Author Spotlight: Dalton Trumbo
All movies that make it to the silver screen started out as pages and pages of dialogue, scene design, and camera directions, most of which were created by a screenwriter. Dalton Trumbo was a prolific screenwriter of the Golden Age of cinema, the ’40s–’50s, penning award-winning films like Roman Holiday, Spartacus, and Exodus—except he didn’t use his name in most of them.
Trumbo was born and raised in Colorado and showed promise as a writer at an early age, working as a cub reporter for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel while he was still in high school. He attended the University of Colorado in Boulder for two years, where he continued to impress with his writing. He worked as a reporter for the Boulder Daily Camera and contributed to campus publications such as the humor magazine, the yearbook, and the campus newspaper.
In 1930, he started working as a writer professionally. He wrote articles for mainstream magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Vanity Fair, and the Hollywood Spectator, where he was later hired as a managing editor. After leaving the Hollywood Spectator, Trumbo worked as a reader in Warner Bros. Studios’ story department.
Before foraying into screenplays, Trumbo was a novelist. His first published work, Eclipse, was released in 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression. The novel was a fictional representation of his childhood in Grand Junction, and the novel became controversial there. His next novel, Johnny Got His Gun, won a National Book Award for Most Original Book in 1939.
Trumbo entered the world of movies in 1937, and by the early 1940s, he was already one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood. Some of his early works for the screen included Kitty Foyle (1940), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945). He was nominated for an Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay for Kitty Foyle.
Trumbo’s reputation started getting muddy in the mid-1940s, when he, along with other workers in the film industry, was investigated for allegedly planting Communist propaganda in US films. He was sentenced eleven months in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1950 and was barred from working in the film industry, unless he disavowed Communism under oath.
Once his sentence was served, Trumbo moved with his family to Mexico City. He wrote 30 screenplays under various pseudonyms, which were sold to B-level movie studios. In 1950, he adapted Gun Crazy, a short story by McKinlay Kantor, and Kantor agreed to be the front for Trumbo’s screenplay. He also wrote The Brave One (1956), which was credited to “Robert Rich,” the name of a producer’s nephew. The film later won the Academy Award for Best Story.
By the late ’50s, the enforcement of the blacklist weakened, and Trumbo was credited for the 1960 film Exodus, adapted from the eponymous novel by Leon Uris. Later on, actor Kirk Douglas also publicized that Trumbo wrote the screenplay for Spartacus, which Douglas had starred in. Spartacus is an epic historical drama based on a novel of the same name by Howard Fast. It was also one of the biggest box office hits of all time. It was this move that ended the blacklist. Trumbo was reinstated into the Writers Guild of America, and gradually, his films were credited back to him. The last to be credited was Roman Holiday, which was finally credited to Trumbo in 2011. Roman Holiday starred Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck and is the story of a young princess who went out to see Rome on her own. By the time of its release, Roman Holiday was both a box office and a critical hit, and by 2011, it was already considered a classic in American film.
In 1971, Trumbo adapted his own novel, Johnny Got His Gun. In 1975, he was officially recognized by the Academy. He was presented with an Oscar statuette for Best Story for The Brave One. In 1993, he was also awarded a posthumous Academy Award for Roman Holiday, which was previously credited to Ian Hunter, one of Trumbo’s fronts.
Trumbo passed away in 1976 as a result of a heart attack. He donated his body to scientific research.
In 2015, a film based on Trumbo’s life was released, starring Bryan Cranston and directed by Jay Roach. The film, titled Trumbo, received critical acclaim. A collection of his work is also available in the Academy Film Archive. He is honored in his hometown of Grand Junction with a statue of his likeness writing screenplays in a bathtub.
Sources:
2. Hollywood blacklisted my father Dalton Trumbo: now I’m proud they’ve put him on screen
4. 5 Things You Didn't Know About Dalton Trumbo
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