Tackling Trumbo: How the story of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was told and why Hollywood isn’t tackling serious issues

Screenwriter John McNamara on why he chose to tell the story of blacklisted Hollywood writer Dalton Trumbo, and how after 25 years in the movie industry he thought it would be an impossible film to make

Dalton Trumbo, played here by Bryan Cranston, secretly wrote screen hits including Roman Holiday

Credit: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle

I DIDN’T WRITE TRUMBO for political reasons, or because I felt I had anything new to say about the dangers of censorship and demagoguery. My interest came about because I was lucky to meet four writers who, for much of their careers, were very unlucky.

The first was Arthur Laurents, best known as the librettist of the musical West Side Story and screenwriter of the first studio movie about the Hollywood Blacklist (albeit a fictional one), The Way We Were. We met in 1982, through the first annual Young Playwrights Festival, a national writing competition founded by composer Stephen Sondheim. Thanks to Steve and his arts foundation, my one-act play and nine others were produced off-Broadway. Arthur was one of the directors. A witty, intimidating, engaging man, I’d nag him for career advice (“Write more than you talk,” he’d say) and lessons he learned in his career. On the latter, his replies were less terse.

I loved The Way We Were and it remains one of my favourite movies. Arthur said the experience of making it was painful, not only because he clashed with the director and was fired and rehired more than once, but also because he himself had been blacklisted in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s for his progressive political beliefs. For him, writing The Way We Were – even in its heavily dramatised form – meant reliving nightmarish agony. He had lost his career because he refused to name fellow radicals; he lost friends because they named him to save their own careers.

I was too young at the time to do much but listen, and that was a good thing, because his anecdotes about loyalty, betrayal, revenge and forgiveness, were the purest educational lectures I’d experienced.

Two years later, while an undergraduate at New York University, I leapt at the chance to audit a graduate screenwriting class taught by Ring Lardner Junior, Waldo Salt and Ian McLellan Hunter, all formerly blacklisted. While I very much wanted to learn what they had to teach me about writing, thanks to Arthur I also wanted to learn more about the blacklist from those who’d lived through it.

And so I did, none more so than from Ian McLellan Hunter, who told me that though he was the credited writer of the classic romantic comedy Roman Holiday, he’d been the front for the movie’s actual, blacklisted screenwriter: his great friend, Dalton Trumbo.

Trumbo’s name then came up frequently in class. He’d only been dead a few years, but his presence still cast a huge shadow. As Ian and Ring described Trumbo’s humour in the face of luckless battle – or his largesse while flat broke, or hilarious epistolary clashes with congressmen, producers, stars and banks, the story was again impressed on me. This all happened. In my country. Not long ago. To these people sitting right in front of me and those they knew. What their stories about Trumbo made even clearer was that, while many had survived the blacklist – which was heroic enough – Dalton Trumbo had actually helped end it. He did it consciously, strategically and with as little fear in his heart as any human being I can imagine.

And yet, when you learn interesting things at a young age, you can easily set them aside. Because life. Because new and shiny. Because girls. Because parties. Because ambition and scrambling to get any job you can as a writer. Which is how I more or less forgot about Trumbo and the blacklist as soon as I moved to Hollywood in 1984.

The film Trumbo tells of how writer Dalton Trumbo was forced to write films under a false name

Credit: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle

Twenty-four years later, deep into a Hollywood writing career of high and lows, I was casually telling my friend, producer Kevin Kelly Brown, about Trumbo’s life. Kevin saw it as a possible movie. I only saw the impossibilities. “The hero is a communist,” I said, “It’s period, it’s political, it’s showbiz, there is no sex, no gore, no ticking time bombs or fart-based comic set pieces, no tights, fights or flights and, most damningly, no chance of a lucrative tent pole franchise.”

In other words, while my government would have no interest in censoring my attempt to tell this story, I, after a quarter century in the Hollywood marketplace, was censoring myself.

And in that moment, it struck me: my baked-in-Los-Angeles thinking had become not just narrow but cowardly. The best prison a society can construct is made by and for the prisoners. Once I realised this is exactly the kind of future the House Un-American Activities Committee would have dreamed about, I committed heart and soul to the story of Dalton Trumbo.

Kevin and I optioned Bruce Cook’s Dalton Trumbo biography with our own money, and I set about writing and rewriting it on spec for the next seven years.

We soon discovered self-censorship isn’t made in a vacuum but born on palm-lined boulevards pulsing with big, sleek cars and people in dark, sleek attire talking to one another on tiny, sleek phones, all on the hunt for The Next Big Thing that, it goes without saying, must be sleek.

Helen Mirren stars in Trumbo, playing gossip columnist Hedda Hopper who was renowned for naming suspected communists in her writing

Credit:Hilary Bronwyn Gail / Bleecker Street

Which is the reason the movie output of major studios has primarily narrowed to: big comedies, bigger action movies, biggest family animated films. A movie like Trumbo would not have a place on a major studio’s slate, mainly because it doesn’t reassure the audience that its beliefs are sacrosanct; rather it demands they question those beliefs and face the fact that some of life’s problems are irresolvable. Superhero problems are resolved by conquering obstacles we all agree on (destruction of Earth – bad; saving babies – good); movie comedians can titillate but mustn’t disturb (goofy dad farts uncontrollably at mom’s birthday… but shows up for father-daughter dance). There is nothing wrong with the superhero or goofy dad. I take my nine-year-old son to every one of their movies the second they hit the multiplex and enjoy them as much as he does. My only issue is the multiplex really ought to be renamed the uni-plex, because it only shows us the stories we want to believe, rarely the ones we need to confront.

Trumbo had no interest in celebrating the things on which we all agree. In fact, he fought for the opposite, believing each and every American has the right to be wrong.

But this same script that repelled the major studios attracted a sharp and tasteful producer in Michael London, an excellent director in Jay Roach, and stars Bryan Cranston, Helen Mirren, Diane Lane, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Louis CK and Elle Fanning, a package of talent that locked down a new financing company, ShivHans, and its distributor, Bleecker Street.

And while rounds of script notes are commonplace at the major studios, as they try to reshape what is true (a communist fights to save the First Amendment) into what might become beloved (a steroidal white male in neoprene kills aliens… farts… and saves babies), ShivHans and Bleecker Street never had a single note on the script.

All the rewriting I did was with the director and actors, under the watchful eyes of our consultants, Trumbo’s daughters Niki and Mitzi. Everyone’s common goal was to make the movie as honest, accurate and entertaining as possible.

So while Dalton Trumbo the man laboured under such crushing political oppression he couldn’t even put his name on his often-compromised work, Trumbo the movie is exactly as I wrote it, without a breath of compromise, made better at every step by the passionate debates we had along the way. For good or ill, and I’ll never be an impartial judge, not a single rewrite on Trumbo dulled its jagged edges or resolved its inherent contradictions.

It may be the pinnacle of irony that a movie about fascistic politicians and paranoid movie studios of 1947 colluding to kill progressive thought would be made in 2015 under circumstances of unregenerate artistic freedom.

It’s an irony I think Dalton Trumbo would smile at knowingly. His genius and bull-headed love of fighting and winning led to the removal of a muzzle that silenced an entire nation.

In part because of Dalton Trumbo, I live in a country that’s arguably more free (though with far more surveillance). Yet in that moment when I was ticking off all the reasons no one would ever make his story into a movie, I realised I’d silenced myself as efficiently as any studio or government ever could. I’m glad his life and work helped me see that. And that by writing his story, I could remove the muzzle I’d placed on myself. In late-night quiet, I promise him – a prayer from one atheist to another – that I’ll never willingly slip that muzzle on myself again. And will fight anyone who tries to force it on another.