Friends,
I enjoyed this well-researched
article. Don’t miss this terrific movie. However, I disagree with
the author’s comment about Diane Lane’s performance. I found it very
moving, as the stress on the family was unbearable.
Kagiso,
Max
Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
'Trumbo' and the Hidden Story of the Red Scare
James DiEugenio
Friday, December 25, 2015
Consortium News
The post-World War II years could have shaped America into a very
different country by building on the foundations the New Deal and moving more
along the lines of European allies with publicly financed health care and other
social protections.
Instead, reactionary forces that never made peace with President
Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era reforms generated a new Red Scare, wildly
exaggerating the threat from a small number of mild-mannered communists and
leftists in Hollywood to steer the nation in a right-wing direction favored by
big business.
A new movie, Trumbo, recounts one early chapter in that saga, the
persecution of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and other leftists in the movie
industry who became known as the Hollywood Ten, subjected to jail and
“blacklisting” for their political views.
The film tells Trumbo’s personal story as a victim of ambitious
congressmen, a zealous columnist and intimidated movie executives, but also how
this talented screenwriter ultimately prevailed with the help of actor Kirk
Douglas and a few other Hollywood luminaries who appreciated Trumbo’s skills
and saw the blacklisting as a hysterical witch hunt.
But what the movie fails to explain is how the scars from the Red
Scare permanently changed America, making it a place of fearful conformity with
a relatively narrow band of acceptable political thought. The era killed off a
vibrant Left that could have challenged the Right’s hostility to government
social programs fulfilling the constitutional mandate to “provide for the …
general Welfare.”
Yet, as a tale of one man’s struggle against a fearsome
combination of government pressure and industry complicity to control his
freedom of thought, Trumbo is a worthy – and even rare – historical drama.
An Exceptional Talent
Dalton Trumbo was one of the most colorful, fascinating and
prolific writers that the Hollywood film colony ever produced. Trumbo wrote, or
co-wrote, well over 50 produced screenplays. In addition, he wrote numerous
plays, novels and non-fiction books. Some of his most famous scripts were A
Bill of Divorcement, A Guy Named Joe and Kitty Foyle.
Unfortunately for Trumbo, he was never allowed to walk up on stage
to receive an Academy Award. Not because he did not win any. He actually won
two: one for The Brave One and one for Roman Holiday. But at the time he won
those Oscars — in the 1950s — he was on what became known as the Hollywood
blacklist.
This was an unofficial assemblage of the names of persons working
in the motion picture industry who were not allowed to be employed by any of
the major studios or television networks. Therefore, when Trumbo won those two
awards, his Oscars were given to people who either did not actually exist or
who worked as a “front” for Trumbo.
A “front” was someone who had an acceptable name to the studios
and who was deemed employable. This person did either little or no work on the
completed script, but was allowed a percentage of the fees accrued for the
screenplay. Trumbo was finally given his Oscar for The Brave One in 1975, the
year before he died. It was not until 2011 that his name was restored to prints
of Roman Holiday.
Trumbo was born in Colorado in 1905. He began writing in high
school for his local newspaper. When he attended college at the University of
Colorado, he worked as a reporter for the Boulder Daily Camera. After working
for a number of years at a bakery and after years of having his stories and
novels rejected, he finally began to have some success when his essays were
accepted in some major magazines. He then became a script reader for Warner
Brothers.
From about 1937 to 1947, Dalton Trumbo was one of the highest-paid
writers in Hollywood. Some sources state that he was the highest paid writer in
the film colony. Trumbo had two qualities that producers craved: he was
versatile and he was fast. He could write in a variety of film genres, from
comedy to fantasy to personal drama to the epic structure. And since he was a
workaholic, he could produce completed screenplays and rewrites at a rate that
was exceptional.
Actor Kirk Douglas was astonished at how fast Trumbo wrote the
script for Spartacus. In Douglas’s book, I am Spartacus, the actor said Trumbo
worked at least twice as fast as any writer with whom he worked. Those
qualities, plus a gift for finding a story arc and creating credible characters
and dialogue, helped Trumbo ascend to the highest peak of Hollywood success
before the age of 40.
Hunting ‘Subversives’
Trumbo’s career all but collapsed when he ran headlong into the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This infamous committee first
became prominent under Texas Congressman Martin Dies in 1938 when it was
initially supposed to investigate Nazi espionage in America. But since it was
largely composed of Republicans and conservative Democrats (like Dies), it
quickly turned to inquiring into one of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs,
the Federal Theater Project. (Robert F. Vaughn, Only Victims, p. 36)
The Federal Theater Project was a part of the Works Progress
Administration, which became the largest single employment program of the New
Deal. The Federal Theater Project was meant to employ out-of-work actors,
directors and stage managers in federally funded stage productions; both in New
York and several regional outlets.
It was a smashing success in that it produced nearly 1,000 plays
in four years. These were seen by hundreds of thousands of spectators. Some of
the plays were directed by Orson Welles and have become legendary in stage
history, e.g., The Cradle Will Rock.
HUAC did not like the spectacular success of this program. Dies
once said that the WPA was the greatest boon the communists ever had in the
United States. (ibid) Dies called several people to testify about supposed
communist influences in certain productions. The committee was so
unsophisticated in its understanding that it criticized the director of the
project for going to Russia to see new experimental plays by theater innovators
like Konstantin Stanislavsky. (ibid, p. 61)
Congressman Joe Starnes famously asked project director Hallie
Flanigan if playwright Christopher Marlowe was a communist, though Marlowe had
died in 1593. Yet, these clownish blunderings became popular with newspapers
and magazines. And, at first, HUAC gained a large amount of public support.
Dies unsuccessfully called for the resignation of New Deal officers such as
Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes. (ibid, p. 70). But Dies did kill the Federal
Theater Project.
After World War II, HUAC became a standing committee and – under
new chairman Parnell Thomas – the panel decided to hold hearings into the
Hollywood film industry. The committee investigators, led by Harry Stripling,
assembled dossiers which were largely created from information delivered by FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover. HUAC then held open hearings, calling a series of
prominent players in the entertainment field.
Contempt of Congress
The first panel consisted of “friendly witnesses” who essentially
agreed with the committee’s judgments and aims – that Hollywood was filled with
communist agents who were assembling works of propaganda in order to weaken the
foundations of American life. Then, HUAC called “unfriendly witnesses” who did
not agree with these judgments, refused to cooperate with the committee and
were then indicted for contempt of Congress.
The “friendly witnesses” included three heads of major studios:
Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer and Walt Disney, all extremely powerful, wealthy
and politically connected. Warner volunteered the names of suspected
communists, e.g. writers Alvah Bessie, Howard Koch and Ring Lardner Jr.
(Vaughn, p. 81)
Disney testified that a strike his studio endured a year before
was caused by communist infiltration of trade unions, and he named union leader
Herbert K. Sorrell as a communist agent. Disney also named an animator at his
studio, David Hilberman, as a communist. (ibid, p. 85)
Mayer testified that HUAC should write legislation that would
regulate the employment of communists in private industry.
With Republicans in control of the committee, it enlisted novelist
Ayn Rand as a witness who watched the film Song of Russia and evaluated whether
or not it was propaganda. Rand declared that since the film did not depict
normal life in Russia as a gulag, it was propaganda.
As author Victor Navasky has written, the parading of these
friendly witnesses was little more than the scaffolding for a sideshow. Famous
actors such as Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, Robert Montgomery, Gary Cooper
and Ronald Reagan joined the studio executives. (Reagan continued defending
HUAC into the 1970s even after it was formally disbanded.)
There was a tactical aim in all of this. By presenting these
witnesses first and urging them to deliver speeches and name suspected
subversives, the 10 “unfriendly witnesses” who followed were set up in the
public eye as being antagonistic toward the earlier star-spangled cavalcade.
Trumbo was in this second group. He had been a member of the
Communist Party from about 1943, an isolationist and anti-war, an attitude
conveyed by his famous novel Johnny Got His Gun, published in 1939. In the
rapidly ascending spiral of Cold War demagoguery, these qualities made him a
perfect target of HUAC and one of its ambitious young members, Richard Nixon.
Pleading the First
Trumbo and his group of fellow writers – Albert Maltz, Ring
Lardner Jr., Lester Cole, Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, John H. Lawson, Sam
Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk (who was a writer-director) – decided
to do battle with HUAC. They knew that the question the committee would ask was,
if they were now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party, which would
not be officially outlawed until 1954.
But the witnesses knew that if they admitted this, the next
question would be: Who else do you know who is or was a member? Or the committee
would ask, did you attend any meetings, and if so who did you see there?
Since they had already seen what men like Mayer, Warner and Disney
did in getting rid of suspected leftists, the witnesses knew that not only
would their careers be endangered but anyone else they named would be put at
risk.
Therefore, Trumbo and other witnesses decided not to plead the
Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination but instead refused to directly
answer the committee’s questions, citing their First Amendment rights of choice
and privacy. For their stance, Trumbo and nine other witnesses, who became
known as the Hollywood Ten, were prosecuted for contempt of Congress.
Their main attorney, Bartley Crum advised them that the Supreme
Court would not uphold such a conviction. But after Trumbo was convicted in the
lower court, the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. Trumbo went to prison
for about 11 months in Ashland, Kentucky.
Besides prison terms, the Hollywood Ten case led to a blacklist by
movie executives who “deplored the action of the 10 Hollywood men who have been
cited for contempt by the House of Representatives.” All business ties and
contracts with them were “suspended without compensation” and none would be
re-employed until they were acquitted or purged themselves of contempt and
declared under oath he is not a communist.
As the Red Scare spread, about 300 workers in the entertainment
industry were blacklisted. Some, like actor Philip Loeb, were pushed to the
edge. As Douglas notes in his book, Loeb could not care for his emotionally
troubled son and committed suicide, a particularly painful experience for
Douglas who knew Loeb when they were both up-and-coming actors in New York.
Eking Out a Living
When Trumbo emerged from prison, he first moved to Mexico for a
couple of years. He tried to eke out a living writing scripts, but the man who
once commanded $75,000 per screenplay could make only a fraction of that sum.
So, he moved back to Los Angeles where he lived in a small house in Highland
Park. For the next several years, he employed phony names and hired fronts to
produce his scripts, even when he was dealing with small, independent
production companies like the King Brothers.
Even though Trumbo was making much less money and working much
harder and longer, he could not claim credit for his work. As Jay Roach’s
Trumbo shows, this put a tremendous strain on Trumbo’s home life.
Beyond the movie executives, other powerful Hollywood figures
piled on the Hollywood Ten and went after their support group, the Committee
for the First Amendment. Actor John Wayne and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper
formed the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservations of American Ideals.
When a performer or writer wanted to recant and purge himself, he
got in contact with this group. As Reagan said in an interview for the film
Hollywood on Trial, they would tell this person that the Alliance really could
not help you unless you decided to help yourself. Once the person did so, he
would get permission from studio executives to work again.
Roach’s film shows actor Edward G. Robinson, who had supported
Trumbo with monetary contributions and didn’t work for a year, going through
this penance under the approving eye of Wayne.
Some Hollywood Ten defendants, like director Edward Dmytryk, could
not handle the pressures and made arrangements with the powers that be to
recant and name names. As result, actress Lee Grant was added to the blacklist
while the rehabilitated Dmytryk went on to direct films, including The Caine
Mutiny, shot in 1954 at the high tide of the blacklist.
As the film shows, however, there were some brave souls who
finally cracked the blacklist.
When Kirk Douglas came to Hollywood in 1945, he was hired to work
on a film called The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. There was a strike going on,
the one which Disney referred to in his testimony before HUAC. The striking
union, largely representing set dressers, had asked the Screen Actor’s Guild to
honor their picket line.
Under the influence of Guild leaders — such as George Murphy,
Ronald Reagan and George Montgomery — SAG refused to do so. But the writer and
the director of Douglas’s film, respectively Robert Rossen and Lewis Milestone,
did support the strikers. They would not cross the picket line. Fearing a
lockout, producer Hal Wallis had the actor sleep in his dressing room.
As Douglas related in his book, two years later, both Milestone
and Rossen were called before HUAC. Milestone escaped to France. Rossen
admitted membership in the Communist Party. Both men were blacklisted.
Another Douglas friend and colleague, Carl Foreman, producer of
the film High Noon, was called to testify but fled to England. Foreman was
targeted because some took High Noon as an allegory for what HUAC was doing to
America.
A Disgusted Douglas
All this shocked Douglas, who knew that none of these men posed
any threat to the security of the United States. He realized how absurd the
practices of the HUAC actually were.
For instance, the committee called baseball player Jackie Robinson
to testify against actor Paul Robeson, but Robinson could offer little or no
information about the actor. Douglas concluded that the only reason Robinson
was called was because, like Robeson, he was a famous African-American.
Douglas was also distressed by the fact that six of the Hollywood
Ten were Jewish as was he and as were many of the executives who capitulated so
completely before HUAC. Douglas could not understand why people of the Jewish
faith, who fully understood the price and pain of being persecuted, would go
along with the HUAC circus, led by a clown like Thomas.
As Douglas wrote and as the film shows, much of this stemmed from
fear. Men such as Warner, Mayer and Harry Cohn were “terrified their great
power would be taken away from them if their loyalty to America was called into
question.”
Roach’s film shows a scene with columnist Hedda Hopper going into
Mayer’s office, calling him a kike, and threatening to vilify him in her
columns unless he cooperated with the committee.
But Douglas rejected such pressure, agreeing with actor Fredric
March who said: “They’re after more than Hollywood. This reaches into every
American city and town.”
Ironically, HUAC’s aggressive witch hunt against leftists in
Hollywood contributed, indirectly, to the undoing of Trumbo’s isolation. In
1950, author Howard Fast was called before HUAC and grilled about his
colleagues in a group opposing Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco. When
Fast refused to answer, he also was imprisoned.
In prison, Fast used the library to research the life of
Spartacus, a slave who turned gladiator and finally became a rebel leader
against Imperial Rome. After getting released from prison, Fast wrote a
historical novel about the man who almost undid the Roman Empire.
But Fast’s life was not the same as it had been before. He was
banned from speaking on college campuses. He was under surveillance by the FBI.
And he was denied a passport, which deprived him of his right to do research on
Spartacus in Europe.
When Fast finished his book, he tried to sell it to his old
publisher, Little, Brown and Company, but was turned down after the FBI visited
the publisher. Six other publishing houses also turned it down. With no other
alternative, Fast published it himself. In four months, it sold 48,000 copies
with Fast and his wife shipping out copies from their basement.
Finding Spartacus
By the 1950s, Kirk Douglas had built a very successful career as
an actor. He also despised the fact that MGM made him sign a loyalty oath to
play painter Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life. So, Douglas created his own
production company with partner Ed Lewis, who dropped off a copy of Fast’s
Spartacus on Douglas’s desk.
Douglas loved the book and decided to produce the film (and star
in it). Fast insisted on writing the first draft of the script but it was quite
poor, prompting Douglas to enlist Trumbo to do the re-write. But Douglas told
Universal Studio chiefs Ed Muhl and Lew Wasserman that Lewis was writing the
script.
About halfway through the film’s production, Trumbo stopped
working, complaining that he had written about 250,000 words on the project so
far and did not want to do that much work if his name was not on the film.
Douglas drove to Trumbo’s house and told him that when the film
was finished, he would insist that Trumbo get screen credit, which is what
Douglas wanted to do all along. Douglas invited Trumbo to a meeting at the
Universal commissary with himself and director Stanley Kubrick, something
Trumbo had not done for almost 13 years.
After columnist Hedda Hopper exposed the fact that Trumbo was
secretly writing Spartacus, producer-director Otto Preminger approached Trumbo
to write a movie from the Leon Uris book Exodus. Preminger announced this in
the movie trade papers, joining Douglas in helping Trumbo crack the blacklist.
After Douglas and Preminger made their announcements, singer/actor
Frank Sinatra also decided to employ a blacklisted writer, Albert Maltz, except
Sinatra wanted to make this into a big event. But Trumbo advised Douglas to
tell Sinatra to drop his crusade, since it would probably hurt Sen. John
Kennedy in his presidential race against former HUAC member Richard Nixon.
Joseph Kennedy, the candidate’s father, also advised Sinatra not to go that
route.
A President Weighs In
But after Kennedy got elected in 1960, he and longtime friend,
Paul Fay, attended a public screening of Spartacus. The American Legion was
picketing and Kennedy could have asked for a private screening of the film.
Wasserman and Muhl would have been glad to oblige.
But on the advice of his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy,
the President made the deliberate public appearance.
Roach closes the film with a nice strophe. Hopper is in her living
room watching television when a segment depicting Kennedy’s attendance at the
film comes on the screen. The camera rotates around her face slowly, as she
begins to realize that her reign of terror is now ending.
The scene dissolves to black. Out of the darkness, we see Trumbo
in the wings about to go on stage in 1970 to collect his Laurel Award, the
annual distinguished career award given out by the Writers’ Guild of America.
Eloquently, Trumbo addresses the issue of the whole blacklist period and the
film closes.
Director Jay Roach began his career in comedy, directing Michael
Myers in the Austin Powers films. He also directed the Robert DeNiro comedy
Meet the Parents before going to the small screen to direct works closer to his
heart. For HBO, he directed the political dramas Recount about the Republican
heist of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, and Game Change about Sen.
John McCain’s decision to pick Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential
running mate in 2008.
Roach has now made Trumbo, a political drama for the large screen.
Overall, he does fairly well. Dalton Trumbo did several interviews that were
captured on film and can be seen by almost anyone. Actor Bryan Cranston has
obviously watched them at length as he does a nice job portraying Trumbo’s
feisty character.
The English actress Helen Mirren plays Hedda Hopper. From the
first time I saw Mirren in The Long Good Friday, I was struck by her
intelligence, subtlety and technical proficiency. She furthers that tradition
here with a nicely understated performance. In an easy part, John Goodman is
strong and vivid as low-budget producer John King.
Roach likes to begin a scene low key and then build it to a
powerful explosion or aria. For example, he does this with Goodman wielding a
baseball bat at a representative of the producers’ alliance sent to intimidate
him from employing blacklisted writers.
The one disappointment in the cast is Diane Lane as Trumbo’s wife
Cleo. Either she could not find the center of her character, or Roach could not
help her. It’s a completely blasé performance in a major role.
A Bigger Picture
In my opinion, some of the film’s shortcomings originate in the
script by John McNamara. The film tries to make the opening of Spartacus into a
crowning historical moment, which is not true. Because of the power of Douglas,
Wasserman and Muhl, this achievement ended the blacklist for Trumbo but not for
many others who did not have that kind of torque behind them. For them, it lingered
on into the mid-1960s.
Another problem with the script is that it misses the core
motivation for HUAC and the careers of some of its members, like Dies, Thomas
and Nixon. For political reasons, they bitterly resented the scope and the
goals of Roosevelt’s New Deal. They did not want government to be the solution
to the Great Depression. So, they decided to poison the New Deal’s legacy with
the taint of communism.
To a degree, they were successful. HUAC managed to drastically
limit the American political spectrum by attacking, smearing, prosecuting and
demonizing any political orientation left of the Democratic Party.
HUAC, Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare tilted the politics of the
country decidedly to the right, meaning that – unlike many European industrialized
countries – there is no serious left-leaning American political party.
Though HUAC Chairman Thomas went to prison on fraud charges, Sen.
Joe McCarthy took up the anti-communist cause, expanding the Red Scare into the
U.S. government and other aspects of American life. As with HUAC, FBI Director
Hoover supplied information to McCarthy.
When Robert Kennedy became Attorney General, he looked at the
information that Hoover had. There were maybe 50,000 members of the Communist
Party in the United States and many of them were FBI informants. In other
words, there was no real communist threat to fear. It was more a creation of
men like Hoover who recognized that an exaggerated fear of communism was an
effective weapon for gaining political advantage and personal power.
It was this subterranean agenda that the American public was never
made to understand. Therefore the consequences went unabated.
Even today, prominent right-wingers decry government programs to
create jobs or alleviate suffering – including President Barack Obama’s
private-insurance-based health care program – as “socialism” or “communism.”
The value of scaring the American people has not been lost. Today,
we live with another excessive threat, the War on Terror, which has led to the
Patriot Act, torture, drone strikes and racial profiling.
The ability of Americans to resist these current excesses is
crippled by the failure of politicians, the courts and the media to stop the
Red Scare that started in Hollywood in 1947.
Trumbo is a decent enough picture. And Roach should be praised for
his good intentions in filming it. There are few directors and producers making
politically relevant films in America today.
But in my opinion, this subject would have been better served if
Roach had made a mini-series on the subject. That would have given him the
opportunity to depict a much wider American canvas and a much larger subject.
Dalton Trumbo was part of an epic struggle. In the end, he
personally won, but the country lost.
James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book
is Reclaiming Parkland [1].
Links:
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Parkland-Bugliosi-Assassination-Hollywood/dp/1626365334
[2] https://org.salsalabs.com/o/1868/p/salsa/donation/common/public/?donate_page_KEY=12975&okay=True
[2] https://org.salsalabs.com/o/1868/p/salsa/donation/common/public/?donate_page_KEY=12975&okay=True
- See more at: https://portside.org/print/node/10475#sthash.viA3eSvO.dpuf
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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