Trumbo: Whitewashing the Life of a Blacklisted Writer
A new documentary on screenwriter Dalton Trumbo aims to honor its subject but succumbs to self-righteousness and obfuscation.
Support Pajamas Media; Visit Our Advertisers
Trumbo was a rigorously talented man, an artist whose love for writing matched his prodigious output. Being blacklisted meant he kept on writing but under assumed names. He even won an Oscar for a story initially credited to someone else to escape the blacklist’s reach.
But his moral center didn’t always square with his oversized heart.
Let’s face it. Trumbo took a deeply un-American position — embracing the ideology of the country’s enemy — and stuck pro-Communist messages in his screenplays.
He saw conspiracies everywhere, even at his daughter’s elementary school. Actor David Strathairn reads a corrosive letter he wrote to his daughter’s school principal. Seems the young Trumbo bore the brunt of his reputation, and he claimed everyone up to the area PTA was to blame.
How many school children have had their love of learning soured by the taunts of their schoolyard peers or sullied by the local bully? But most fathers don’t have the skill, or the chutzpah, to write the letters Trumbo fired off to the school principal.
Trumbo serves as another example of Hollywood’s selective outrage. The industry didn’t bat an eye over Woody Allen’s less-than-honorable romantic pursuits in the 1990s, but it’s hard to imagine actors eager to work with Mel Gibson following his anti-semitic rant.
Heck, the industry won’t even take a stand against the forces trying to extinguish all smoking from movie screens. And while Trumbo served a year in jail for contempt of Congress, his Hollywood peers at the time deserve some blame for failing to fight back against the blacklist once he regained his freedom.
That doesn’t diminish, or excuse, how the government treated Communist sympathizers of the era. Either we’re a country where citizens can hold any position they wish or we’re not. During the McCarthy era, that distinction got muddied and people’s lives were forever tarnished as a result.
Trumbo ultimately tries to wrap itself, and its hero, in the American flag. A final image of the screenwriter has that flag fluttering in the background.
Trumbo could easily be seen as a talented screenwriter, a caring father, and a man so stubborn he was willing to be jailed rather than appease a broken system. But let’s leave the “patriot” label to other, more deserving Americans.
Christian Toto is a freelance writer and film critic for The Washington Times. His work has appeared in People magazine, MovieMaker Magazine, The Denver Post, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and Scripps Howard News Service. He also contributes movie radio commentary to three stations as well as the nationally syndicated Dennis Miller Show and runs the blog What Would Toto Watch?
| Comment |  Digg This |
 del.icio.us |
 |
 |
 PJM Home |
32 Comments
1. slavus:With all due respect, Mr. Toto, this is not about the government mistreating people for their convictions. This is about people creating a Stalinist enclave in Hollywood, where non-Party members were not given the same chances as members. Like true liberals, they were aghast when the tables were turned and they got a taste of their own medicine. Alas, the current situation is not very different - to be a non-liberal in Hollywood is to be a pariah.
Jul 17, 2008 - 5:34 am 2. Daniel Anderson:Just think of it Joe McCarthy was right.
Jul 17, 2008 - 6:48 am 3. Choreographer:Blacklisting is bad if is used against you as a liberal/socialist, but good if you use it against Christians and conservatives. I am in the film/theatre profession, and state unequivically that there is blacklisting of self-identified conservatives and people of faith in Hollywood. I wonder if Douglas and Giamatta would be interested in performing in a film examinating that topic? No? The heavy-breathing of the Left on the blacklisting in the fifties is just disgusting.
Jul 17, 2008 - 7:02 am 4. 49erDweet:But philosophically it is not the same thing if a conservative is blacklisted. They aren’t as deserving of freedom as liberals. Everybody knows that!
Jul 17, 2008 - 7:59 am 5. J.J. Sefton:Amen choreographer! As a screenwriter with over 25 years in the biz, I can state unequivocally as fact that blacklisting is alive and well. Forget conservative and Christian - if you hold even a moderate political leaning, or dare criticize any aspect of the left’s dogma, you are effectively persona non grata.
I cannot speak about communists post WW2 in the industry and its potential or perceived threats, but the entertainment industry today is a corrosive influence on our society, whether overtly in its recent spate of anti-war films or in its everyday, subtle and constant portrayals and inferences about people, political institutions and lifestyles.
Tailgunner Joe was right - except he was 50 years ahead of his time.
Jul 17, 2008 - 8:37 am 6. kabud:People there are not many good films that advocate MORALITY AND VALUES OF LIBERTY
Lets compile lists of such and share!!
Today we can totally IGNORE sabotage and subversion from Hollywood bastards
Because we have:
netflix and torrents of curse!
if anyone would like to learn how he can find a good film to give it a test ride i can explain how to use this:
http://www.utorrent.com/
DONT GO TO HOLLYWOOD SUBVERSIVE PROPAGANDA MOVIES
Become a master of your values.
I would recommend Hitchcock’s film, James Bond movies- all could be found online with many different subtitles and downloaded within hours or even minutes
And if you like- you can subscribe to NETFLIX and watch DVDs
But ask friends what is good and not destroying your core values
Jul 17, 2008 - 9:44 am 7. Rubicon:Perhaps most ironic is that the liberal drivel films we have been treated to recently, are virtually all total and complete box office failures.
Jul 17, 2008 - 10:38 am 8. Andy Anderson:Seems those fly over folk who “cling” to their religion & guns, already understand (despite their supposed stupidity according to leftist opinion),that Hollywood is as corrupt & moreso than anything going on in Washington.
Many may admire the “pretty people,” but most know those same pretty people who preach they know best what is best for all of us & we should just shut up & obey, are pathetic losers. Many did not make it through high school. Many failed abysmally at everything they tried, until they tried pretending, & then they developed their attitude they were superior beings to others.
Too bad many Americans buy into the liberal leftist drivel these folks espouse & actually vote according to the dictates of the collectivist mindset Hollywood has become.
But truth has a way of winning out in the long run & sooner or later these clowns of life who spend much time in rehab & much money on pampering themselves while condemning others for not sacrificing, will be revealed.
I’ve always found it fascinating that we’ve seen so many films about Hitler and the Holocaust (most fine, often wonderful films, Schindlers List is required viewing for my children once they reach age 14), yet Hollywood does not have similar outrage for the equal if not greater horrors of Stalin, Mao, and Castro et al. HBO deserves credit for a fine (and singular) film on Stalin (w/ Hollywood conservative Robert DuVall in an amazing performance) yet even this film had little to do with the horrors imposed on the ordinary people of the Soviet Union. Hollywood wouldn’t dare offend the sensibilities of the multi-millionaire faux socialist/communist “artist” community. It took Andy Garcia 9+ years (and enduring the contempt of his Hollywood “compatriots” to make the wonderful “The Lost City”. Hollywood is a cesspool of childish, America-hating “Useful Idiots”. I cannot imagine a more unpleasant “community” in which to live.
Jul 17, 2008 - 10:40 am 9. The old (and new?) blacklist | WHAT WOULD TOTO WATCH?:[...] Pajamas Media review of “Trumbo” explores the complexity behind the life and times of the Oscar-winning [...]
Jul 17, 2008 - 10:49 am 10. kabud:Andy Anderson:
much respect!
As far as film on stalin times watch this:
Khrustalyov, mashinu! (1998)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0156701/
But mind it is VERY ROUGH AND SHOCKING
it is very true though. I went to see it back then with my wife at the first screening in NYC.
It was so shocking, she started crying and could not stop for hours
I write this and i cant help myself with tears
it is a must see for everyone.
Also whatch The Lives of Others
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/
it is exact true showing of life in soviet times
i myself had very similar apartment and was under constant surveillance like it is shown in the film
it is so true and so real
Jul 17, 2008 - 11:36 am 11. J.J. Sefton:Andy:
I escaped almost 5 years ago back to NYC. So, okay, it is what it is, but Hollywood is a Stalinist gulag with palm trees.
Jul 17, 2008 - 11:39 am 12. Javelin:“Stalinist gulag with palm trees.”
Jul 17, 2008 - 12:04 pm 13. Javelin:way to go, you describe reality perfectly. Yes, pedicures, fast new cars, beautiful women, 25000 sq ft mansions on a hill with pool, lot’s of drugs sounds just as fun as mining gold in -40F with inadequate food, shelter and clothing.
This must be the eigth hundred time they have done something about those poor oppressed black listed writers. You would think that they were the only ones being oppressed for their beliefs in those days. Funny, no one ever did a movie showing what would have happened to pro democracy screenwriters in their precious workers’ paradise contemporaneously.
Jul 17, 2008 - 12:10 pm 14. Bozoer Rebbe:“This is about people creating a Stalinist enclave in Hollywood, where non-Party members were not given the same chances as members.”
Slavus, that’s exactly why Elia Kazan named names. He was angry how the communists took over the Group Theater he helped establish and how their politics trumped art. For him it was personal. The event led him from being a member of the Communist Party to being a fierce anti-communist. He ended up naming names in part out of ideology but also because he felt no loyalty to them because of their actions.
From Richard Bernstein’s NYT review of Kazan’s autobiography:
“Mr. Kazan chose sides via a personal experience in 1935, when he was a young member of the Communist Party in the Group Theater in New York. He recalls how the party cell, which met secretly once a week, was ordered to take control of the Group Theater. Mr. Kazan demurred. As a result, a “ritual of submission” was organized in the form of a criticism session during which he was sternly rebuked for his ideological errors by a party emissary. Mr. Kazan resigned right afterward, saying the incident was designed “to stop the most dangerous thing the Party had to cope with: people thinking for themselves.”"
Jul 17, 2008 - 1:19 pm 15. J.J. Sefton:Wasn’t making a direct comparison. Just using that as a metaphor. Maybe it didn’t read so well, so I consider myself chastised. Perhaps a better comparison is The Village from “The Prisoner.” Humble apologies to the 100 million victims of communism.
Jul 17, 2008 - 1:29 pm 16. Javelin:Sef,
Jul 17, 2008 - 2:58 pm 17. uburoisc:Just making some fun out of it. Like this is only the 2000th time Hollywood has bemoaned the awful fate of the blacklisted writers who only could afford Buicks and not Cadillacs and Rolls like the rest of them.
I started a thread on IMDb on the “Way We Were” board that still gets me angry responses: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070903/board/thread/90341724
I live in the Hollywood Gulag, and I rather enjoy my pariah status here as a red-baiter and unapologetic communist hater.
The thing to remember about the film and entertainment twits; none of them know anything about what happened in the Soviet Union or Cuba or anyplace else really. They wouldn’t know Magadan from a line of cocaine.
And when I pointedly bring up the fates of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn, Nikolay Gumilyov, Maria Tsvetaeva, Yevgenia Ginzburg or the thousands of other artists, writers, and poets of great intelligence and sensitivity who were ruthlessly harassed, tortured and murdered by the sadistic monsters that hacks like Dalton Trumbo worked so hard not just to defend, but to advocate as leading the way toward the future, I get nothing more than an quick attempt to change the subject.
As actors, they’re not entirely unaware of my tone and passion on the subject; it’s pretty clear when it comes to what happened in the Great Purge, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and all the other euphemisms for communist mass slaughter; I’m about one flippant comment away from an ugly bar fight.
Dalton Trumbo was a vile and credulous fool who defended Soviet mass-murder for decades after it was possible to be so ill-informed of what had taken place over there (and what was continuing to go on); he cheered the boot as it crushed the human face. I would treat him no better than I would treat a piece of garbage like Fritz Kuhn.
Jul 17, 2008 - 3:25 pm 18. uburoisc:I really shouldn’t even use the term “gulag” to describe Hollywood, even mockingly; those poor souls who went through such unspeakable suffering, the millions and millions of them who were murdered in the real gulags of the Soviet Tragedy (Martin Malia’s apt term) do not bear comparison to this dystopian fairyland in any respect.
Jul 17, 2008 - 4:45 pm 19. djaces:As I recall the blacklist had no actual law behind it, and could been completely ignored, if anyone in Hollywood had the stones to to take a stand, which makes the continuing agonizing over the horrors of the blacklist that they voluntarily enforced themselves so completely laughable.
Jul 17, 2008 - 4:53 pm 20. ferd:nice comments, uburoisc. keep up the red-baiting. anytime you need a wingman before you make a flippant comment, let me know.
Jul 17, 2008 - 6:20 pm 21. fred:The thing I have a hard time understanding: why are these fools in Hollywood so passionate about socialism, when what they earn and their lifestyles are about as anti-proletarian as can possibly be imagined? They really do not care about poor and working people. It’s all a shuck and jive for them. And it IS capitalism and liberal democracy that gives them the chance to live in such opulence while producing such crap.
Jul 17, 2008 - 6:51 pm 22. fred:I am not in the entertainment business (I’m an investment research professional), so I have really no understanding for why entertainment and media people are the way they are. I sure would appreciate it if those in that business or who understand the people in it would set me straight on some things. More than anything else, why are people in entertainment and media generally so attracted to various Marxisms and/or Communism? I just spent some time googling this Trumbo fellow, trying to find anything out there that probes WHY he became a Communist and WHEN, in his early life, he began his fascination with Marxism. A little self-revelation is in order: I used to be a member of the Left three decades ago, and until about 1987 I still considered myself a kind of revisionist Marxist. I UNDERSTOOD why I went down that path, when it began, and why I eventually backed out of it after ten years or so in that ideology.
I’m always interested in something beyond the ideas people hold: I’m interested in WHY they are the way they are. This guy Trumbo seems to have had a youth marked by poverty and struggle, but then again I and everyone else I know will tell you that they know people who had similar experiences of struggle and poverty. But it didn’t make them socialists.
In my case, I was caught up in moral/ethical concerns and also probing the meaning of life. Certain biblical and theological themes played a role in it for me, but eventually it was conservative thinking about human nature and the nature of our fallen condition that I could not crack or find a workaround to that finally caved my search for a revised Marxist theory that avoided the errors and extremes of currently historical manifestations of Communism fell into. Ranging into neuroscience and genetics, I discovered that evil has an organic basis. Utopia in this dimension is not possible, and trying to make it happen just tramples on human beings’ basic liberties.
Do people in media and entertainment probe these subjects deeply? And how can one live in the opulence they live in and yet profess socialism? I really do not understand these people? Is there anything about them WORTH understanding?
Jul 17, 2008 - 8:31 pm 23. kabud:fred:
several reasons why hollyshit people are communist perverts:
1.
lenin gave cinema a very huge boost: every one in ussr knows his slogan:
THE MOST IMPORTANT ART FOR US IS CINEMA
usually healthy anticommunists from sovok add to it this :
BECAUSE WITH THE CINEMA WE CAN MANIPUILATE IDIOTS TO THE UNPRECEDENTED DEGREE
I used to see this slogan all over in sovok. Lenin KNEW how to influence morons better then devil himslef
hence:
2.
lots of early cinema came from soviet russia and Ukraine of course(Dovjenko)
So unprecedented ACTIVE MEASURES were applied at all aspects of movie making:
subversion, bribing, threats, plots of different kinds, honey traps, murder, blackmail
lots of it will never surface but lots of it is known and well described in the article and not just in this article:
———–
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=13032
The plain fact is that anti-Soviet or anti-Communist films not only do not win Academy Awards in the U.S., they do not even get made.
..
The reason for this want of anti-Soviet films has been well documented in Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley’s Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s. The 1930s and ’40s, writes Billingsley, saw thick veins of Communist influence running through the Hollywood studio system. Studio Stalinism, the underground movement to smuggle Communist ideology into American cinema, found a surplus of useful idiots in Hollywood, many of them disillusioned with capitalism and enamored with the so-called Russian Experiment.
——————————-
THIS IS A PERFECT MATERIAL FOR A REALLY GOOD FILM
IF ANYONE GETS INTERESTED WE CAN NEGOTIATE A PRODUCTION PROJECT TO CONFRONT THE ANTI_AMERICAN PROCOMMUNIST ENEMY
Also, about a week ago i was reading about Krivonis-Symchych, a Ukrainian UPA fighter, who is still alive at 85.
In the 40s his 100 guys member brigade managed to encircle and destroy an NKVD DIVISION of several thousands or more bastards, the exactly same NKVD division that deported Crimea Tatars , Chechens and conducted millions atrocities.
Kryvonis spent 50-60-70-up to the mid 80s in jails and camps of GULAG
Miraculously survived and returned home finally.
Once in the camp he lead other prisoners against the group of 200 criminals who were terrorizing inmates: at night they sealed the barrack with criminals and put it on fire.
No one survived, they killed all 200 bastards.
KGB was not able to make a SINGLE person talk in the investigation.
NO ONE talked. That was there spirit.
There was a picture of young Kryvonis in that article here
http://ua.pravda.com.ua/files/8/_Picture_file_path_8525.jpg
Jul 18, 2008 - 9:25 pm 24. Jack Conway:Where am I? Hershey, Pa?
Jul 19, 2008 - 10:00 am 25. Jack Conway:I’ve never seen so many nuts in my life.
Blacklists should be resurrected.
Jul 19, 2008 - 10:08 am 26. kabud:And the first names, as dangers to the country, though nitwits, should come from here.
Jack Conway: you just got on the list.
Now, may we have your real name, social and adress?
Jul 19, 2008 - 11:39 am 27. fred:anyway we can find you
kabud,
I’m still stuck on the contradiction inherent in some of these Hollywood Weasels: why are they hot after the high life, with tons of money, properties, cars, women, etc, and still given over to socialist dogma? I highly doubt Mr. Trumbo would have wanted to live on a collective or work in a factory and bask in the glory of being called a comrade.
Jul 19, 2008 - 7:38 pm 28. kabud:Fred
i remember Howard Stern words from 10 -15 years back:
he was interviewing some actor or some one else from film industry
he said something to the effect:
the fact that these people appear in the movies and pretend so well(playing their role) doesn’t mean tat they are smart at all
they are actually very stupid people
i may say same goes for writers like trumbo
or may be he had a weak spot and it was cleverly exploited by the enemy
and one more thing:
people tend to never believe that something bad is going to happen directly to them. to others- may be but not to them
it is like after 9-11 new yorkers forgot how it was
and NO ONE is thinking about the coming attack
which to me is just a very stupid idiocy : 9-11 was a successful test of american inability to protect ourselvs
Jul 20, 2008 - 9:40 am 29. Bob Miller:“why are they hot after the high life, with tons of money, properties, cars, women, etc, and still given over to socialist dogma?”
The ruling class has to have fun, even under Communism.
Jul 20, 2008 - 5:20 pm 30. Whitehall:The real question is, if the Hollywood infrastructure is so anti-American, why hasn’t an alternate source of films arose to satisfy the demand?
As for me, I very seldom attend movies anymore. The last few were so full of liberal plot subversions that I just stopped going. Remember the climax of “Sweet Home Alabama”? Why should the climax be a gay wedding?
Time for some elite turnover in this country.
Jul 20, 2008 - 5:38 pm 31. kabud:Bob Miller:
u r right
ruling class used to enjoy unprecedented and unbelievable material wealth under soviet times
from what i saw: level of life KGB colonel was equal to level of millionaires in the west
level of a general was like a billionaire level
they know why they are in the game and are very highly motivated
then show business people in the west: they are not rocket scientists, they are VERY easily manipulated and technique of manipulation is a very strong point of communist rulers, the strongest skill they developed in 90 years of active measures
Jul 20, 2008 - 7:24 pm 32. Attmay:Why is the openly gay Nathan Lane involved with this piece?
Trumbo’s pal Uncle Joe would have had him thrown in the gulag.
Jul 21, 2008 - 6:06 pm