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"Trumbo" the Movie

Jan 6, 2016 | Books

I’m not going to be doing a Book of the Week for the next month, I’m going to do a Movie of the Week.  As you may remember, I am, among other things, an actor and a member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG).  SAG has its own awards ceremony for actors that only other actors can vote on.  So, I have to watch all the movies and TV shows that there are nominees in so I know what I’m voting on.  Sound real tough, huh?  Yeah, it’s a lot of fun … for the first few weeks.  Then it’s like, “I have to watch another movie today?!”  So, anyway, I’m not reading that much for now.

The first movie I’m going to talk about is Trumbo.  It’s about the entertainment blacklist during the McCarthy witch hunt.  Dalton Trumbo was one of the best screenwriters possibly ever in Hollywood.  And he was blacklisted because he was a member of the communist party.

Brian Cranston as Trumbo is every bit as good as you’d expect him to be.  He’s a wonderful actor.  I’m not going to name everyone else who did a wonderful job.  Just go online and look at the cast list.  They were all amazing.  And the actors playing Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, and Kirk Douglas, and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper all just nail their characters.  You can see and hear the celebrity in them.

But this movie isn’t just good.  It’s important.  I thought I knew about the blacklist, but I didn’t know anything.  I don’t think anyone but those directly involved really knew, and should.  I told a 43-year-old woman the movie was about the McCarthy witch hunts and blacklist and she had no idea what I was talking about.  It wasn’t even that much before her time and she had never heard of it.  That is not good.  We need to remember what happened when we let panic run our lives and our government.

Yes, Trumbo was an admitted communist.  But so what?  It’s not illegal.  What is illegal is imprisoning him for it.  Yet, that is exactly what happened to him, the rest of the Hollywood Ten, and many other people.  And nobody stopped them!  And like the Salem witch trials it was named for, simply being accused made you guilty.  We need to remember.

In one of the first scenes of the movie, Trumbo’s daughter asks if she is a communist or, like her mother, a democrat.  Trumbo gives her the “test:” If she had a sandwich at lunchtime at school and she saw a child who had no lunch, what would she do?  She immediately says she would share her sandwich with the other child.  “Oh, I see.  You would sell half of your sandwich to him.”  As she says no to each option he presents, she giggles more and more, because to her it is so obvious that sharing is the right thing to do.  Then she is a Communist, her father tells her.  It’s trite and simplistic, but the scene is very well done and makes a very good point.

After his release from prison, he continued to write screenplays, but under pseudonyms.  His name would guarantee failure.  Insiders knew he was writing them.  They knew he wrote Roman Holiday, as well as Spartacus, The Brave One, Exodus, and lots of other films you’ve heard of.

Now, if the movie is accurate, Spartacus and Exodus were what brought an end to the blacklist.  They both came out in 1960.  Kirk Douglas produced Spartacus and he did not hide that he had hired Trumbo to write it.  Otto Preminger said the script he wrote for Exodus was so terrible that he was going to put Trumbo’s real name on it, “so you can take the blame.”  He was kidding, of course.  Like Douglas, he was taking a stand, and both of them had the clout to do it.

John Wayne, the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Hedda Hopper threatened to boycott and demonstrate outside the theaters where Spartacus was playing it to keep people from coming inside.  Which they did.  Boycott and demonstrate, that is.  It didn’t stop anyone from going in to see it.  President Kennedy very publicly and pointedly crossed picket lines to see it and Preminger publicly announced that Trumbo had written Exodus.  That double-whammy destroyed the credibility of the blacklist and the era was over.
But we still need to remember it.  And this movie does an excellent job of showing the era for what it was.

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