James Dalton Trumbo (December 9, 1905 – September 10, 1976) was an American screenwriter and novelist. As one of the Hollywood Ten, he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 during the committee's investigation of Communist influences in the motion picture industry. Trumbo won two Academy Awards while blacklisted; one was originally given to a front writer, and one was awarded to "Robert Rich", Trumbo's pseudonym.Blacklisting effectively ended in 1960 when it lost credibility. Trumbo was publicly given credit for two blockbuster films: Otto Preminger made public that Trumbo wrote the screenplay for the smash hit, Exodus, and Kirk Douglas publicly announced that Trumbo was the screenwriter of Spartacus. Further, President John F. Kennedy crossed picket lines to see the movie.On December 19, 2011, The Writers Guild of America announced that Trumbo was given full credit for his work on the screenplay of the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday, sixty years after the fact.
University of Southern California, Grand Junction High School, University of Colorado Boulder
Nationality
American
Spouse
Cleo Beth Fincher
Children
Melissa Trumbo, Nikola Trumbo, Christopher TrumboMelissa TrumboNikola Trumbo
Parents
Orus Bonham Trumbo, Maud Trumbo
Siblings
Catharine Trumbo, Elizabeth Trumbo
Awards
Academy Award for Best Story, National Book Award for Most Original Book, Writers Guild of America Award - Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement
Nominations
Academy Award for Best Writing Adapted Screenplay, Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay - Motion Picture, Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written Drama, Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Drama, Retro Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation
Movies
Spartacus, Roman Holiday, The Brave One, Exodus, Johnny Got His Gun, Papillon, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Lonely Are the Brave, Kitty Foyle, Gun Crazy, A Guy Named Joe, Road Gang, The Sandpiper, Executive Action, The Last Sunset, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, The Prowler, Five Came Back, He Ran All ...
Star Sign
Sagittarius
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Quote
1
The art of lying is the art of the practical. It ought never be indulged in for the pure pleasure of the thing, since over-usage dulls the instrument, corrodes the character and despoils the spirit. The important thing about a lie is not that it be interesting, fanciful, graceful or event pleasant but that it be believed. Curb, therefore, your imagination. Let the lie be delivered full-face, eye to eye, and without scratching of the scalp. Let it be blunt and forthright and so simple that you can repeat it in detail and under oath ten years hence. But let it, for all its simplicity, contain one fantastical element of creative ingenuity--one and no more--designed to capture the attention of the listener and to convince him that, since co one would dare to invent the improbability you have inserted, its mere existence places the stamp of truth upon everything that you have said. If you cannot tell a believable lie, cling then to truth which is always our secret succor in times of need, and manfully accept the consequences.
2
I begin to realize why people believe that Hollywood corrupts writers. But they're quite wrong. All Hollywood does is give them enough money so they can get married and have kids like normal people. But it's the getting married and having kids that really corrupts them.
3
[1970, accepting the Screen Writers Guild Laurel Award] The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides. When you who are in your 40s or younger look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, 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 and some 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 that 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.
4
[February 1940] If they say to us, "We must fight this war to preserve democracy", let us say to them, "There is no such thing as democracy in time of war. It is a lie, a deliberate deception to lead us to our own destruction. We will not die in order that our children may inherit a permanent military dictatorship".
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Fact
1
Wrote the screenplay of "Will Adams" which was to star Peter O'Toole and Toshiro Mifune with direction by John Huston and produced by Eugene Frenke and Jules Buck. but the project never went through.
His widow Cleo died of age-related causes Oct. 9, 2009, at home in the Bay Area city of Los Altos, CA.
4
In 1979, Trumbo's unfinished novel "Night of the Aurochs" was published posthumously in 1979. A World War II novel told by Grieban, the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz death. Edited by Robert Kirsch, the novel initially is epistemologically narrated in the first person through letters written by Grieban before shifting to the third person. Grieban tries to link the ethical nature of the Nazi movement to the American Civil War, in which both Nazi Germany and the Confederate States of American fought to keep the races pure and separated. However, Grieban falls in love with a Jewish inmate of the death camp. Sympathetically rendered, Grieban is a broken man, living out the rest of his life in hiding, and dying uncared for.
5
The Journalism School of the University of Colorado built and dedicated the Dalton Trumbo Free Speech Fountain. According to the School of Journalism, the fountain "is named in honor of Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten . . . screenwriters and directors who were blacklisted and driven from their livelihoods for refusing to testify before the House of Un-American Activities Committee".
6
His screenplay for The Brave One (1956) won the Oscar for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story in 1958. The screenplay was credited to Robert Rich, who was not at the Academy Award ceremony and was not a member of the Screen Writers Guild. It turned out that Rich was a nephew of the producers of the film, who denied the rumors that the screenplay actually had been written by a blacklisted screenwriter. After Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas broke the blacklist in 1959 by hiring Trumbo, it was revealed that the screenplay for "The Brave One" actually had been written by him. Trumbo received his Oscar on May 2, 1975, shortly before his death, but the official screen credit was not changed until many years later.
7
Was finally honored with an Oscar for the screenplay of Roman Holiday (1953) in 1993, 16 years after his death. Unable to write under his own name during the blacklist, Trumbo used "fronts" during the 1950s, the years in which, ironically, he wrote his best scripts. For Roman Holiday (1953) Trumbo used his friend Ian McLellan Hunter as a front. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (which had supported the blacklist) awarded Trumbo a belated Oscar for his other blacklist-era Academy Award winner, The Brave One (1956), in 1975, before his death.
8
Was a member of Delta Tau Delta International fraternity.
9
Writer-producer James Kevin McGuinness, a right-winger who was a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, testified that left-wing screenwriters did not inject propaganda into their movie scripts during World War II. "[The movie industry] profited from reverse lend-lease because during the [war] the Communist and Communist-inclined writers in the motion picture industry were given leave of absence to be patriotic. During that time . . . under my general supervision Dalton Trumbo wrote two magnificent patriotic scripts, A Guy Named Joe (1943) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)".
$10 Million
