Trumbo he relished the duel

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/movies/11trumbo.html?_r=2&oref=slogin. Peter Askin, director, and Christopher Trumbo, writer of the film "Trumbo" at the Toronto International Film Festival. Twitter Linkedin Sign In to E-Mail or Save This Print Share Close DiggRedditTumblrPermalink By MICHAEL CIEPLY Published: September 11, 2007 LOS ANGELES, Sept. 10 — Sixty years after a Congressional panel grilled 10 uncooperative writers, directors and producers about their supposed Communist connections, Hollywood still quarrels over the heroes and villains of its Red Scare. The propriety of giving Elia Kazan — one who “named names” — an honorary Oscar in 1999 remains a contentious subject. And only five years ago Stanley Kramer’s widow bitterly battled the makers of a television documentary that depicted her late husband using the blacklist to deny his former partner Carl Foreman a producer’s credit on “High Noon.” But on Monday night in Toronto, one of the era’s acknowledged heroes, the jailed and blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, was expected to deliver some posthumous words that might finally put to rest the hunt for good guys and bad. The admonition occurs in the first few minutes of “Trumbo,” a documentary directed by Peter Askin and written by Trumbo’s son, Christopher Trumbo. The film is making its debut as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Real to Reel series. In a speech actually delivered in 1970, now re-enacted by the actor David Strathairn, Trumbo said, “There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides; and almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of these antithetical qualities in his own person, in his own acts.” The same talk was embedded in a 2003 play, also called “Trumbo,” in which Mr. Askin and Mr. Trumbo had Ed Harris, Nathan Lane, Chris Cooper, Tim Robbins and other actors taking turns during the run playing the lead role, which mostly involved reading from Dalton Trumbo’s remarkably stage-ready personal letters. Having moved those words to the beginning of their documentary — which includes interviews and clips, along with readings by Mr. Strathairn and Mr. Lane, as well as others like Michael Douglas, Joan Allen, Liam Neeson and Paul Giamatti — the director and writer, in effect, declare peace, and clear the way for a look at a beleaguered human being in all of his messy contradictions. (Produced by Safehouse Pictures and Filbert Step Productions, the film isn’t yet set for commercial distribution.) “Things are still hotter than they ever needed to be,” Christopher Trumbo said of Hollywood’s obsession with the blacklist. “As human beings, we tend to personalize things,” Mr. Trumbo noted, speaking by phone on Saturday from his Ojai, Calif., home. “It becomes Hitler rather than Fascism.” Dalton Trumbo, of course, personalized plenty at the time. One of 10 who were jailed for contempt for refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, he and hundreds of others were barred from working openly for Hollywood for more than a decade. During years when he lost his beloved ranch in the Southern California mountains, lived in Mexican exile and worked under assumed names, he wrote letters of deep gratitude to those who supported him, like the producer Sam Zimbalist (“Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo”), and freely excoriated those who did not. Among his detractors, those who contributed to his fiscal crunch came in for the roughest drubbings. In one 1948 letter — read on screen by Mr. Giamatti — Trumbo, the impoverished screenwriter of “A Bill of Divorcement” and “A Guy Named Joe,” told an official at the local phone company: “When we Reds come into power, we are going to shoot merchants in the following order: (1) those who are greedy, and (2) those who are witty. Since you fall into both categories, it will be a sad story when we finally lay hands on you.” But over the long haul, his son said, Trumbo settled on the view that an evil committee had simply exposed the weakness of many around him.
Both Mr. Askin and Christopher Trumbo are now distant enough from those events to marvel at traits for which Dalton Trumbo most likely would have been remembered, even if his joining the Communist Party in 1943 and subsequent refusal to testify about it had never become an issue. Most striking, for Mr. Askin, was his subject’s urge to memorialize his thoughts in hundreds of private letters that were written and rewritten to professional polish, most in a style that invites precisely the sort of declamation they have been receiving from some of Hollywood’s most skilled actors. (Some were collected in “Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962,” published by M. Evans & Company in 1970.) “He couldn’t wait to get to the mailbox to get the replies,” Mr. Askin said, describing Trumbo’s approach to correspondence in a recent phone interview. “He relished the duel.” Many of the letters exist only because their writer, who died in 1976, kept a huge cache of carbon copies. His son — who had two sisters, Melissa, known as Mitzi, and Nikola — said the file was an outgrowth of Trumbo’s insistence on precision in his many battles. “It’s hard to remember what you said 20 years ago, if they’re going to call you on it,” Mr. Trumbo said of his father. “Given his nature, people were always doing that.” More than a few letters deal with Trumbo’s relentless struggle to regain the good life in the years before his credits on “Spartacus” and “Exodus” in 1960 helped break the blacklist. If a yearning for days when he was reputedly Hollywood’s highest-paid writer seemed contradictory for a card-carrying Communist, that was no more puzzling, Christopher Trumbo said, than his father’s seemingly casual decision to join the party in the first place. “It came as a complete surprise to my mother,” said Mr. Trumbo, who is working on a book about the blacklist. “They had talked about it and decided not to join.” Asked why Hollywood has often seemed less inclined than his father to set aside past sins, Mr. Trumbo said it was because so many were complicit in shutting out the relative few who were actually denied work for their political stance. “People feel guilty about it,” he said. “I think it’s because essentially the community itself recognized that it didn’t have to happen. And they let it happen.”