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Financially, the Mexican adventure proved unsuccessful, and Trumbo had a very unhappy experience writing a script for Herbert Biberman. But in another respect, it laid the foundation for Trumbo’s campaign against the blacklist. While in Mexico, he conceived the story and wrote the script for The Brave One. He also watched from afar as one of his black-market scripts, Roman Holiday (fronted by his close friend Ian Hunter), enjoyed unqualified success. He returned to the United States in early 1953, determined to wage an unrelenting battle against the blacklist.

With difficulty, Cleo Trumbo finally resolved the financial mess her husband had left behind. The family also struggled to ensure that Trumbo received screen credit for Roman Holiday and that Kirk Douglas did not get exclusive credit for “breaking the blacklist.” The Trumbos were gratified when a free-speech fountain at the University of Colorado was dedicated to Trumbo and when the citizens of Grand Junction embraced him and Eclipse. The “Dalton Gang” sponsored a sculpture of him—writing in his bathtub—that sits on Main Street in Grand Junction. A special Writers Guild committee restored many of his black-market credits.

In June 1950 Trumbo traveled east to surrender to federal authorities. He and John Howard Lawson were incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institute in Ashland, Kentucky. Clearly angry and dispirited by the experience, Trumbo failed to complete his “big” historical novel. Money worries weighed heavily on him, and after his release, he resumed his black-market work and decided to move to Mexico.

Trumbo’s investors did not provide adequate funds for the shoot, and they demanded that he rush the editing process so they could recoup their investment more quickly. Christopher worked closely with his father on the project. During the shoot, one of the extras wrote a distorted account of events that was sent to Esquire by Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood Ten. That act ended the friendship between the Bessies and Trumbos.

An overview of Dalton Trumbo as a writer, person, and political figure and the many battles he fought. It posits that his membership in the Communist Party did not define him and outlines his essential political credo. It also shows him as others saw him.

This chapter introduces Trumbo’s family and his geographic origins. Readers meet his parents and follow his boyhood adventures and ambitions in Grand Junction, Colorado, including a one-year stay at the University of Colorado. His aspirations to be a writer and the obstacles to becoming one are discussed.

1938 was Trumbo’s annus mirabilis. He wrote his first memorable film and his greatest novel, and he married his true love. A Man to Remember was one of the few B films to earn excellent reviews and return A-level profits. Johnny Got His Gun won a National Book Award, and it became the Bible for generations of antiwar partisans. Cleo Fincher became his emotional anchor, steadying him for the successes he earned. Trumbo also became active in the antiwar movement.

Trumbo and the rest of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted by the movie industry and indicted for contempt of Congress, waged a vigorous three-year fight to stay out of prison. Public opinion, however, was against them. Those years witnessed the beginning of the scriptwriting black market and Trumbo’s antipathy toward liberal anti-Communists.

During his fight to stay out of prison, Trumbo wrote a play, began writing scripts on the black market (at substantially reduced rates), and composed The Time of the Toad, his brilliant, slashing critique of the domestic cold war.

Back in Los Angeles, Trumbo launched his plan to undermine the blacklist. He believed that lawsuits were counterproductive. Rather, he thought that he and a few other talented writers could produce a sufficient number of quality scripts to start rumors flying, win awards, and attract increasing numbers of producers to the black market. He spent a great deal of time polishing his plan.

Trumbo took time from his black-market work to write several political tracts. When fourteen leaders of the California Communist Party were indicted, tried, and convicted for violating the Alien Registration Act, Trumbo wrote a second brilliant indictment of the domestic cold war, The Devil in the Book. As an act of solidarity, he rejoined the Communist Party but resigned once the Supreme Court overturned the fourteen leaders’ convictions. He also took time to rethink his earlier membership in the party, its secrecy, and the Hollywood Ten’s strategy.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences joined the blacklist enterprise when its governors enacted a bylaw preventing blacklisted people from being nominated for Academy Awards, beginning with Michael Wilson’s script for Friendly Persuasion. A few months later, “Robert Rich” won an Academy Award, and Trumbo, with the help of television reporter Bill Stout, exploited those events. He gave speeches on the subject and wrote articles, including his last great attack on the domestic cold war, which was published in the Nation. The script for The Defiant Ones, cowritten by the blacklisted Ned Young, gave Trumbo new ammunition for his campaign to get the Academy to rescind its bylaw. When it did so, Trumbo announced that he was “Robert Rich.”

Trumbo’s major breakthrough occurred when he was assigned to adapt Howard Fast’s historical novel about the great slave uprising against the Roman Empire. To maintain his vision of the movie, he waged a series of battles against director Stanley Kubrick and some of the actors. As part of that campaign, he wrote some of his most scintillating analyses and employed some of his best maneuvers to earn a screen credit.

While working on the Spartacus script, Otto Preminger asked Trumbo to write the script for Exodus. Preminger publicly announced that Trumbo would receive screen credit. (The announcement that Trumbo would also receive screen credit for Spartacus came seven months later.) Thus, at the end of 1960, Trumbo’s name was on the screen twice, for two hugely successful films. This feat provoked a slow weakening of the blacklist, but blacklistees returned to work in a trickle, not a wave.

Trumbo subsequently received two more credits, for The Last Sunset and Lonely Are the Brave. (He had been working on both for Bryna prior to the earlier credit announcements.) Believing the blacklist had not yet been broken, Trumbo urged other blacklistees to proceed carefully, keep writing scripts, and avoid doing anything that might antagonize studio executives. Two of his projects with Preminger did not reach fruition, and Trumbo’s reporting of his black-market income attracted an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service.

Trumbo’s next important assignment was his most prestigious—adapting Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer for Eddie Lewis and John Frankenheimer. Trumbo faced a difficult task, and Malamud did not entirely approve of Trumbo’s approach. The movie was not a box-office success. Nor was Trumbo’s next project—an adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s novel The Horsemen, also for Lewis and Frankenheimer. However, the publication of a selection of Trumbo’s letters, titled Additional Dialogue, received accolades from critics. Trumbo became involved with the black civil rights movement and the anti–Vietnam War movement, but comedian Steve Allen use Trumbo’s political past to blackball him from participating in Tom Bradley’s campaign for mayor of Los Angeles. In February 1970 the Writers Guild of America bestowed on Trumbo the Laurel Award for lifetime achievement. His acceptance speech was highly controversial.

Trumbo’s antiwar novel became very popular with anti-Vietnam activists, and he decided to make it into a movie. He first worked with Luis Buñuel but then decided to direct it himself. He had difficulty securing funds and wound up with a group of investors who constantly meddled with his efforts.

The investors wanted a major studio to distribute the movie, hoping for a larger advance; Trumbo insisted on an independent distributor that would have the patience to stick with the movie while it attracted an audience. They fought constantly, but Trumbo eventually prevailed. Although the movie received many good reviews and won several film festival awards, it did not attract a large audience, and Trumbo suffered a major financial loss.

After the Trumbo family moved to Los Angeles, Trumbo’s father contracted a fatal illness, and Dalton had to go to work in a bakery to support the family. During his eight years at the bakery, he wrote several novels, dozens of short stories, and some film scripts. Finally, he secured a job writing movie reviews and essays for the Hollywood Spectator.