Blacklist

The Guardian reviews Trumbo

Via The Guardian, a very positive Trumbo review – when Hollywood saw red. The conclusion:

Alongside flagging up Otto Preminger’s unsung role in returning Trumbo’s name to the screen, what gives Roach’s movie bite is the depiction of the writer’s family and the toll that his actions and allegiances take upon them. 

Diane Lane is excellent as Trumbo’s loving but long-suffering spouse, Cleo, defending her children against their father’s drug- and alcohol-fuelled irritability, and Elle Fanning works wonders with the role of Niki (played in her younger years by Madison Wolfe), the elder daughter who seems to embody so many of her father’s fiery, idealistic traits. 

In the end, it is through the eyes of these characters that we see Trumbo most clearly, in all his stubborn, satirical glory. Cranston’s Trumbo may be the focus of attention, but Lane and Fanning’s Cleo and Niki (along with the rest of his family) are the power behind his throne – in fiction as in life.

Hollywood blacklisted my father: now I’m proud they’ve put him on screen

Credit: Mitzi Trumbo

Trumbo will open in the UK on February 5, and this article in The Guardian is part of the buildup: Hollywood blacklisted my father: now I’m proud they’ve put him on screen. Excerpt:

When Mitzi Trumbo was 15, she opened her front door to find one of Hollywood’s most famous actors standing outside. It was Kirk Douglas. A few days later, Laurence Olivier turned up. “He outstretched his hand for me to shake and the dog got in the way and he tripped over.” 

Fifty-five years later, she still remembers how starstruck she felt. But besides the excitement, what Mitzi most recalls from those encounters was a feeling of frustration that she couldn’t brag about it to her high-school friends. Her father, Dalton Trumbo, was one of the most famous Hollywood screenwriters of his generation, both for his work (he wrote the Oscar-winning Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, and several novels) and for his leftwing politics. 

In 1947, when anti-communist fear took root in America, Trumbo was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He refused to give the names of colleagues with supposedly communist sympathies and was imprisoned for 11 months. On his release, he was blacklisted and could not work under his own name. He continued to produce uncredited scripts and his three children – Nikola, Mitzi and Christopher – were told not to speak about anything that went on at home. 

When Mitzi opened the door to Douglas and Olivier, her father was writing the screenplay for Spartacus, which would go on to become one of the biggest box office hits of all time. Trumbo was publicly credited as its writer on the film’s release in 1960: an act that effectively broke the blacklist. 

The extraordinary story of Trumbo’s defiance in the face of politically motivated adversity has now been made into a film, with Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston in the title role and featuring Helen Mirren and John Goodman. 

“It’s an important story to get out there,” says Mitzi, 70, speaking from her home in the Bay Area of San Francisco. “Jay Roach [the director] and Bryan Cranston have done a wonderful job. They really care about it.” 

Seeing her father, who died in 1976, portrayed on screen was a surreal experience. Cranston bore a startling physical resemblance to Trumbo, “especially when they had him older. At times, I would be on set and I would say: ‘Gosh, that’s so like him.’ ” 

Other aspects rang less true. “There’s a scene where he takes me and my sister for ice-cream,” says Mitzi. “I was laughing with her afterwards saying, ‘That would never have happened!’ My father worked all the time and if we had issues we went to our mum. But he was fiercely entertaining. We learned about language and politics and how to think from him. That was pretty great.”

A debate over Trumbo and 'Trumbo'

My old friend David Looman has written a response to a recent criticism of Dalton Trumbo (the link to that piece is in the text). A shorter version appear in SFGate.com, but David has provided me with his original text, and allowed me to reproduce it here:

One of the most glorious episodes in San Francisco's history was the massive City Hall demonstrations at the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings in 1960; these demonstrations were a significant contribution to breaking the back of America's shameful anti-communist witchhunt.  It was therefore shocking to pick up the Chronicle the first Sunday after the New Year and be confronted by Michael Bernick's scurrilous and red-baiting article, "Why the lies of 'Trumbo' matter, need challenging."

Bernick makes no claims to originality ( or footnotes), writing instead to publicize the writings of Ron Radosh and Ron Capshaw -- the originals of which also appear without footnotes or sources.  Discerning readers may have missed Radosh's review of "Trumbo."  It appeared in an online magazine 'PJ Media', perhaps best known for recently running a series of articles on 'The Red Menace of Pete Seeger.'  Capshaw most often writes for The National Review, the official journal of right-wing Republicanism.  Writings of Radosh and Capshaw can also be found in the online "Front Page Magazine", whose slogan is,"Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out", and which feels its mission is to warn America about Obama's coming communist takeover of the government.

Bernick's road to challenging "Trumbo's lies" has a fairly unpromising start.  His first statement of putative fact is " In the 1930's Trumbo also became an active member of the Communist Party USA…". Out here in Realityland, if there is any one fact upon which both Trumbo's biographer's and the FBI are agreed, it is that Trumbo became a member of the Communist Party in 1943.  Bernick's piece goes downhill from there.

Bernick then cites  Radosh and Capshaw as 'setting out' that "Trumbo was an apologist for the 1930's Stalinist purges, secret police, and state control in the Soviet Union". Here one really would like a citation or a source. After all these years of controversy, I've never seen anyone, even Trumbo's worst enemy, produce a single quote from Trumbo supporting or apologizing for the purges, the secret police, or "state control". ("State control" seems a little syntactically challenged; the phrase usually seems to call for a preposition -- state control of something.)  Bernick claims Trumbo called Stalin one of the "democratic leaders of the world."  Here again, one would love to see a source.  Trumbo scholars Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo, in their massive biography "Dalton Trumbo" state unequivocally that "Trumbo never publically extolled or defended Stalin…"

The article goes on -- and on.  Bernick says, "Historian Radosh notes that Trumbo took steps to block movies by anti-communist authors Arthur Koestler, James Farrell and Victor Kravchenko, whose works he deemed 'untrue and reactionary'."  This is pure fiction !  Here's a communist, who can't even get a screen credit under his own name, blocking movies in one of the most ruthlessly capitalist industries in America.  Astounding!  Actually, Trumbo defended Koestler's right to write a wrong-headed screenplay when the issue arose during the making of Spartacus.  (I think Trumbo was a little hard on poor James T. Farrell, whose Studs Lonigan I loved as a youth. ) Radosh/Bernick then goes on both to misquote and to take out of context a letter to Herman Biberman about Biberman's conduct toward Trumbo. (Radosh has virtually made a career out of misquoting and misrepresenting the Trumbo to Biberman letter.  He puts it in every one of his pieces about Trumbo, each time with a new distortion.)

By this point, we are almost through Bernick's article, still looking for one of the "lies of Trumbo", and, just as important, looking for even a mention of what he thought "needed challenging."  We finally get it:  Bernick wants us to remember that "many people on the left … opposed Trumbo and the Communist Party.  These included Eleanor Roosevelt, trade unionists and democratic socialists such as Michael Harrington."  That's what Bernick thinks we needed to know.  Got it.  Eleanor Roosevelt was not a communist.  Thanks.

Eleanor Roosevelt, trade unionists, and democratic socialists such as Michael Harrington were also opposed to McCarthyism, the red scare, right-wing witch-hunts, and imprisoning people and destroying their livelihoods for their political beliefs.  That's what the movie Trumbo thinks we need to know.

Pure as Jesus and cunning as Satan: A review of Trumbo

Via The Los Angeles Review of Books, a long article by Jerome Christensen, a professor at UC Irvine: Pure as Jesus and Cunning as Satan. Excerpt:

Trumbo may or may not have ended the blacklist — most of the Ten never worked in Hollywood again. Trumbo may or may not be the first Hollywood movie about the Hollywood unions, but it is certainly the first biopic of a screenwriter. Trumbo earned his biopic because, in Spartacus, he wrote the allegory of his own imagined emancipation of his brethren as an epic. 

Some victories are imagined, and they win Oscars. Some victories are real, however, and they win power. In the end, this movie makes the convincing case that it is only Kirk Douglas, star on the screen, boss of the screenwriter, bane of the moguls, and chief of his runaway production, who, when the lights go on, can truly say with the purity of ownership and the cunning of history, “For better or worse, I am Spartacus.”

How Dalton Trumbo's kids changed 'Trumbo'

Via The Hollywood Reporter, published on September 2: How Dalton Trumbo's Kids Changed 'Trumbo'.

Dalton Trumbo’s surviving children played a key role in shaping Trumbo, the Bryan Cranston-starring biopic about the Hollywood screenwriter blacklisted in the 1940s and 1950s for his suspected Communist ties that premieres Sept. 12 at the Toronto International Film Festival. 

John McNamara, who penned the script, reached out to daughters Niki, a 76-year-old psychotherapist (depicted in the film by Elle Fanning), and Mitzi, a 70-year-old photographer, at the urging of director Jay Roach ("from my experience on Recount and Game Change, I encouraged him to get to know the people directly involved"). 

Through this process, the ending changed. Originally Trumbo shares a let-bygones-be-bygones moment with adversary John Wayne, which Mitzi found to be "corny" and unearned: "It seemed like putting a big happy bow on the whole thing." 

Likewise, they made sure that director Otto Preminger’s relatively lost-to-history role in breaking the Blacklist by offering Trumbo a screen credit on Exodus was depicted in the film as concurrent with Kirk Douglas’ own assistance on Spartacus (the star has proudly, and loudly, taken credit for it for the past half-century). "That was very important to me," says Mitzi. 

For Niki, weary of a too-saintly depiction of her father, "what I wanted was the more three-dimensional Trumbo. I particularly wanted his flaws to be seen. His substance abuse — the alcohol — wasn’t there at all before." 

Niki’s recollections of how, during the darkest days of the Blacklist, the family was enlisted in a small chicken farming-and-butchering operation, helped McNamara shape the final act’s caper shape, in which Trumbo puts the kids to work on his pseudonym-fueled screenwriting comeback in the schlock film market. 

"Jay was right," says McNamara. "Hearing them out carefully brought out so much." 

The Trumbos are happy to have been heard. "Coming from my perspective, it was not a story that would ever be told," says Niki. "Because it was too dangerous. There’s a moment in this script where 'Communist' is first said out loud. I had a moment thinking, 'They’ve gone too far. This is not going to be acceptable.' And I realized it was a hangover from growing up and living this story."

'Trumbo' leads diverse field in Screen Actors Guild nominations

Via (ironically) Voice of America: 'Trumbo' Leads Diverse Field in Screen Actors Guild Nominations. Excerpt:

"Trumbo," the movie about the 1947 Hollywood blacklist, led the Screen Actors Guild nominations Wednesday in a diverse field that hinted at likely Oscar contenders but snubbed presumed front-runners "The Martian" and new Jennifer Lawrence drama "Joy." 

"Trumbo," about a group of screenwriters and directors shunned for their associations with the Communist Party, earned three nominations, including the guild's top prize for best ensemble cast. 

Other nominees for best ensemble were Netflix African war drama "Beasts of No Nation," Wall Street comedy "The Big Short," Catholic Church abuse probe "Spotlight" and rap movie "Straight Outta Compton." 

Adam McKay, director of "The Big Short" said he was impressed by the range of topics covered by the nominations. "You're talking about the advent of hip hop, child soldiers, the sex scandal in Catholic Church and malfeasance in Wall Street. I'm pretty proud of that for Hollywood," he told Reuters. 

The top winners at the SAG awards, chosen by more than 100,000 actors, often go on to win Oscars. The list was announced a day ahead of Thursday's Golden Globe nominations and January's nominations for the Oscars. 

"Trumbo" star Bryan Cranston earned a best actor nod for his role as Dalton Trumbo, while Helen Mirren got a best supporting actress nomination for playing gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.

'I lived it': Niki Trumbo on the movie

 

Credit: Bleecker Street

Via MovieFreak.com: "Trumbo" - Interview with Niki Trumbo. Excerpt:

It goes without saying that Niki Trumbo would have unusually intimate insight others would not likely possess in regards to director Jay Roach’s Trumbo. After all, the movie is a biopic of her two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter father, Dalton Trumbo (portrayed by Bryan Cranston), after all, so she was front and center for all of the events depicted within the confines of the 124-minute opus. The majority of the picture focuses on his blacklisting in Hollywood after he and several of his fellow writers stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), each accused of being communists, all unwilling to throw others under the bus just so they could stay out of jail. 

“It was weird,” laughs Niki Trumbo, “watching portions of it that first time. We went to New Orleans to visit the set and one of the producers showed us a little five minute clip of the birthday scene, and it just undid me. I was just in tears. I can’t exactly explain what it feels like, to see yourself – although it is not you – in a scene you never were really in or happened exactly like it was depicted but the essence of which of the emotion and what I was feeling during that time is all right there. It’s a little overwhelming.” 

A Seattle resident, I was able to sit down for a few minutes with Niki at the downtown Fairmont Olympic Hotel to discuss her father, the film and what the entire process of having a Hollywood filmmaker dig so deeply into her life has been like. Although brief, our conversation was a consistently engaging one, and for my part it time flew by way too quickly. 

“I love this movie,” she says with a massive grin. “I love it so much. I like the father-daughter story because it is representative to what so much of our relationship was like. I love how they’ve depicted Trumbo. I love Bryan’s performance. There is nothing about this movie that I can think of that I don’t like.” 

There’s a wonderful sequence early on in the film where Dalton and Niki are horseback riding, and it is here the daughter asks her loving dad to explain communism to her. It’s a wonderful moment, perfectly sublime in both delivery and impact, allowing the viewer instant insight into who this man was, his thought process and his deep, overwhelming desire to be a good father even as he knows a storm of immeasurable power and size is about to descend upon him and his family. Granted, it also never happened. At least, not all at once, and not as depicted in the film. 

“No,” she chuckles, “we never had a conversation like that one while riding horses. That’s made up. But it’s also what I was referring to earlier. It’s another essence moment, a scene that fits what was going on at the time and the emotions we were feeling, but not actual reality. The real moment was more like me asking, ‘Daddy, are you a communist?’ and him replying that he was. The follow-up question was something like, ‘Can I be a communist when I grow up?’ and I wanted him to say that of course I could be; that he’d be so proud of me if I was. Instead he told me I had to be 21 before I could make decisions like that. I had to be old enough to vote. I was so disappointed!  

“Of course, what I wanted was his approval more than I wanted to be a communist. But, I also think he didn’t want to influence my political beliefs, so he wanted to distance himself a little bit from doing that until I was older and could actually talk about, discuss and debate those sort of topics from a place of mutual understanding.”

Robert Fulford: The myth of the Hollywood Ten

Via The National Post: Robert Fulford: The myth of the Hollywood Ten. Fulford is a veteran Canadian journalist, and in this column he echoes the American right's ongoing anxiety about Trumbo and the Hollywood Reds. Excerpt and then a comment:

Allan Ryskind’s recent book, Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters, shatters the innocent facade of the writers, especially Trumbo. Ryskind grew up in Hollywood, where his father, Morrie Ryskind, wrote A Night at the Opera for the Marx Brothers. Since then Allan has watched the flowering of the legend with a skeptical eye. 

He says the behaviour of the Ten during the time of the German-Soviet pact betrays their real opinions. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a 10-year non-aggression pact in Aug. 23, 1939, allowing Germany to conquer Poland without fear of Soviet intervention — the beginning of the Second World War. 

For the next 22 months Trumbo and the others were American isolationists, ferociously opposing Franklin Roosevelt’s aid to Britain in its fight with Germany. They were following Communist orders. When Hitler betrayed Stalin and attacked Russia, Communists like Trumbo abruptly reversed their opinions and announced that Germany had to be opposed. 

The movie Trumbo ignores these developments in order to keep the liberal myth alive. It presents Dalton Trumbo as high-minded, inventive and desperate to maintain both his pride and his income. It’s amusing from time to time, providing the audience doesn’t think about who believed what, when and why.

Strikingly, Fulford doesn't mention that Morrie Ryskind (whose often funny columns I recall in the Los Angeles Times long ago) was also a former left-winger who'd moved right in 1940; in 1947 he appeared before HUAC as a "friendly witness."

That was often the way it went in those days: some people joined the Communist Party, or other far-left parties, not out of a desire to achieve concrete political goals, but out of a desire for the One True Faith. When the political party turned out not to be a god after all, they swung far over to the opposition. At least they found more money over there, and more cordial conversations with the FBI. 

My teacher, Dalton Trumbo

Via The Tyee, my review of Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical: My Teacher, Dalton Trumbo. Excerpt:

Dalton Trumbo, on a Mexico City night in 1952, handed back my 88-page typed science-fiction novelette and said, "Well, you're a writer." 

He also offered me a dollar for it, which, age 11, I foolishly declined; I wouldn't see any more writing income for a quarter-century. But I knew he'd set my course in life. 

That's just one reason why I'm perversely grateful for the Hollywood blacklist, which has now returned to public consciousness -- first through the full-scale biography by Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo, and then through the new movie Trumbo. 

Trumbo and his family were in Mexico because he'd been toppled from his post as the best-paid writer in Hollywood, and therefore in the world. His Communist politics had made him collateral damage in the opening shots of the Cold War. In the 1940s movies were the dominant mass medium, seen by millions of Americans two or three times a week. The idea of a screenwriter with the wrong politics was intolerable. And it was good politics for the House Un-American Activities Committee to invade Hollywood, ask questions, and drive very capable people out of their careers. 

The blacklist ruined thousands of lives and careers, including those of the Trumbos, my parents, and countless others. And that's not counting the many more blacklisted before and since out of less glamorous jobs than working in Hollywood.

Ceplair: The year of Trumbo

Yesterday I emailed Larry Ceplair about this blog, and he very kindly sent this article he's written on "The year of Trumbo":

In the People’s Republic of China, it is the year of the sheep; in the United States it seems to be the year of Dalton Trumbo.  Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical, co-authored by me and Christopher Trumbo, was published in January.  Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters – a polemical attack on Trumbo and the other Hollywood blacklistees – by Allen Ryskind, the son of a Hollywood anticommunist, was published a few months later.   An earlier biography of Trumbo, written by Bruce Cook, was reprinted in September.  The movie, Trumbo, based on Cook’s biography, opened in November, preceded and followed by a series of articles by anti-Communists blasting the movie’s positive portrayal of its subject. 

Why, some seventy years after the October 1947 hearings that initiated the blacklist and some twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the putative end of the cold war does the mention of the name Dalton Trumbo still provoke such animus from latter-day anti-Communists?   It is because he and the other members of the Hollywood Ten are, along with Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, the outstanding symbols of an ongoing, unresolved debate in this country about national security and patriotism. 

Since the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), the debate has arisen about every thirty years: the mailing of abolitionist pamphlets (1830s); suspending the writ of habeas corpus (1860s); the mass emigration from eastern Europe at the turn of the century; the Espionage Act of 1917; the Alien Registration Act of 1940; and the loyalty oaths and anti-Communist acts of the domestic cold war.  In the post-cold-war years, the gaps have grown smaller, as the PATRIOT acts have consistently widened government incursions and the immigration/refugee issue has amplified the volume.

Dalton Trumbo was the most successful and colorful of the hundreds of blacklisted Hollywood people (not to mention the thousands of blacklisted teachers and trade-union members).  Not only did he author dozens of pamphlets, articles, and speeches condemning the domestic cold war, he virtually single-handedly devised and engineered the campaign that undermined the motion-picture blacklist.  The publication of his collected letters (in 1970) and his film Johnny Got His Gun (1971) catalyzed the birth of revisionist history about the blacklist.  By that I mean that the books and articles written prior to 1970 were mainly unfavorable toward and critical of the Hollywood Ten, seeing them as hacks, unworthy of respect for their political choices, and subversives, who got what they deserved.  Their fate was necessary to protect national security and represented no loss to United States culture. 

Victor Navasky (Naming Names), Nancy Schwartz (The Hollywood Writers’ Wars), myself and Steven Englund (The Inquisition in Hollywood) wrote books, published at the end of the decade, telling a very different story.  We argued that the Ten had raised a legitimate challenge to the Committee on Un-American Activities and the other congressional committees and administrative tribunals unjustly proscribing members of the Communist Party and kindred leftists.  We believed that the domestic cold war, which was really aimed at silencing all critics of government and society, harmed rather than enhanced national security.

We held the stage for about a decade.  Then, in the 1990s, the pendulum swung back, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of some of its archives.  Several books appeared, re-accusing the Ten of being agents of the Soviet Union, dedicated to the destruction of the United States.  Their main indictment was that Trumbo and the others were “unrepentant Stalinists,” who had not apologized for their apostasy or praised the domestic cold war.  And yet they had gone back to work under their own names and were now being celebrated! 

Christopher Trumbo entered the ring in opposition, with a series of interviews, his play (Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted), the documentary film (Trumbo) based on the play, and his plans for a comprehensive biography of his father.  After his premature death, I completed what he had begun.  (Unknown to us both, John McNamara was, during this time, trying to get his Trumbo screenplay financed.)

Trumbo is, in fact, more than a symbol.  He was a significant political actor, possessing a formidable analytical mind.  He read at length and deeply in history and politics.  He was, essentially, a populist cum democratic socialist, opposed to what he and his generation of radicals labeled “thought control.”  Their challenge to the Committee on Un-American Activities, though it was, in the short run, a losing effort, was one of the first direct challenges to the cold-war state.  Those challenges widened over the years and, within ten years, the United States Supreme Court began, finally, to heed their words and to begin to roll back some of the worst elements of cold-war proscriptions. 

But the national security state constructed during the cold war continues to widen and lengthen its control over information, requiring every generation to re-engage in the fight to protect the rights of free speech and assembly in the United States. That is why the year of Trumbo is so significant.  It follows the years of Edward Snowden and serves as a reminder that vigilance and courage are the only protections against a governing apparatus determined to monopolize any and all information.