Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Blacklist of Liberal Writers
By
Timothy Sexton
In 1943 Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo officially became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Then, as now, and as at any time in American history, it was not a crime to belong to the Communist Party. Nevertheless, Trumbo's decision to make the leap from fellow traveler to official member would have far-reaching repercussions that no real American could ever have envisioned at a time when American and Soviet soldiers were fighting side by side in Europe to stem the tide of fascism. Trumbo would later explain that he basically joined the Communist party because so many of his friends were members and he trusted them, and had no real reason not to trust the Party. Despite being a member of the Communist Party, over the course of the next few years Trumbo was one of the most in-demand and well-respected screenwriters in Hollywood. His credits during this period included such classics as
A Guy Named Joe, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, and the WWII masterpiece
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. As might be expected, it was not until after the end of World War II and the institution of many Nazi war criminals and the adoption of a fascist undercurrent running through the American political system that Dalton Trumbo's career began to take a nosedive.
Dalton Trumbo's original literary ambitions had been to become a novelist. His life spent in poverty, along with a sideline of petty criminal activity, might perhaps have been the stuff of an American Dostoyevsky. The Great Depression changed the career paths of many people, proof positive that Karl Marx was onto something when he theorized that economic conditions determine consciousness. Faced with toiling in near-poverty as he attempted to write the Great American Novel or putting food on the table by becoming a script reader at Warner Brothers, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the path Trumbo chose. Trumbo quickly rose to become a screenwriter for B-movies for Warners before his obvious talent was finally recognized and he was promoted to pen such pre-blacklist classics as the Academy Award-winning
Kitty Foyle and
I Married a Witch, the movie that would be refashioned a few decades later into the long-running TV series Bewitched.
After getting the requisite screen credit, Dalton Trumbo had rushed to become an active member of the Screen Writers Guild. Although the 2007/2008 writer's strike may give the impression that the Writers Guild is a tough political group, today it is pretty much impotent compared to the power it had in the 30s and 40s. In fact, the President of the Screen Writers Guild, John Howard Lawson, was accused of being too political and giving the writers far more power than the studios desired them to have. The Hollywood studios moved to make the Screen Playwrights the go-to union for writers and attempted to force their top writers to resign as members of the Screen Writers Guild and join the new union which they essentially controlled. Trumbo flatly refused to do so and found his contract was immediately declared null and void. Not all writers were as committed as Trumbo: the Screen Writers Guild soon discovered that roughly 80% of its membership had abandoned them. It was the first time that Dalton Trumbo would be placed on a blacklist, but not the last, and it lasted only six months. The second blacklist would last over ten years.
The ironically named House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which was in itself one of the most un-American activities ever sanctioned by legality in American history, made it their mission to cleanse Hollywood of its communist influence. It would not be the last time that ideologically unsound hysterics overlooked the undeniable fact that the movie industry is without question the most conservative industry outside of the religious private school industry. (Not to mention the fact that there was about as much communist influence in Hollywood movies then as there is Islamic religious beliefs in Hollywood now.) In October of 1947, Dalton Trumbo was called before this collection of hypocrites and liars and proved to be the admirable anti-Elia Kazan. Whereas Elia "Rat Bastard" Kazan rolled over like the biggest coward in the history of Hollywood and named names left and right to keep his own sorry ass from losing the money to which he'd become accustomed and the ability to convince idiotic actresses like Marilyn Monroe to sleep with him, Dalton Trumbo proved to have the kind of backbone that a traitor like Kazan could only dream of. For his efforts to show that the whole thing was as farce as un-American as steak and kidney pie, Dalton Trumbo found himself on his second Hollywood blacklist. He would also go down in history as one of the infamous Hollywood Ten. He was also sentenced to federal jail on charges of contempt. (The irony continues to mount.) Trumbo served almost a year in prison despite committing only the crime of exercising his Fifth Amendment rights. But wait, that's not even a crime is it?
Exactly.
Once he was released from prison, he could only get screenwriting jobs by writing under a pen name and letting someone else take the credit. His salary for these writing jobs was appropriately less than what his name and reputation would have garnered had he take the route of Elia "Rat Bastard" Kazan and handed over his friends without so much as a pretension toward having a conscience. While Kazan was rewarded for ruining the lives of his so-called friends with A-list jobs and Oscars, Dalton Trumbo had to hide in the shadows. Of course, Dalton Trumbo also won Oscars. His screenplay for
Roman Holiday was honored with an Oscar for Best Screenplay, but he could not accept it or even publicly admit that he'd written it. Another level of irony: the man who was officially awarded the Oscar in Trumbo's name, Ian McClellan Hunter, would later find himself on the blacklist. Just a few years later another writer would accept Trumbo's Oscar for writing the screenplay for
The Brave One. Finally, in 1960, over a decade after his appearance before the HUAC, Dalton Trumbo's name would finally be placed in the credits of a film that he wrote. It took a star with magnitude, guts and conscience of Kirk Douglas who was also the producer of the first film following his blacklisting to publicly acknowledge that Dalton Trumbo was the writer:
Spartacus.
I'm Trumbo!