here:<\/em><\/p>\n

Who better to comment on the historical implications of Jay Roach’s Trumbo<\/strong> than our friend and collaborator on Film Art<\/strong>, Jeff Smith<\/a>? He’s not only an expert on film sound, as he showed in his guest post on Brave<\/a>, but he has written a book on the Hollywood blacklist. Jeff offers these observations on the film.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Last week, I was delighted to see that Bryan Cranston received an Oscar nomination as the star of Trumbo<\/em>. Throughout the month of November, I was \u201cjohnny-on-the-spot\u201d for local media interested in covering the new biopic about Dalton Trumbo. The story had a local angle. In 1962, Trumbo donated a large collection of scripts, notes, contracts, photos, and business correspondence to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Since then, scholars interested in the Hollywood blacklist have been making pilgrimages to Madison to probe Trumbo\u2019s collection as well as the papers of five other members of the Hollywood Ten (Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner Jr., Herbert Biberman, Samuel Ornitz, and Alvah Bessie.)<\/p>\n

I had done a lot of work with the collection, so I could do interviews with WMTV, WISC, The Wisconsin State Journal<\/em>, and University Publications. Unfortunately I had not yet seen Trumbo<\/em>, the Jay Roach film based upon Bruce Cook\u2019s 1977 biography. I could talk about Trumbo\u2019s life and career and the buzz I\u2019d heard about the movie, but until it played Madison, I had to stay mum about the movie itself.<\/p>\n

After a couple of weeks in distribution in limited release, Trumbo<\/em> went wide just before Thanksgiving. Now that I\u2019ve seen it, I am delighted to report that Trumbo<\/em> merits every bit of the hype that surrounded it. To my mind, it is the best fictional\u00a0film about the blacklist that Hollywood has yet produced.<\/p>\n

Buoyed by a standout performance by Cranston, Trumbo<\/em> is fast-paced and funny, and rather nimbly summarizes many of the political and industrial issues that led to the institution of the blacklist in 1947. It also showcases the effect that \u201cunemployable\u201d writers working on the black market had in undermining the rhetoric of the blacklist throughout the Cold War period. It became hard to say with a straight face that you were protecting American screens from the taint of Red propaganda when films secretly written by Communists were winning awards and topping the box office.<\/p>\n

I was struck by some of the choices made by Roach and screenwriter John McNamara in bringing Trumbo\u2019s story to the big screen. Although Trumbo\u2019s career has been well documented by film scholars, Roach and McNamara faced the same challenges in adapting Cook\u2019s biography that any filmmaker does in transforming a literary property into a classical narrative structure. How do you make Trumbo an active, goal-oriented protagonist despite the fact that he was the victim of historical circumstance? How do you deal with the welter of historical actors and subplots that populate Cook\u2019s biography? How do you boil down a complex historical situation into a clear, transmissible narrative?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Witnesses, friendly and\u00a0otherwise<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Trumbo005<\/a><\/p>\n

Dalton Trumbo at work.<\/em><\/p>\n

Like\u00a0many contemporary Hollywood biopics, Trumbo<\/em> doesn\u2019t try to convey the full sweep of its subject\u2019s quite colorful life. It omits reference to young Dalton\u2019s Christian Scientist upbringing, his early toils in the Davis Perfection Bakery, or even the publication of his first story in 1933. Indeed, the film also makes only offhand references to Trumbo\u2019s early achievements as a novelist and screenwriter. These are briefly acknowledged near the film\u2019s start through a series of shots in Trumbo\u2019s office at the Lazy-T Ranch that reveal his award for Johnny Got His Gun<\/em> and his Oscar nomination for Kitty Foyle<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Instead the film focuses on the period of Trumbo\u2019s career during which the screenwriter became one of Hollywood\u2019s sacrificial lambs at the altar of HUAC\u2019s anti-Communism. When the film begins in the mid-forties, Trumbo was the most highly paid screenwriter in Hollywood, earning $75,000 per script. In today\u2019s currency, that amounts to about $800,000 per picture, a remarkable sum for someone under studio contract.<\/p>\n

Just a few years later, Trumbo would appear as an \u201cunfriendly witness\u201d during hearings conducted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in October of 1947. As a result, he’d eventually\u00a0be convicted of Contempt of Congress charges and sent to federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky.<\/p>\n

\"Hollywood<\/a><\/p>\n

Although HUAC was concerned about the potential subversion of American screen content, it was not, in fact, illegal to be a member of the Communist Party. It was, however, a criminal offense to advocate for the overthrow of the American government according to the provisions of the Alien Registration Act (aka the Smith Act) passed in 1940.<\/p>\n

About six months after HUAC concluded their hearings on Hollywood, a dozen Communist Party leaders were indicted for Smith Act violations.\u00a0\u00a0 Defendants insisted that political change in America could be accomplished through democratic process and constitutional principle. But prosecutors claimed these statements couldn\u2019t be trusted since Communists employed \u201cAesopian language\u201d and therefore did not really mean what they said. The attack proved successful and effectively criminalized membership in the Communist Party as a result. Since any individual\u2019s denial of revolutionary rhetoric would be viewed with suspicion, you were likely seen as guilty of the Smith Act if you simply owned a copy of Marx and Engels\u2019 The Communist Manifesto<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Even before the Foley Square trials, as they came to be known, many of the Communist Party\u2019s rank and file, including the Hollywood Ten, also feared that they would be prosecuted on similar grounds if they admitted their membership. This proved to be one factor that favored the Ten\u2019s failed \u201cfirst amendment\u201d defense. True, they risked getting cited for Contempt of Congress. But that had the prospect of looking more dignified than simply being hauled off in cuffs on Smith Act charges.<\/p>\n

When he returned from prison, Trumbo encountered an industry that wanted him, but not his name on the credits. Producers recognized his talent, and he continued to write through the circuitous network of fronts and pseudonyms. Trumbo would win two Oscars for his work as a black market screenwriter: one for the Gregory Peck\/Audrey Hepburn classic, Roman Holiday<\/em>\u00a0(below) and another for a Disneyesque \u201cboy and bull\u201d story, The Brave One<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"RH400\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By the end of 1960, Trumbo\u2019s name would once again grace movie screens as the credited screenwriter on Kirk Douglas\u2019 Spartacus<\/em> and on Otto Preminger\u2019s Exodus<\/em>. This moment essentially ended what remained of the Hollywood blacklist. In moving from the limelight to the shadows and back again, Trumbo\u2019s life had the kind of plot arc that Hollywood loves. It\u2019s a story of redemption in which the hero overcomes overwhelming odds to regain the professional respect and recognition he\u2019d been denied.<\/p>\n

Although all of this suggests that Trumbo<\/em> is a pretty conventional biopic, it\u2019s quite unconventional in its treatment of the blacklist. As the late Jeanne Hall noted years ago, Hollywood\u2019s representation of this dark chapter of its past was surprisingly evasive, getting on the right side of history but for all the wrong reasons.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bad Faith in Appleton<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

The Majestic<\/strong> (1999).<\/em><\/p>\n

In titles like The Way We Were<\/em>, The Front<\/em>, and Guilty by Suspicion<\/em>, filmmakers pulled a \u201cbait and switch.\u201d They substituted obvious cases of injustice for the much messier questions posed about HUAC\u2019s abrogation of basic civil rights protections. The Hollywood Ten tried to defend themselves on First Amendment grounds, questioning whether HUAC itself had the right to invade their privacy or to limit their freedom of assembly. But in most of these earlier films about the blacklist, HUAC\u2019s inquiry eventually entangles someone who was never a member of the Communist Party. In The Way We Were<\/em>, the WASP-y Hubbell comes under suspicion for his relationship with the Jewish radical, Katie. In The Front<\/em>, Howard comes under suspicion after selling black market scripts by Communist writers under his own name. Both of these instances present obvious cases of individuals wrongfully accused. They recruit our sympathies for characters that suffer as a result of HUAC\u2019s tactics, but gloss over more fundamental questions about whether someone should be denied employment on the basis of their political beliefs.<\/p>\n

No film, however, displays the equivocation evident in previous representations of the blacklist as vividly as Frank Darabont\u2019s The Majestic<\/em>. The protagonist, Peter Appleton, is a Hollywood screenwriter who has just been named by the committee. Distraught, he takes a drive out of Hollywood, but has an accident en route. Suffering from amnesia, Appleton finds himself in the small town of Lawson, California where is mistaken for Luke Trimble, a soldier killed in action some nine years earlier. Appleton becomes immersed in the Lawson community, helping his \u201cfather,\u201d Harry, restore the small town theater that gives the film its title. Prompted by a combat film shown in the Majestic, Appleton regains his memory, and confides the truth of his situation to his new girlfriend. After his car is discovered, federal agents give Appleton a summons to testify about his Communist affiliations.<\/p>\n

During the climax, Appleton appears before HUAC with the aim of clearing himself. Congressman Elvin Clyde confronts Appleton with evidence that he attended a meeting of the \u201cBread Instead of Bullets\u201d club. Appleton pleads innocence, saying he only went because he was a \u201chorny, young man\u201d seeking to impress his date, Lucille Angstrom. Just as he is about to deliver his prepared statement purging himself of Communist associations, Appleton changes his mind. Instead he gives an impassioned speech that cites his First Amendment rights and denounces the investigation as a betrayal of America\u2019s real ideals. Appleton saunters out of the hearing to the loud applause of onlookers. Yet Appleton\u2019s lawyer later tells him that Angstrom is currently a CBS producer on Studio One,<\/em> and his reference to her as a member of the Communist front organization is viewed as cooperation with the Committee.<\/p>\n

In The Majestic<\/em>\u2019s civic fantasy, the committee hearing revives the \u201cwrongly accused\u201d trope seen in earlier blacklist films. Worse, it shows its hero successfully using the First Amendment legal defense that had spectacularly failed when the Hollywood Ten used it during the 1947 hearings. Moreover, because Appleton is a political na<\/em>\u00eff<\/em>, his inadvertent naming of names redounds to his benefit. Given the film\u2019s hopelessly confused politics, perhaps there is unintentional irony in the fact that Appleton is also the name of the Wisconsin hometown of Senator Joseph McCarthy (below), the man synonymous with the Cold War\u2019s anti-Communist campaign.<\/p>\n

\"Tail<\/a><\/p>\n

Trumbo<\/em>, in contrast, doesn\u2019t pull any punches. The film condemns HUAC\u2019s activities not because it was prone to wild, unproven accusations like those of McCarthy, but rather because the very nature and essence of its inquiry was itself an abuse of power. The movie does nothing to deny Trumbo\u2019s guilt. Indeed, the real-life Trumbo freely admitted it. In the 1976 documentary Hollywood on Trial<\/em>, Trumbo described his reaction to his trial thusly: \u201cAs far as I was concerned, it was a completely just verdict. I had contempt for that Congress and have had contempt for several since.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, while not excusing Trumbo\u2019s actions, the film dramatizes the debilitating effects of being blacklisted, both in his professional and personal life. The burden of Trumbo\u2019s black market work put a strain on his marriage and his family, all of whom were enlisted to perform services he himself could not do publicly.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The blacklist: More than Red-baiting<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Trumbo<\/a><\/p>\n

Besides providing a more accurate picture of Red-baiting and its effects, Trumbo<\/em> also proves remarkable in making passing reference to some of the important secondary causes that eventually led to the blacklist. An early scene, for example, shows Trumbo (above) on a picket line during the vituperative Congress of Studio Union strikes that took place in 1945. Film historian Jon Lewis argues that one reason for the studio\u2019s cooperation with HUAC\u2019s investigation was that it served their interests in their long-term relationship with Hollywood\u2019s craft guilds. Once Communists within the film industry\u2019s labor unions became targets of government scrutiny, only the more moderate factions remained. Whether or not HUAC\u2019s investigation was a direct cause, Hollywood did not experience another strike until more than four decades later.<\/p>\n

Trumbo<\/em> refers to another cause of the blacklist: anti-Semitism. Although it was something of a stereotype, Communists were popularly associated with European Jews. In fact, when Warner Bros. released I Was a Communist for the FBI<\/em> in 1951, several moviegoers wrote studio head Jack Warner complaining that the film repeated the lie that all Jews were Communists. Said one Julius Newman of Roxbury, Massachusetts: \u201cI demand that this dangerous, rotten, and libelous bit of propaganda be withdrawn immediately before some Jewish mother somewhere, gets her son\u2019s skull cracked for Mother\u2019s Day.\u201d<\/p>\n

The perception that anti-Semitism was an underlying cause of the blacklist was aided by the fact that three of the Committee were members of the Ku Klux Klan at the time of the 1947 hearings, including the Chair, J. Parnell Thomas. Moreover, in a speech before the House of Representatives, another HUAC member, Mississippi Democrat John Rankin, attacked members of the Committee for the First Amendment, who had lobbied on behalf of the Hollywood Ten. Rankin claimed that certain performers were suspect because their Anglicized names hid their actual Jewish origins:<\/p>\n

One of the names is June Havoc. We found that her real name is June Hovick… Another one is Eddie Cantor, whose real name is Edward Iskowitz. There is one who calls himself Edward Robinson. His real name is Emanuel Goldenberg. There is another here who calls himself Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Melvyn Hesselberg.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Hedda<\/p>\n

Screenwriter John McNamara wrote a similar speech for Trumbo<\/em>, but placed it in the mouth of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. When MGM boss Louis B. Mayer reminds Hopper that the legal situation was complicated by the fact that several of the Hollywood Ten had contracts, she responds:<\/p>\n

Then how about I make crystal clear to my thirty-five million readers who runs Hollywood and won\u2019t fire these traitors? How about I name names, real names? Like yours, Lazar Meir; or Jack Warner, Jacob Varner; Sam Goldwyn, Schmuel Gelbfisz.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The presence of Hedda Hopper in Trumbo<\/em> hints at a third underlying cause of the blacklist: the role of the trade press and gossip columnists, who prosecuted and enforced it. Hopper was not alone in this endeavor. Publishers like Billy Wilkerson of The Hollywood Reporter<\/em>\u00a0and columnists like Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan \u201ccheered\u201d HUAC\u2019s efforts from the sidelines. They also helped the enforcement of the blacklist once it was instituted, calling public attention to the surreptitious presence of banned writers on the black market.<\/p>\n

All of these elements in Trumbo<\/em>\u2019s script make it a richer, more sophisticated depiction of the Hollywood blacklist than that offered by its predecessors. They also remind us that its operations were about more than just politics. Once the blacklist was established, studio bosses gained the upper hand in their dealings with labor, gossipmongers used rumor and accusation to fill column inches and sell papers, and anti-Semites exploited the common association of Communism and Jewish intellectuals to thwart activism among progressives, including those in the Civil Rights movement.<\/p>\n

In sum, Trumbo <\/em>offers a more nuanced sense of the various factors at play at the time of the blacklist than virtually all of its cinematic predecessors. This makes it all the more surprising then that the film nonetheless rewrites history in other ways. In an effort to both streamline and personalize its protagonist\u2019s story, Trumbo<\/em> invents new characters, revises the order of historical events, and shorts the achievements of other black market screenwriters who also contributed to the blacklist\u2019s ultimate demise.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The eleventh member of the Hollywood ten<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although most film audiences expect that movies will generally portray historical events with some degree of accuracy, Hollywood cinema rewrites history all the time. Despite the fact that this is common practice, some films that take such liberties are hurt by negative publicity, especially around awards time. Recall the controversy surrounding Selma<\/em>\u2019s depiction of President Lyndon Johnson as an opponent of Martin Luther King\u2019s famous march rather than as a \u201cbehind the scenes\u201d ally. Some believe that the loud complaints coming from the LBJ camp cost director Ava DuVernay an Oscar nod.<\/p>\n

Trumbo<\/em> is no exception to this principle, even though it has been unusually forthright about the changes made to the historical record. My spidey senses were alerted to this during the movie when they introduced Louis CK\u2019s character as \u201cArlen Hird.\u201d I\u2019d never heard of Arlen Hird.<\/p>\n

Both in interviews and in an article in the New York Times<\/em>, screenwriter John McNamara has acknowledged that Hird is a composite character, whose traits and experiences are based on five other members of the Hollywood Ten. Louis CK, for example, physically resembles the real-life Alvah Bessie, who, like the character, was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish civil war.<\/p>\n

\"Louis<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Alvah<\/a><\/p>\n

Moreover, when Hird is in prison, he hears a radio broadcast of Edward G. Robinson\u2019s \u201cfriendly\u201d testimony. Robinson calls him \u201cthe top fellow who they say is the, uh, commissar out there,\u201d a swipe that blacklist historians would immediately associate with John Howard Lawson. And sadly, like Samuel Ornitz, Hird dies after battling cancer, having never seen the blacklist come to its ignoble end.<\/p>\n

As Nicolas Rapold observes in the Times<\/em>, Hird is meant to stand in for other Communist screenwriters whose attitudes were more doctrinaire than Trumbo\u2019s. Yet I believe the real purpose of using a composite character is to simplify the historical record to make it more digestible for the viewer. Rather than tracing out Trumbo\u2019s relation to all of the eighteen other \u201cunfriendly witnesses\u201d subpoenaed by HUAC, McNamara opts to consolidate them into a single character. Such a decision makes some intuitive sense, since viewers would be hard pressed to keep tabs on a parade of many characters. By creating Hird as a composite, Trumbo\u2019s interactions with him gain vividness and salience.<\/p>\n

Still, McNamara\u2019s narrative technique is merely one approach among a larger menu of options, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. He could have treated the Hollywood Ten as a group protagonist, who all share the same goal in legally challenging HUAC\u2019s authority. Such a gambit, though, would have displaced Trumbo from the center of the story early on. That decision would have weakened the causal motivation behind his later emergence as a black market crusader.<\/p>\n

Alternatively, McNamara could have dramatized Trumbo\u2019s individual interactions with Bessie, Lawson, and Ornitz, et.al., using a superimposed title to identify each one. The gain in accuracy, though, would likely mean a loss of dramatic clarity and a mildly more self-conscious style of narration. More important perhaps, it also would make for a less emotionally engaging story. The film shows Hird confiding in Trumbo at the Lazy-T ranch, participating in the Ten\u2019s legal strategy, serving his prison term, and undergoing surgery for lung cancer. The accumulation of these details provide for a more fully fleshed out character. There\u2019s also the opportunity to feel empathy for Hird\u2019s children at his funeral, an effect that couldn\u2019t have been as focused if Hird\u2019s problems were scattered among separate individuals.<\/p>\n

None of this is meant to suggest that McNamara absolutely made the right<\/em> choice in deciding to treat so many members of the Ten as a composite. Rather, it is simply the recognition that such a technique is the result of a deliberate choice and further that one creative decision can lead to a cascade of others. Had McNamara stayed doggedly faithful to the historical record, Trumbo<\/em> would have been a different film, but perhaps not a better one.<\/p>\n

Perhaps we should recognize that screenwriters often must adapt historical narratives in the same way that they adapt literature. And the same sorts of questions about fidelity<\/em> will bedevil us as when films change details of our favorite novels and stories. Rather than being dogmatic in expecting that historical films stick close to the facts, maybe we simply should ask whether the film is faithful to the spirit of the historical record, especially when its creators are so open and honest about the changes they made. Such a stance would at least recognize the difficulties faced by screenwriters in balancing the weight of classical narrative conventions against the strict measure of historical accuracy. If, as many screenwriters argue, films differ from literature in their emphasis on conflict and action, then the decision in Selma <\/em>to treat LBJ as an obstacle to Martin Luther King\u2019s goal makes a certain dramatic sense. Here again, one can debate the merits of that creative choice. But at least we do so with a fuller understanding of why such choices are made in the first place.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Get me rewrite!<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"J<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"J<\/a><\/p>\n

Besides creating composite characters, McNamara rewrites history in other ways. Perhaps the most obvious is when he creates a scene in prison between Trumbo and HUAC chair, J. Parnell Thomas, which never actually happened. True, Thomas was convicted on corruption charges and was sent to federal prison. But he served his term in Danbury, Connecticut rather than Ashland, Kentucky where Trumbo was incarcerated.<\/p>\n

In this case, the real-life story proves more entertaining than what appears in the film. While at Danbury, Thomas encountered two other members of the Hollywood Ten \u2013 Lester Cole and Ring Lardner, Jr. — serving their time on Contempt of Congress charges. Upon seeing Thomas working in the prison yard, Cole made a wisecrack that led the former HUAC chair to respond, \u201cI see that you are still spouting radical nonsense.\u201d Cole\u2019s sharp retort: \u201cAnd I see you are still shoveling chicken shit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other cases, McNamara revises the chronology of events. In the film, Trumbo first meets with the King Brothers, Frank and Hymie, just after he is released from prison. In reality, Trumbo started working for the King Brothers just weeks after his HUAC testimony. Almost immediately after being suspended by MGM, Trumbo did black market work on the screenplay for the King Brothers\u2019 cult classic, Gun Crazy<\/em>, using fellow writer Millard Kaufman as a front. With Kaufman serving as intermediary, the Kings likely did not know of Trumbo\u2019s involvement. But the brothers began working directly with Trumbo shortly thereafter. In fact, Frank King personally visited the Lazy-T ranch just prior to the Trumbo\u2019s departure for prison, offering to pay him $8,000 to write the script for Carnival Story<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Trumbo<\/em> coyly acknowledges the screenwriter\u2019s contribution to Gun Crazy<\/em> by featuring posters of the film in several shots. But by revising the historical circumstances of Trumbo\u2019s first involvement with the Kings, the film more or less denies him actual credit attribution, ironically engaging in the same sort of opportunism displayed by the producers who surreptitiously hired him.<\/p>\n

McNamara\u2019s most significant changes to blacklist history, though, involve omissions. Trumbo\u2019s Oscar victory for The Brave One<\/em> is well documented and the episode \u2013 both in the film and in real-life \u2013 neatly captures his role as industry gadfly. But the same year that the mysterious \u201cRobert Rich\u201d won the Academy Award for Best Original Story, Michael Wilson also was nominated for a project for which he was publicly denied screen credit.<\/p>\n

\"Brave<\/a><\/p>\n

Wilson had completed a first draft of Friendly Persuasion<\/em> for director Frank Capra in 1946, but no film was made from the script until producer\/director William Wyler took over the project in 1955. When it came time to determine the screenwriter credit, Wyler suggested that it go to Robert Wyler and Jessamyn West for their extensive revisions, including many rewrites completed on set during shooting. When Wilson became aware of this, he immediately protested Wyler\u2019s decision and forced arbitration by the Screen Writers Guild. The Guild ruled in Wilson’s favor, but also reminded the film\u2019s distributor, Allied Artists, that they could legally deny credit to any screenwriter who had failed to clear himself before HUAC. When Friendly Persuasion <\/em>was released in 1956, its only writing credits read \u201cFrom the Book by Jessamyn West.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite a good deal of press coverage of the dispute, the incident might have been a mere blip on the cultural radar if not for the 1957 Oscar nominations. When they were announced, a film with no credited screenwriter unexpectedly received a nomination for a screenwriting award. And with public acknowledgement of Wilson\u2019s contribution to Friendly Persuasion<\/em> more or less verboten<\/em>, the text of the nomination simply said the writer was ineligible under Academy rules.<\/p>\n

Worried that a public victory by a blacklisted writer would give the industry a big ol\u2019 black eye, the Academy reportedly instructed Price Waterhouse to excise the nomination from the Oscar ballots that were sent to voters. Yet, even though the Academy essentially rigged the vote against Wilson, Groucho Marx offered an incisive quip about Wilson\u2019s situation at the Writer\u2019s Guild Awards banquet held about two weeks before the Oscars. Said Groucho, \u201cThe Ten Commandments<\/em>. Original story by Moses. The producers were forced to keep Moses\u2019s name off the credits because they found out he had once crossed the Red Sea.\u201d Given all the effort that went into preventing Wilson from receiving the award, Trumbo\u2019s Oscar win as \u201cRobert Rich\u201d must have tasted even sweeter. The award was given in absentia by Deborah Kerr, and Jesse Lasky, Jr. accepted it.<\/p>\n

\"Deborah<\/a><\/p>\n

Moreover, the Rich incident was hardly the last humiliation that the Academy would suffer. The very next year novelist Pierre Boulle received a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for The Bridge on the River Kwai, <\/em>which was based on his book. But Boulle had been a front for Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, who had taken the assignment as black market work for producer Sam Spiegel. When Boulle\u2019s name was announced as the winner, the novelist was nowhere to be found. Instead, Kim Novak accepted the award on his behalf. But insiders knew exactly why Boulle was absent. As someone who wrote and spoke in French rather than English, his stumbling acceptance speech would have exposed the hypocrisy by which Foreman and Wilson were denied an award that they merited. (Sadly, neither Foreman nor Wilson would live to see their work duly recognized. In 1984, the Academy posthumously recognized them as the true authors of Kwai<\/em>\u2019s screenplay.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nathan E. Douglas = ?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Defiant<\/a><\/p>\n

The original credits sequence of The Defiant Ones<\/strong> (1958) listed Nedrick Young as a coauthor under his pseudonym Nathan E. Douglas. He appeared in a bit part coinciding with\u00a0his credit listing, along with coauthor Smith, in the cab of the truck. Video versions such as this have restored his name.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Things didn\u2019t end there. The Oscar nominations in 1959 saw yet another brewing controversy regarding eligibility of a black market scribe. The writing team of Harold Jacob Smith and Nathan E. Douglas earned a nod for Best Original Screenplay for The Defiant Ones<\/em>, even though the latter was a pseudonym for blacklisted writer Nedrick Young. If anything, Young\u2019s participation in the making of The Defiant Ones <\/em>was signaled by producer-director Stanley Kramer\u2019s giving him a notable cameo in the film. During the opening credits, Young and Smith are both seen as prison guards riding in the front seat of a truck used to transport convicts. In a rather coy gesture, when the film\u2019s writing credits are shown, Young\u2019s pseudonym \u201cNathan E. Douglas\u201d is superimposed over the man himself. Even though the general public didn\u2019t know Young from Adam, his cameo made his participation an open secret in Hollywood.<\/p>\n

During awards season, Young as \u201cNathan Douglas\u201d collected a lot of hardware, including awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Writer\u2019s Guild of America. With the nominations imminent, leadership within the Academy recognized that a third straight public relations disaster was in the offing. Just before Christmas in 1958, former Academy president George Seaton approached Young and Smith seeking assistance in overturning the Academy bylaw prohibiting blacklisted personnel from eligibility for awards. For his part, Trumbo himself stayed abreast of the situation and even rescheduled a media interview order to avoid fanning any flames of opposition from within the Academy.<\/p>\n

On January 15, 1959, Seaton, Young, and Trumbo all got their wish as the hated bylaw was officially rescinded, passed by the Academy\u2019s Board of Governors with near unanimous support. Two days later, Trumbo confirmed to newsman Bill Stout that he was, indeed, Robert Rich. On Oscar night a few months later, Young enjoyed the spotlight in a way that had been denied his predecessors. And when The Defiant Ones<\/em> won the Oscar for the Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, Young strode to the podium along with Smith and offered a humble thank you. Ward Bond, one of John Wayne\u2019s allies in the Motion Picture Alliance for American Ideals, observed: \u201cThey\u2019re all working now, all these Fifth-Amendment Communists. We\u2019ve just lost the fight. It\u2019s as simple as that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where does all of this backstory fit into the story told in Trumbo<\/em>? As it turns out, nowhere. In choosing to concentrate on Trumbo\u2019s story, the movie keeps all of this rich contextual material offscreen. As is often the case, the historical realities surrounding the end of the Hollywood blacklist were much denser, messier, and more complex than what can easily fit into a standard two-hour film. Classical Hollywood narrative, with its emphasis on goal-orientation and clearly motivated, causally linked events, tends to nudge screenwriters away from the sprawl more often found in novels or television miniseries. In the case of Trumbo<\/em>, screenwriter John McNamara likely opted for the virtues of clarity and concision. He concentrated only on those incidents that directly involved the titular character, eliminating or minimizing anything that would detract from that narrative focus.<\/p>\n

That being said, the creative choices of McNamara and director Jay Roach are, above all, choices. The screenplay for Bridge of Spies<\/em>, for example, manages to convey something of the complex bilateral negotiations that linked the downing of U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers with the seemingly unrelated espionage case of KGB officer Rudolf Abel. One could imagine Roach and McNamara devising very brief scenes of Wilson, Foreman, and Young in their Academy imbroglios. Or alternatively, the film might have included Trumbo\u2019s voiceover reading the text of his actual letters to Wilson, many of which commented on the perpetually changing conditions of the black market. As before, the inclusion of such material wouldn\u2019t necessarily make Trumbo <\/em>a better film. But it would make it a different one.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Although Dalton Trumbo led the fight against the blacklist, often using the industry\u2019s greed, hypocrisy, and mendacity against itself in the process, my brief synopses of these other screenwriters\u2019 Academy Award travails show that he was not alone. Many individuals taking small incremental actions led to the blacklist\u2019s end. It wasn\u2019t smashed; it crumbled through erosion. The fact that one of Hollywood\u2019s \u201cuntouchables\u201d was able to openly accept a major industry award made open screen credit a logical next step. Dalton Trumbo happened to be the lucky individual to regain his name without having to bow and scrape before HUAC. But even he knew it could just as easily have been Nedrick Young. Or Michael Wilson. Or Albert Maltz.<\/p>\n

Come Oscar night on February 28th<\/sup>, if Bryan Cranston is lucky enough to hoist the Best Actor prize above his head, it will be a fitting tribute to a man whose struggles with this same institution helped to define him and his era. Yet an Oscar victory would also pay tribute to all those whose stories have not reached the screen, but whose grit and determination made Trumbo\u2019s triumph possible. And Mr. Cranston, if you get to deliver that acceptance speech, be sure to remember all those unsung heroes that joined Trumbo in the fight.<\/p>\n

\n

Trumbo<\/em> is based on Bruce Cook\u2019s biography<\/a>, which was first published in 1977. Readers should also check out Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo\u2019s massive, exhaustively researched new biography, Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0Ceplair is also the co-author, with Steven Englund, of the standard work on the Hollywood blacklist itself, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics and the Film Community, 1930-1960<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0My book, Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist: Reading the Hollywood Reds<\/em><\/a>, also considers Trumbo\u2019s contribution to Spartacus<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Trumbo’s collection of correspondence, speeches, business papers, scripts, and photographs is held at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. A rich sampling of material from it is available here<\/a>. Several of the photos in this entry come from the WCFTR collection. Go here<\/a> to listen to excerpts from his HUAC testimony.<\/p>\n

Excerpts from John Rankin\u2019s infamous speech about Jewish actors in Hollywood can be found in Gordon Kahn\u2019s Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the Ten Who Were Indicted<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0Trumbo himself commented on the role of anti-Semitism in HUAC\u2019S investigations in The Time of the Toad: A Study in Inquisition in America<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n

Franklin Leonard interviewed John McNamara last November about his work on Trumbo<\/em> for his Black List Table Reads<\/a> podcast.\u00a0Nicolas Rapold offers a useful guide<\/a> to the individuals profiled in Trumbo<\/em>, including its composite characters. If you’re interested,\u00a0you can see actual footage of the announcements of various screenwriting awards at the Oscar ceremonies of 1957<\/a>, 1958<\/a>, and 1959<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For more on how adaptation works, see the thirteenth chapter of the new edition of Film Art: An Introduction<\/em>, forthcoming next week. That chapter is available for courses as an add-on to both the printed edition and the McGraw-Hill electronic edition.<\/p>\n

\"Gun<\/a><\/p>\n

Trumbo.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo; John Frankenheimer and Dalton Trumbo.   DB here: Who better to comment on the historical implications of Jay Roach’s Trumbo than our friend and collaborator on Film Art, Jeff Smith? He’s not only an expert on film sound, as he showed in his guest post on Brave, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1,12,57,40,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-and-other-media","category-film-comments","category-film-history","category-hollywood-aesthetic-traditions","category-hollywood-the-business","category-screenwriting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33187"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33230,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33187\/revisions\/33230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}