 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976) | |
|
American screenwriter and novelist who started his career in Hollywood in the 1930s. Trumbo was one of the so-called Hollywood Ten, prominent scriptwriters and directors, who were arrested for contempt of Congress during the McCarthyist crusade against Communist in the 1950s. "He worked at night, often in the bathtub, the typewriter in front of him on a tray, a cigarette in his mouth (he smoked six packs a day). On his shoulder perched a parrot I had given him, pecking Dalton's ear while Dalton pecked at the keys." (Kirk Douglas in The Ragman's Son, 1988) Dalton Trumbo was born in Montrose, Colorado, but the family moved soon to Grand Junction, about 65 miles from Montrose. Trumbo grew up in Grand Junction, and later referred to his hometown as Shale City in ECLIPSE (1935) and JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1939). Trumbo's father, Orus Bonham Trumbo, tried different occupations, such as shoe retailer and beekeeper but without much success. While still at high school, Trumbo started to write for the local newspaper, the Daily Sentinel. He studied at the University of Colorado from 1924 to 1925. When his father died in 1925, Trumbo moved to Los Angeles to support his mother and two little sisters. He worked for nine years on the night shift at a bakery. (Quote: "I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of.") During this time he also studied at the University of California and at the University of Southern California. His first stories and essays Trumbo published in Vanity Fair. In 1932 he began contributing to the Hollywood Spectator, and left the bakery when he was offered the post of managing editor of the magazine. As a novelist Trumbo made his debut with Eclipse, a satire in the spirit of Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922) about a self-made businessman, John Abbott, in confrontation with provincial culture - thinly veiled real-life persons from Grand Junction. In the same year he entered the film industry as a reader and a screenwriter at Warner Bros. Trumbo wrote twenty-one screenplays in the next six years, many of them low-budget remakes for the B-picture units at Warner's, Columbia, and RKO. His adaptation of Christopher Morley's novel KITTY FOYLE, a story about a white-collar girl and her troubled love life, won an Oscar nomination. From an early age, Trumbo was determined to be a novelist. The inspiration for his anti-war story Johnny Got His Gun came when he read an article about a British officer, who was horribly disfigured during World War I. The book won a National Book Award, but had its greatest success in Japan, where it appeared before the attack on Pearl Harbour, and was widely discussed among peace groups after the USA declared war on Japan. Trumbo himself was not in fact unhappy after the book went out of print, on account of its possible use in obscuring the war effort. Joe, the protagonist, is a soldier of the first World War. His body has been destroyed in a battle on the last day of the war. First he doesn't realize his situation: "He had no legs and no arms and no eyes and no ears and no nose and no mouth and no tongue. What a hell of a dream. It must be a dream. Of course sweet god it's a dream. He'd have to wake up or he'd go to nuts. Nobody could live like that." Joe, a living dead man, realizes then the extent of his disfigurement and tries desperately to find a way to communicate with his surroundings. Using the occasional stream of consciousness, Trumbo follows Joe's thoughts, feelings, and memories as he lies helpless in the nightmare. Johnny Got His Gun remained for long an underground classic. It was republished first in 1959, influencing the emerging generation of Beats, and such protest singers as Bob Dylan. In the 1960s the Spanish film director Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) planned to film the work, and wrote the script with Trumbo. This production never took off, but Trumbo himself found backing to produce the script and made in 1971 his own debut as a director with its film adaptation, starring Timothy Bottoms, Jason Robards, Diane Varsi and Donald Sutherland as Jesus Christ. The film won several awards at Cannes, but did poorly at the box office in the U.S. The screenplay had only Trumbo's name on it. In 1938 Trumbo married Cleo Fincher and bought a ranch, named Lazy T, at Lockwood Valley, some 140 kilometers from Hollywood. During World War II Trumbo was a war correspondent with the US Army Air Forces. In THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO (1944) Trumbo avoided racist overtones in his script. The film had the quality of a documentary and depicted the first American attack on Japan. Spencer Tracy played Lt. Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, who gained world fame as the commander of the bold bombing raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942. "A big studio, big scale film, free of artistic pretensions, it is transformed by its not very imaginative but very dogged sincerity into something forceful, simple and thoroughly sympathetic." (film critic James Agee) In 2001 this episode of World War II filled the latter part of the mega-budgeted Pearl Harbor, directed by Michael Bay, starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Beckinsale. This film was considered by Lou Lumenick a "third-rate schmaltz that pays only lip service to history." (New York Post) Trumbo joined the Communist Party in 1943 and after the war supported a strike organized by the Conference of Studio Unions. However, from 1948 Trumbo's relationship with the party became more distant, mainly because he did not have time for it. Communism meant for Trumbo freedom and brotherhood, and struggle against fascism, but he did not care much about Marx. Lela Rogers, Ginger Rogers's mother, reportedly testified that she believed writers Trumbo and Clifford Odets were Communists. Ginger had refused to say a line from a Trumbo's screenplay - "Share and share alike, that's democracy." As a scriptwriter Trumbo was highly successful and well paid, but he was also a campaigner for union rights, the National Chairman of Writers, and member of the HICCASP (Hollywood Independent Citizens' Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions). In 1947 Trumbo was sentenced to a jail term for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Along with others from the 'Hollywood Ten' group of writers and actors (Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Robert Adrian Scott), Trumbo refused to state whether they were, or ever had been, members of the Communist Party. The Ten were charged with contempt and later convicted. Trumbo was fired from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and imprisoned for a year in 1950. During this period he read Tolstoy's novel War and Peace. After his release, Trumbo was blacklisted and unable to find work in the United States. In GUN CRAZY (1949) Millard Kaufman had served as a front for Trumbo. The film has enjoyed fame as one of the great B-pictures. Cummins and Dall are two doomed lovers, who owe much to the real-life characters of Bonnie and Clyde. The hero's fascination with guns is an early warning about the role of firearms in American culture. Trumbo sold his California ranch and moved his family to Mexico, living with a colony of other blacklistees. He continued writing scripts at cut-rate prices under various pseudonyms, mostly for low-budget films. He also wrote stories for a women's magazine using his wife's name. Among Trumbo's employers was the King Brothers, who produced the film THE BRAVE ONE (1956), based on his story 'The Boy and the Bull'. To hide his identity, Trumbo used a checking account at the United States National Bank on Colorado Avenue in Pasadena, under the name of James and Dorothy Bonham. Banks rewarded clerks for giving information about anyone suspected of being subversive. "I went through this ridiculous routine because I have never endorsed with my own name any check, lest the looseness of Hollywood banking clerks would cause it to be known that DT was working for this or that producer." Ian McLellan Hunter has said that Trumbo wrote the original story for William Wyler's film ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953), starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. "He asked me to front for him," Hunter later said. Hunter was given an Academy Award for the story. "Had it been for the screenplay, I could have convinced myself that I had done most of it." Hunter turned over his fee from Paramount to Trumbo. Trumbo was a phenomenally fast scriptwriter. He could turn out a full, polished 150-page script in a week. Usually he wrote first the dialogue and then the shots, description, and action. His story for The Brave One (1956) won an Academy Award, under the alias 'Robert Rich'. Trumbo’s name then appeared in the screen credits of SPARTACUS (1960), about a rebellious slave, and EXODUS (1960) to the embarrassment of the film industry. Otto Preminger, the director of Exodus, was a liberal and openly employed Trumbo. For Spartacus Trumbo was hired through Kirk Douglas, who had always liked his stories. Spartacus was based on Howard Fast's novel. Trumbo considered Fast just as narrow-minded in his Marxist views as the people who did not tolerate leftist views. The manuscript was passed to Fast as the text of Eddie Lewis, who worked for Douglas for eight years. "This blacklisting is going to collapse because it is rotten, immoral and illegal. I am one day going to be working openly in the motion picture industry. When that day comes, I swear to you that I will never sign a term contract with any major studio. I will, proudly and by preference, do at least one picture a year for King Brothers, and I will try to make it the best picture that I have it in me to do." (from Trumbo's letter to the King Brothers, in The Penguin Book of Hollywood, ed. by Christopher Sylvester, 1998) With the help of the director Otto Preminger, Trumbo broke away from the blacklist and was hired to write the screenplay for Exodus, based on Leon Uris's bestseller. More scriptwriting credits came from THE SANDPIPER, perhaps better remembered for its song 'The Shadow of Your Smile' than for its stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. HAWAII (1966) was based on James Michener´s bestseller. In THE FIXER (1968) a Jew in Tsarist Russia, Yakov Bok, is imprisoned. The prosecuting attorney Grusbeshov tries to make Yakov confess to the murder of a child, and that he is the tool of an international Jewish political organization dedicated to revolution. After years of suffering Yakov becomes the embodiment of human dignity and strength to resist injustice. "I committed no crime, I need no pardon. I want trial. If you try to make me leave here without one, you'll have to shoot me first. You have called me a criminal, now you must try me." (from Trumbo's screenplay) PAPILLON (1973), based on Henri-Antoine Charrière’s autobiographical bestseller, was set on Devil's Island. In the early 1970s Trumbo brought onto screen his 1939 antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun, and the book also was reprinted. At the Cannes Festival, the film won the International Critics Award. However, Trumbo's comeback was shadowed by poor health. He died in Beverly Hills on September 10, 1976. His last novel, NIGHT OF THE AUROCHS, written in the form of an autobiography of a Nazi, was left unfinished and prepared for posthumous publication (1979) by Robert Kirsch. Trumbo's letters to his children, auto dealers, creditors and others, edited by Helen Manfull, were published under the title ADDITIONAL DIALOGUE (1970). ISHI, THE LAST OF HIS TRIBE (1978), Trumbo's screenplay for television, was completed by his son Christopher. For further reading: Dalton Trumbo by B. Cook (1977); The Ragman's Son by Kirk Douglas (1988); Radical Innocence by B. Dick (1989); Writers in Hollywood by I. Hamilton (1990); Johnny got his gun: Dalton Trumbo by Mary Ellen Snodgrass (1993); World Authors 1900-1950, vol. 4, ed. by Martin Seymour Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood Rebel: A Critical Survey and Filmography by Peter Hanson. (2000) - Other blacklisted screenwriters in Authors' Calendar: Paul Jarrico, Abraham Polonsky . - Huom.! Trumbon toteutumattomien elokuvaprojektien joukossa oli käsikirjoitus (1962-63) elokuvaan The Dark Angel, joka perustui Mika Waltarin romaaniin Johannes Angelos. Selected film works:
Novels, plays, and essays:
Non-fiction:
|