#trumbo

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

Dalton Trumbo was reputedly postwar Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriter and perhaps its most iconic as he was known to write his scripts whilst taking a bath. With such scripts under his belt as 1940’s class conscious Kitty Foyle, for which Ginger Rogers won a Best Actress Oscar, and World War II morale boosters like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo starring Spencer Tracy, he was rightly seen as one of the best screenwriters in Hollywood. But to keep this prestigious, well-paying job, as Dalton was warned by MGM’s studio mogul Louis B. Mayer, he best avoid politics. Trumbo didn’t listen.

After the WWII alliance between Washington and Moscow collapsed and the Cold War began, Hollywood leftists were subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about alleged film propaganda.

Among witnesses HUAC summoned was Trumbo. To continue making movies all he had to do was to confess to the grand inquisitors (which included Richard Nixon) that he’d joined the Party and to name Communists, leftists and union supporters in the movie colony. But like other members of the Hollywood Ten, in 1947 a defiant Trumbo refused to cooperate, was fined for contempt of Congress, and sentenced to prison.

Despite their beliefs in the First Amendment, the “Hollywood Ten” were convicted for contempt of congress. They appealed to the Supreme Court, however the Supreme Court chose to keep their convictions in place. This led to Trumbo having to serve almost a year in prison. Trumbo, along with the rest of the Hollywood Ten, were also blacklisted by the film industry and kicked out of the Screen Writers Guild – despite the fact that one of the Hollywood Ten, John Howard Lawson, was the first President of the SWG and one of its founders. This meant that they would not be able to obtain any work in Hollywood.

However, the blacklist did not stop Dalton Trumbo, who wrote under “fronts” or assumed names. After the failure of the Hollywood Ten’s appeals, Trumbo and his family moved to Mexico. It was here that Trumbo wrote some of his best work, often chain-smoking in the bathtub, with a parrot that Kirk Douglas had given him for company. One film which he wrote during this time was Roman Holiday, which won an Oscar for his screenplay. But on this occasion, Ian McLellen Hunter, a fellow screenwriter, had acted as Trumbo’s “front” and therefore accepted the award as if the screenplay was Hunter’s own. It was not until 1993 that Trumbo was posthumously awarded this Oscar, 16 years after his death. Audrey Hepburn also won an Oscar for her performance in the film.

A Monday Monday Song Johnny Got His Gun is the second track on my recently released album, Peace Colored Gown. (Over the next several Mondays, I will be featuring a song from the album, describing its background and how it came to be). Johnny Got His Gun is an anti-war novel written in 1938 by American novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and published September 1939 by J. B. Lippincott. It…