Trumbo

You may not know this guy in the bathtub, but you may be familiar with his screenplays: Roman Holiday, The Brave One, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, and Spartacus, among others. His name is Dalton Trumbo, and he is the subject of a documentary I've watched recently called Trumbo, based mainly on his many letters and correspondences.

These letters come at a dark and troubling time in Trumbo's life. He was part of a group called the Hollywood 10, a bunch of screenwriters and other people working in the film industry who refused to cooperate during the HUAC investigation of communist influence in the film industry. One may recall the origin of the term McCarthyism and a similar investigation carried out by senator Joseph McCarthy, during the time when the Cold War was nearing its peak and anti-communist sentiment was high.

Because of his refusal to testify or name any other members of the Communist Party, Trumbo was blacklisted from Hollywood. Deprived of income, and with a family to feed, he used aliases or fronts to get his work out. And one of those works won him (or at least his front) an Academy Award.

Trumbo's letters to friends, family, or the occasional random person (telephone company, principal) are eloquent, clever and full of wordplay. It's almost as if he had this urge to just write out his soul while denied the opportunity to do it for a living.

Several accomplished actors (Donald Sutherland, Liam Neeson, and Paul Giamatti among others) narrate Trumbo's many letters and speeches. And they paint a picture that disturbs me. For if you replace the word "Communist" with any other term or denomination, "Negroes," "Christians," "Jews," "Muslims," and so on, this level of discrimination borne from fear exists today, and it takes only one person in power to spark a similar fire once again.

But despite persecution, Trumbo faces his problem with determination, sticking to his guns all the way: he works harder than before, churning out story after story, often writing multiple stories at one time. In the end, he triumphs over these fears.

“The blacklist was a time of evil. No one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides. It will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew or were diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us — right, left, or center — emerged from that long nightmare without sin.” - Dalton Trumbo's acceptance speech as he received a lifetime achievement award in 1971.