Exclusive: After World War II, the Red Scare built the careers of redbaiters like Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon while undermining the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and stifling prospects for progressive politics in America, a tale touched on by the movie, “Trumbo,” writes James DiEugenio.
By James DiEugenio
The post-World War II years could have shaped America into a very different country by building on the foundations the New Deal and moving more along the lines of European allies with publicly financed health care and other social protections.
Instead, reactionary forces that never made peace with President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era reforms generated a new Red Scare, wildly exaggerating the threat from a small number of mild-mannered communists and leftists in Hollywood to steer the nation in a right-wing direction favored by big business.
Actor Bryan Cranston starring as Dalton Trumbo in the movie, “Trumbo.”
A new movie, Trumbo, recounts one early chapter in that saga, the persecution of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and other leftists in the movie industry who became known as the Hollywood Ten, subjected to jail and “blacklisting” for their political views.
The film tells Trumbo’s personal story as a victim of ambitious congressmen, a zealous columnist and intimidated movie executives, but also how this talented screenwriter ultimately prevailed with the help of actor Kirk Douglas and a few other Hollywood luminaries who appreciated Trumbo’s skills and saw the blacklisting as a hysterical witch hunt.
But what the movie fails to explain is how the scars from the Red Scare permanently changed America, making it a place of fearful conformity with a relatively narrow band of acceptable political thought. The era killed off a vibrant Left that could have challenged the Right’s hostility to government social programs fulfilling the constitutional mandate to “provide for the general Welfare.”
Yet, as a tale of one man’s struggle against a fearsome combination of government pressure and industry complicity to control his freedom of thought, Trumbo is a worthy and even rare historical drama.
An Exceptional Talent
Dalton Trumbo was one of the most colorful, fascinating and prolific writers that the Hollywood film colony ever produced. Trumbo wrote, or co-wrote, well over 50 produced screenplays. In addition, he wrote numerous plays, novels and non-fiction books. Some of his most famous scripts were A Bill of Divorcement, A Guy Named Joe and Kitty Foyle.
Unfortunately for Trumbo, he was never allowed to walk up on stage to receive an Academy Award. Not because he did not win any. He actually won two: one for The Brave One and one for Roman Holiday. But at the time he won those Oscars, in the 1950s, he was on what became known as the Hollywood blacklist.
This was an unofficial assemblage of the names of persons working in the motion picture industry who were not allowed to be employed by any of the major studios or television networks. Therefore, when Trumbo won those two awards, his Oscars were given to people who either did not actually exist or who worked as a “front” for Trumbo.
A “front” was someone who had an acceptable name to the studios and who was deemed employable. This person did either little or no work on the completed script, but was allowed a percentage of the fees accrued for the screenplay. Trumbo was finally given his Oscar for The Brave One in 1975, the year before he died. It was not until 2011 that his name was restored to prints of Roman Holiday.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
Trumbo was born in Colorado in 1905. He began writing in high school for his local newspaper. When he attended college at the University of Colorado, he worked as a reporter for the Boulder Daily Camera. After working for a number of years at a bakery and after years of having his stories and novels rejected, he finally began to have some success when his essays were accepted in some major magazines. He then became a script reader for Warner Brothers.
From about 1937 to 1947, Dalton Trumbo was one of the highest-paid writers in Hollywood. Some sources state that he was the highest paid writer in the film colony. Trumbo had two qualities that producers craved: he was versatile and he was fast. He could write in a variety of film genres, from comedy to fantasy to personal drama to the epic structure. And since he was a workaholic, he could produce completed screenplays and rewrites at a rate that was exceptional.
Actor Kirk Douglas was astonished at how fast Trumbo wrote the script for Spartacus. In Douglas’s book, I am Spartacus, the actor said Trumbo worked at least twice as fast as any writer with whom he worked. Those qualities, plus a gift for finding a story arc and creating credible characters and dialogue, helped Trumbo ascend to the highest peak of Hollywood success before the age of 40.
Hunting ‘Subversives’
Trumbo’s career all but collapsed when he ran headlong into the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This infamous committee first became prominent under Texas Congressman Martin Dies in 1938 when it was initially supposed to investigate Nazi espionage in America. But since it was largely composed of Republicans and conservative Democrats (like Dies), it quickly turned to inquiring into one of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the Federal Theater Project. (Robert F. Vaughn, Only Victims, p. 36)
The Federal Theater Project was a part of the Works Progress Administration, which became the largest single employment program of the New Deal. The Federal Theater Project was meant to employ out-of-work actors, directors and stage managers in federally funded stage productions; both in New York and several regional outlets.
It was a smashing success in that it produced nearly 1,000 plays in four years. These were seen by hundreds of thousands of spectators. Some of the plays were directed by Orson Welles and have become legendary in stage history, e.g., The Cradle Will Rock.
HUAC did not like the spectacular success of this program. Dies once said that the WPA was the greatest boon the communists ever had in the United States. (ibid) Dies called several people to testify about supposed communist influences in certain productions. The committee was so unsophisticated in its understanding that it criticized the director of the project for going to Russia to see new experimental plays by theater innovators like Konstantin Stanislavsky. (ibid, p. 61)
Congressman Joe Starnes famously asked project director Hallie Flanigan if playwright Christopher Marlowe was a communist, though Marlowe had died in 1593. Yet, these clownish blunderings became popular with newspapers and magazines. And, at first, HUAC gained a large amount of public support. Dies unsuccessfully called for the resignation of New Deal officers such as Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes. (ibid, p. 70). But Dies did kill the Federal Theater Project.
After World War II, HUAC became a standing committee and under new chairman Parnell Thomas the panel decided to hold hearings into the Hollywood film industry. The committee investigators, led by Harry Stripling, assembled dossiers which were largely created from information delivered by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. HUAC then held open hearings, calling a series of prominent players in the entertainment field.
Contempt of Congress
The first panel consisted of “friendly witnesses” who essentially agreed with the committee’s judgments and aims that Hollywood was filled with communist agents who were assembling works of propaganda in order to weaken the foundations of American life. Then, HUAC called “unfriendly witnesses” who did not agree with these judgments, refused to cooperate with the committee and were then indicted for contempt of Congress.
The “friendly witnesses” included three heads of major studios: Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer and Walt Disney, all extremely powerful, wealthy and politically connected. Warner volunteered the names of suspected communists, e.g. writers Alvah Bessie, Howard Koch and Ring Lardner Jr. (Vaughn, p. 81)
Disney testified that a strike his studio endured a year before was caused by communist infiltration of trade unions, and he named union leader Herbert K. Sorrell as a communist agent. Disney also named an animator at his studio, David Hilberman, as a communist. (ibid, p. 85)
Mayer testified that HUAC should write legislation that would regulate the employment of communists in private industry.
With Republicans in control of the committee, it enlisted novelist Ayn Rand as a witness who watched the film Song of Russia and evaluated whether or not it was propaganda. Rand declared that since the film did not depict normal life in Russia as a gulag, it was propaganda.
As author Victor Navasky has written, the parading of these friendly witnesses was little more than the scaffolding for a sideshow. Famous actors such as Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, Robert Montgomery, Gary Cooper and Ronald Reagan joined the studio executives. (Reagan continued defending HUAC into the 1970s even after it was formally disbanded.)
Ronald Reagan photographed in a cowboy hat at Rancho Del Cielo in 1976.
There was a tactical aim in all of this. By presenting these witnesses first and urging them to deliver speeches and name suspected subversives, the 10 “unfriendly witnesses” who followed were set up in the public eye as being antagonistic toward the earlier star-spangled cavalcade.
Trumbo was in this second group. He had been a member of the Communist Party from about 1943, an isolationist and anti-war, an attitude conveyed by his famous novel Johnny Got His Gun, published in 1939. In the rapidly ascending spiral of Cold War demagoguery, these qualities made him a perfect target of HUAC and one of its ambitious young members, Richard Nixon.
Pleading the First
Trumbo and his group of fellow writers Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner Jr., Lester Cole, Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, John H. Lawson, Sam Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk (who was a writer-director) decided to do battle with HUAC. They knew that the question the committee would ask was, if they were now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party, which would not be officially outlawed until 1954.
But the witnesses knew that if they admitted this, the next question would be: Who else do you know who is or was a member? Or the committee would ask, did you attend any meetings, and if so who did you see there?
Since they had already seen what men like Mayer, Warner and Disney did in getting rid of suspected leftists, the witnesses knew that not only would their careers be endangered but anyone else they named would be put at risk.
Therefore, Trumbo and other witnesses decided not to plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination but instead refused to directly answer the committee’s questions, citing their First Amendment rights of choice and privacy. For their stance, Trumbo and nine other witnesses, who became known as the Hollywood Ten, were prosecuted for contempt of Congress.
Their main attorney, Bartley Crum advised them that the Supreme Court would not uphold such a conviction. But after Trumbo was convicted in the lower court, the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. Trumbo went to prison for about 11 months in Ashland, Kentucky.
Besides prison terms, the Hollywood Ten case led to a blacklist by movie executives who “deplored the action of the 10 Hollywood men who have been cited for contempt by the House of Representatives.” All business ties and contracts with them were “suspended without compensation” and none would be re-employed until they were acquitted or purged themselves of contempt and declared under oath he is not a communist.
As the Red Scare spread, about 300 workers in the entertainment industry were blacklisted. Some, like actor Philip Loeb, were pushed to the edge. As Douglas notes in his book, Loeb could not care for his emotionally troubled son and committed suicide, a particularly painful experience for Douglas who knew Loeb when they were both up-and-coming actors in New York.
Eking Out a Living
When Trumbo emerged from prison, he first moved to Mexico for a couple of years. He tried to eke out a living writing scripts, but the man who once commanded $75,000 per screenplay could make only a fraction of that sum. So, he moved back to Los Angeles where he lived in a small house in Highland Park. For the next several years, he employed phony names and hired fronts to produce his scripts, even when he was dealing with small, independent production companies like the King Brothers.
Even though Trumbo was making much less money and working much harder and longer, he could not claim credit for his work. As Jay Roach’s Trumbo shows, this put a tremendous strain on Trumbo’s home life.
Beyond the movie executives, other powerful Hollywood figures piled on the Hollywood Ten and went after their support group, the Committee for the First Amendment. Actor John Wayne and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper formed the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservations of American Ideals.
When a performer or writer wanted to recant and purge himself, he got in contact with this group. As Reagan said in an interview for the film Hollywood on Trial, they would tell this person that the Alliance really could not help you unless you decided to help yourself. Once the person did so, he would get permission from studio executives to work again.
Roach’s film shows actor Edward G. Robinson, who had supported Trumbo with monetary contributions and didn’t work for a year, going through this penance under the approving eye of Wayne.
Some Hollywood Ten defendants, like director Edward Dmytryk, could not handle the pressures and made arrangements with the powers that be to recant and name names. As result, actress Lee Grant was added to the blacklist while the rehabilitated Dmytryk went on to direct films, including The Caine Mutiny, shot in 1954 at the high tide of the blacklist.
As the film shows, however, there were some brave souls who finally cracked the blacklist.
When Kirk Douglas came to Hollywood in 1945, he was hired to work on a film called The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. There was a strike going on, the one which Disney referred to in his testimony before HUAC. The striking union, largely representing set dressers, had asked the Screen Actor’s Guild to honor their picket line.
Actor Kirk Douglas as the gladiator-turned-rebel-leader Spartacus.
Under the influence of Guild leaders — such as George Murphy, Ronald Reagan and George Montgomery — SAG refused to do so. But the writer and the director of Douglas’s film, respectively Robert Rossen and Lewis Milestone, did support the strikers. They would not cross the picket line. Fearing a lockout, producer Hal Wallis had the actor sleep in his dressing room.
As Douglas related in his book, two years later, both Milestone and Rossen were called before HUAC. Milestone escaped to France. Rossen admitted membership in the Communist Party. Both men were blacklisted.
Another Douglas friend and colleague, Carl Foreman, producer of the film High Noon, was called to testify but fled to England. Foreman was targeted because some took High Noon as an allegory for what HUAC was doing to America.
A Disgusted Douglas
All this shocked Douglas, who knew that none of these men posed any threat to the security of the United States. He realized how absurd the practices of the HUAC actually were.
For instance, the committee called baseball player Jackie Robinson to testify against actor Paul Robeson, but Robinson could offer little or no information about the actor. Douglas concluded that the only reason Robinson was called was because, like Robeson, he was a famous African-American.
Douglas was also distressed by the fact that six of the Hollywood Ten were Jewish as was he and as were many of the executives who capitulated so completely before HUAC. Douglas could not understand why people of the Jewish faith, who fully understood the price and pain of being persecuted, would go along with the HUAC circus, led by a clown like Thomas.
As Douglas wrote and as the film shows, much of this stemmed from fear. Men such as Warner, Mayer and Harry Cohn were “terrified their great power would be taken away from them if their loyalty to America was called into question.”
Roach’s film shows a scene with columnist Hedda Hopper going into Mayer’s office, calling him a kike, and threatening to vilify him in her columns unless he cooperated with the committee.
But Douglas rejected such pressure, agreeing with actor Fredric March who said: “They’re after more than Hollywood. This reaches into every American city and town.”
Ironically, HUAC’s aggressive witch hunt against leftists in Hollywood contributed, indirectly, to the undoing of Trumbo’s isolation. In 1950, author Howard Fast was called before HUAC and grilled about his colleagues in a group opposing Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco. When Fast refused to answer, he also was imprisoned.
In prison, Fast used the library to research the life of Spartacus, a slave who turned gladiator and finally became a rebel leader against Imperial Rome. After getting released from prison, Fast wrote a historical novel about the man who almost undid the Roman Empire.
But Fast’s life was not the same as it had been before. He was banned from speaking on college campuses. He was under surveillance by the FBI. And he was denied a passport, which deprived him of his right to do research on Spartacus in Europe.
When Fast finished his book, he tried to sell it to his old publisher, Little, Brown and Company, but was turned down after the FBI visited the publisher. Six other publishing houses also turned it down. With no other alternative, Fast published it himself. In four months, it sold 48,000 copies with Fast and his wife shipping out copies from their basement.
Finding Spartacus
By the 1950s, Kirk Douglas had built a very successful career as an actor. He also despised the fact that MGM made him sign a loyalty oath to play painter Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life. So, Douglas created his own production company with partner Ed Lewis, who dropped off a copy of Fast’s Spartacus on Douglas’s desk.
Douglas loved the book and decided to produce the film (and star in it). Fast insisted on writing the first draft of the script but it was quite poor, prompting Douglas to enlist Trumbo to do the re-write. But Douglas told Universal Studio chiefs Ed Muhl and Lew Wasserman that Lewis was writing the script.
About halfway through the film’s production, Trumbo stopped working, complaining that he had written about 250,000 words on the project so far and did not want to do that much work if his name was not on the film.
Douglas drove to Trumbo’s house and told him that when the film was finished, he would insist that Trumbo get screen credit, which is what Douglas wanted to do all along. Douglas invited Trumbo to a meeting at the Universal commissary with himself and director Stanley Kubrick, something Trumbo had not done for almost 13 years.
After columnist Hedda Hopper exposed the fact that Trumbo was secretly writing Spartacus, producer-director Otto Preminger approached Trumbo to write a movie from the Leon Uris book Exodus. Preminger announced this in the movie trade papers, joining Douglas in helping Trumbo crack the blacklist.
After Douglas and Preminger made their announcements, singer/actor Frank Sinatra also decided to employ a blacklisted writer, Albert Maltz, except Sinatra wanted to make this into a big event. But Trumbo advised Douglas to tell Sinatra to drop his crusade, since it would probably hurt Sen. John Kennedy in his presidential race against former HUAC member Richard Nixon. Joseph Kennedy, the candidate’s father, also advised Sinatra not to go that route.
A President Weighs In
But after Kennedy got elected in 1960, he and longtime friend, Paul Fay, attended a public screening of Spartacus. The American Legion was picketing and Kennedy could have asked for a private screening of the film. Wasserman and Muhl would have been glad to oblige.
But on the advice of his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the President made the deliberate public appearance.
Roach closes the film with a nice strophe. Hopper is in her living room watching television when a segment depicting Kennedy’s attendance at the film comes on the screen. The camera rotates around her face slowly, as she begins to realize that her reign of terror is now ending.
The scene dissolves to black. Out of the darkness, we see Trumbo in the wings about to go on stage in 1970 to collect his Laurel Award, the annual distinguished career award given out by the Writers’ Guild of America. Eloquently, Trumbo addresses the issue of the whole blacklist period and the film closes.
Director Jay Roach began his career in comedy, directing Michael Myers in the Austin Powers films. He also directed the Robert DeNiro comedy Meet the Parents before going to the small screen to direct works closer to his heart. For HBO, he directed the political dramas Recount about the Republican heist of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, and Game Change about Sen. John McCain’s decision to pick Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008.
Roach has now made Trumbo, a political drama for the large screen. Overall, he does fairly well. Dalton Trumbo did several interviews that were captured on film and can be seen by almost anyone. Actor Bryan Cranston has obviously watched them at length as he does a nice job portraying Trumbo’s feisty character.
The English actress Helen Mirren plays Hedda Hopper. From the first time I saw Mirren in The Long Good Friday, I was struck by her intelligence, subtlety and technical proficiency. She furthers that tradition here with a nicely understated performance. In an easy part, John Goodman is strong and vivid as low-budget producer John King.
Roach likes to begin a scene low key and then build it to a powerful explosion or aria. For example, he does this with Goodman wielding a baseball bat at a representative of the producers’ alliance sent to intimidate him from employing blacklisted writers.
The one disappointment in the cast is Diane Lane as Trumbo’s wife Cleo. Either she could not find the center of her character, or Roach could not help her. It’s a completely blasé performance in a major role.
A Bigger Picture
In my opinion, some of the film’s shortcomings originate in the script by John McNamara. The film tries to make the opening of Spartacus into a crowning historical moment, which is not true. Because of the power of Douglas, Wasserman and Muhl, this achievement ended the blacklist for Trumbo but not for many others who did not have that kind of torque behind them. For them, it lingered on into the mid-1960s.
Another problem with the script is that it misses the core motivation for HUAC and the careers of some of its members, like Dies, Thomas and Nixon. For political reasons, they bitterly resented the scope and the goals of Roosevelt’s New Deal. They did not want government to be the solution to the Great Depression. So, they decided to poison the New Deal’s legacy with the taint of communism.
To a degree, they were successful. HUAC managed to drastically limit the American political spectrum by attacking, smearing, prosecuting and demonizing any political orientation left of the Democratic Party.
HUAC, Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare tilted the politics of the country decidedly to the right, meaning that unlike many European industrialized countries there is no serious left-leaning American political party.
Though HUAC Chairman Thomas went to prison on fraud charges, Sen. Joe McCarthy took up the anti-communist cause, expanding the Red Scare into the U.S. government and other aspects of American life. As with HUAC, FBI Director Hoover supplied information to McCarthy.
When Robert Kennedy became Attorney General, he looked at the information that Hoover had. There were maybe 50,000 members of the Communist Party in the United States and many of them were FBI informants. In other words, there was no real communist threat to fear. It was more a creation of men like Hoover who recognized that an exaggerated fear of communism was an effective weapon for gaining political advantage and personal power.
It was this subterranean agenda that the American public was never made to understand. Therefore the consequences went unabated.
Even today, prominent right-wingers decry government programs to create jobs or alleviate suffering including President Barack Obama’s private-insurance-based health care program as “socialism” or “communism.”
The value of scaring the American people has not been lost. Today, we live with another excessive threat, the War on Terror, which has led to the Patriot Act, torture, drone strikes and racial profiling.
The ability of Americans to resist these current excesses is crippled by the failure of politicians, the courts and the media to stop the Red Scare that started in Hollywood in 1947.
Trumbo is a decent enough picture. And Roach should be praised for his good intentions in filming it. There are few directors and producers making politically relevant films in America today.
But in my opinion, this subject would have been better served if Roach had made a mini-series on the subject. That would have given him the opportunity to depict a much wider American canvas and a much larger subject.
Dalton Trumbo was part of an epic struggle. In the end, he personally won, but the country lost.
James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book is Reclaiming Parkland.
Perhaps one should give benefit of the doubt to Trumbo. After all, there are so many (usually older) folks who even now can claim with a straight face to have never come across a gay person. But, it is one thing to be steeped in ignorance about Palestine–and tacit bigotry that comes out of it–and another to cling to those shibboleths even when facts are readily ascertainable:
Bertrand Russell, to his credit came to a humanist conclusion, in his Nineties:
http://wordsofdissent.com/bertrand-russells-last-message-on-the-israel-palestine-conflict
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdkBgE8tFRI
Words of wisdom that still cast a cut a piercing light though the veil of idiocy and prejudice.
In reviewing the material, it is not possible to figure out just when Douglas promised Trumbo he would get screen credit for Spartacus, or when Kubrick and Douglas escorted Trumbo into the Universal commissary. Either of those would be the end of the blacklist. So I cannot be definite about if Trumbo was blacklisted while working on Exodus.
But as for the second point, I stand by what I said. The awareness of the whole unfairness of the Israel/Palestine problem was not at all as clear or as prevalent back then as it is now. Especially in recent years, there has been a tsunami of new information and books spelling out that unfairness, and America’s involvement in it: from LBJ to Nixon, Kissinger and Ford. There was not anything like this back then. Not even close. Today, the younger members of the Democratic Party, that is under 40, by a clear majority do not favor Israel. Back at the time of Preminger and Trumbo, most Americans did not even know what Palestine was. So to hold Trumbo to a standard we can easily judge today, back in 1960, that simply does not fly. A good example would be Marlon Brando, who starred in a huge Broadway hit about the birth of Israel back in the forties, but came around on the issue much later.
Dalton Trumbo had his career taken away from him; was falsely imprisoned for an ideal; fled to Mexico after, and it took him 13 years to get his life back. His lawyer committed suicide, and so did Douglas’ New York friend actor Philip Loeb. Over three hundred people had their careers halted in their prime. Many fled to Europe. All of this over a non existent communist threat that Bobby Kennedy could not believe when he saw the figures about. But what the second Red Scare did was wipe out anything in this country to the left of the Democratic Party. Which was Nixon’s and Hoover’s, aim in my opinion.
That is what this essay is about. And that is a big subject; bigger than just Trumbo the man, or the film. Mr. Duval’s dispute is with the WGA; your dispute is with President Obama and John Kerry. I can do little or nothing about these issues. Although Bob Parry runs one of the best sites there is about the whole Israel/Palestine issue, and how George W. Bush made it all a lot worse.
So the PEP label is a bit of a smear and red herring.
Yeah, what a problem if in 1960 a Progressive(2 of them, including a director) had made a Zionist propaganda movie? No big deal even to mention, and, of course, not to point to as a fault. In 1960 there was enough facts, including UN resolutions to see, but only(!) if one wanted to see. But why USA “Progressives”, having their history of persecution, did not give a damn about the facts, while doing the movie.
And if it is true, that in 1960 most Americans did not even know what Palestine was, “Exodus” had made them aware of it – in the most pro-Zionist colonization way possible. As if a population of settlers on the Natives’ land needed even more propaganda to see Palestinians as subhumans.
By the way, after WWII there were religious Jews in the USA, who was anti-Zionists. But even if they were not well-known, Einstein and other celebrities had criticized the methods of Zionist colonization (even though not the goal itself) in 1948 in published letter (NYT, no less). So, they could(!) know, and if they did not, they just were or not keen to know the truth about the matter of their movie (a great treat) or were not giving a damn about the plight of Palestinians (even greater), but now they are defended by the modern day USA progressives nevertheless.
Exodus was a poison for USA public, which sure outweighed anything else “Progressive” Trumbo did , and still it is even NOT mentioned by USA Progressives.
lidia, it’s called PEP, Progressives Except for Palestine. Just google the term, and you’ll find all manner of decent, feminist, vegan, LGBT friendly Social democrats who start foaming at the mouth if the term “Palestinian” is so much as uttered (they prefer to call them “Arabs” just like Russians were “Slavs” for Germans of another era). Conservatives tend to be more honest when this sensitive topic comes up, as it did in British Parliament in 1937 when the champion of Democracy’s fight against Fascism, Winston Churchill frankly shared his thoughts on colonization of Palestine by East European Jews:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
Ifa, I know about PEP, but my point was that those PEP are nevertheless often given praises by other progressives who in other cases proclaim solidarity with Palestinians. I guess, Palestinians are still not as important as USA PEP! The Zionist propaganda movie “Munich” had been praised by USA progressives as well, not so long ago.
And, of course, I never could get why Churchill was better than Hitler? Churchill was a colonial ruler, while pretending to be a democratic one – his (un)famous motto about “democracy been bad etc” is a lie, because he clearly was not practicing even capitalist-style democracy with 9/10 of his subjects. Of course, Hitler did to Europeans what Churchill did to non-Whites mostly (even though his victims included the Irish and Russians too, but they were not really “White” either)
“Conservatives tend to be more honest…”
More honest in the sense that they don’t suffer from cognitive dissonance when it comes to proclaiming the supremacism of their ethnic/tribal in-group. In some cases, the mental acrobatics that so-called progressives have to carry out to justify their own crimes (Israel was ruled by the Labour Party for its first 30 years which ruthlessly bulldozed Palestinian neighborhoods and efficiently carried out repeated waves of ethnic cleansing in order to create a mostly Arab-free “Jewish homeland”) can be more dangerous as they can lead to outright denial of the native’s existence as opposed to the right-winger who just wants to lord over the “lower-grade races” so long as they acknowledge his right to do so and call him uncle. This was obvious to the inhabitants of Palestine long ago and they tend to regard Labour electoral victory as a greater disaster than the rise to power of an openly racist leader like Netenyahu, Ayelet Shaked, etc.
http://www.thenation.com/article/zionist-imagination
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n06/yonatan-mendel/diary
Trumbo did not write the script for Exodus while under the black list.
He wrote it at the time Douglas and Preminger were breaking the blacklist.
Further, at that time, back in 1960, there was not anywhere near the awareness of how one sided the Middle East dispute actually was. None of that happened until years later in this country.
So why blame Trumbo for what, I would estimate, about 90% of all progressives thought at that time.
No, Trumbo had written “Exodus” under the blacklist and then after the movie was released he was “outed” and praised.
Now, about 90% – sure, the majority of USA “progressives” always were and still are racist. Just look how Zionist colonization is called “the Middle East dispute” – yeah, “dispute”. Like “dispute” in Algeria, Vietnam or Cuba, right? If USA “progressives” were so ignorant about the things they wrote about, what their “progressiveness” is worth? Or not ignorant and just do not giving a damn about “barbarians”(Palestinians)
So, USA “progressives” are not going to mention this “great” script as something shameful or at least not so commendable. They just gloss it over.
This progressive Trumbo had written “Exodus” script – the pure Zionist propaganda. It was a good indication of what USA “progressives” really are worth. And he did it under blacklisting!
John Duval’s detailed and persuasive account of how scripts for The Brave One and Roman Holiday were incorrectly attributed in whole to Dalton Trumbo were neither “ill defined†or “murky.â€
Mr. Duval’s smarmy detractors did not trouble themselves or respect the readers enough to offer any substantiation for their dismissive putdowns.
Deriding as “sour grapes†a source-supported correction, by a son defending the rightful legacy of his father, is a shocking display of verbal cruelty by a coward.
And a lazy one at that.
Brad Owen brags of his complete ignorance and indifference to the truth, as he piles on with drlloyd’s callous nastiness.
This is the behavior of superannuated yet unreformed schoolyard bullies, who really ought to have had someone break their noses for them a long time ago.
Conventional narratives are often wrong, and not infrequently contain lies, so ought to be challenged and corrected if truth matters.
I would think truth should matter to readers of Consortiumnews — otherwise, what are they doing here? drlloyd and Owen could be lobbing their gobs of spit over at Newsmax instead, with others of their kind.
No one has the right to claim another’s work as their own.
Everyone deserves fair credit for what they have done.
John Duval, thanks for further enlightening us about the falsified legends and dishonorable dealings that so often underlie the laying on of Hollywood laurels.
You have honored your father, and the truth.
Never mind hyenas like drlloyd and Brad Owen, who ought to be ashamed and apologize for the nasty swipes they have taken, but who from the evidence of their own hand, lack the conscience or character to feel or do either.
(America, making it a place of fearful conformity with a relatively narrow band of acceptable political thought. The era killed off a vibrant Left that could have challenged the Right’s hostility to government social programs fulfilling the constitutional mandate to “provide for the … general Welfare.â€)
Thanks James DiEugenio for your tireless efforts to keep us focused on the issues that put our country on its current path. You’re completely correct with your above statement. The JFK research community has written and presented masterfully about the individual crimes of the era, but a grand summation has yet to be presented. One can sense that the time is near when our “era” of government crime will be totally exposed in a single, truthful and compelling narrative. We will then and finally get, the actual back story of the evil genius turning the New Deal into corporate fascism.
Aside from some accounting of political history in this article, still, Trumbo was no hero. Trumbo was self-promoting at best and this film about him is mostly the fabrication by the director from a loosely written bio.
Trumbo the film:
I do not judge the fine actors nor their performance in this make-believe film, but I take exception that there is value or a substantive message learned from untold truth, innuendo and the manipulation of facts.
Dalton Trumbo the man:
Trumbo lied about being the author of the original screenplay which the 1956 Oscar for “Best Original Story” awarded to “The Brave Oneâ€. My father wrote the original screenplay and died before film production.
The movie Trumbo misrepresents the avarice conniving man that Trumbo was. Trumbo was all about the money and getting attention to that end. Trumbo was not a hero, he was just a grandstander who took credit from other people’s work if he could get away with it, especially my father, Juan Duval, who wrote the original screenplay that was the basis for the 1956 Oscar winning category “Best Original Storyâ€, “The Bravo Oneâ€. My father died before film production and the King Bros and Trumbo took advantage of it.
Trumbo was a prodigious writer and during the Blacklist period he was forced to write and rewrite scripts for less money for low-life producers like the King Bros and anyone else who paid him under the table. The King Bros’s nephew Robert Rich, who was one of four listed as the author, was an afterthought and not initially intended to be a front for Trumbo. Per the FBI, Rich was an office errand boy and bag man who picked up scripts and delivered cash to pay Trumbo.
Roman Holiday may be Trumbo’s original story for all I know (and I love the film), but he was not in Italy during the shooting where much of the script was re-written by Director Billy Wyler and screenwriter Ian Hunter. They wrote script on set day to day and the nights before shooting the film, as was Wyler’s method of film making. Ian Hunter’s son (and rightly so) would not return the Oscar when asked by the Academy to do so in order that the Academy issue Trumbo the Oscar decades later.
I understand that Trumbo worked on my father’s screenplay, but it was my father’s original story and not Trumbo’s, which was the category the Oscar was awarded. The Academy should issue a posthumous Oscar to my father, like they did for Trumbo for Roman Holiday.
Facts:
Trumbo re-wrote my father’s original screenplay and removed 50 pages from it, some of which, was about the Catholic ritual of blessing the bulls before a bull fight.
If you read the screenplay marked #1 and the redacted letters in Trumbo’s book, “Additional Dialogue, Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962†and compare them to the rewritten scripts and un-redacted letters archived at the University of Wisconsin Library, it’s obvious that Trumbo didn’t write the original screenplay, otherwise, why would he criticize and complain to the King Bros in so many letters about the original screenplay.
“The Brave One†script marked “#1†with 170 pages is archived in the University of Wisconsin Library where Trumbo donated all his work. The “#1†script’s Title page was removed and no author was mentioned.
The “first version†(133 pages) and “second version†(119 pages) of the scripts listed “Screenplay by: Arthur J. Henleyâ€.
The last two scripts listed “Screenplay by Merrill G. White and Harry S Franklin on the early movie posters and “Original Story by Robert L. Rich†was added to scripts later.
When the King Bros listed their nephew Robert Rich as author they had no idea that “The Brave One†would be nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Story. At first, Frank King said that there was no such person as Robert Rich and later he said that they bought a 6-page script from a Robert Rich who was away in Germany or Spain.
Robert Rich (the nephew) did not attend the Oscar awards because he turned informant for the FBI who were watching Trumbo and Rich didn’t want to be publicly humiliated when the truth came out. And Trumbo used the excuse for not being able to produce the original screenplay for The Brave One on his residence being burgled while intimating that it was the FBI who tossed his residence (FBI File Number: 100-1338754; Serial: 1118; Part: 13 of 15). The FBI did in fact toss his residence but had no interest in scripts. And Trumbo was never an informant for the FBI.
White and Franklin were editors and acting as fronts for Trumbo before and after “The Brave One†movie. The King Bros did not initially intend that their nephew Robert Rich be a front for Trumbo as White and Franklin were first listed as the screenwriters on the movie posters of The Brave One. It was only after the media played up the no-show at the Oscars that the King Bros and Trumbo saw an opportunity to play the media and sell tickets (per Trumbo’s letters to the King Bros).
Juan Duval, poet, dancer, choreographer, composer and director of stage and film was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1897. He matriculated from the Monastery at Monserrat and moved to Paris in 1913 where he studied with his uncle M Duval. Juan Duval was renowned as a Classical Spanish and Apache dancer and performed in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain. Juan was fluent in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and English.
In 1915, Juan Duval was conscripted into the French Army and fought in Tunis and Verdun, where he suffered head wounds and was partially gassed. He came to the US in 1918 and joined the US Army and was then stationed with the 50th Infantry in occupied Germany for two years before immigrating to the US where he directed live theater and taught dancing and acting at his Studio of Spanish Dancing on Hollywood Blvd across from the Warner Bros Theatre. Juan produced Cave of Sorrow (Play); Lila (Musical Comedy); Spanish Love (Drama); Café Madrid; Spanish Revue; Night In Paris (Drama) and choreographed “One Mad Kiss†(musical) and at least one sword fighting scene with Rudolf Valentino. He directed movies in Mexico and Cuba including the 1935 highest grossing Spanish speaking film, “El Diablo Del Mar†starring Movita (Marlon Brando’s second wife).
Mizi Trumbo refused to talk to me about The Brave One original screenplay.
Before former Director of the Academy of Arts and Sciences Bruce Davis retired, he told me that because of the documentation that I provided him, he was inclined to believe that my father wrote the original screenplay which the movie, “The Brave One†was based.
The Academy gave Trumbo an Oscar for “The Brave One†20 years after the Oscars and posthumously gave him another Oscar for the Roman Holiday in 2011.
The Academy of Arts and Sciences should recognize my father’s original story and posthumously awarded him the Oscar for “Best Original Story†for “The Brave Oneâ€.
It’s easy to dismiss this comment as little more than sour grapes, from someone with an ill defined and murky grievance against a conventional narrative..
So let’s do that, because that’s actually correct in this case.
Thanks for the summation. It was much too long, so I didn’t read it.
Mr. Duval, what an interesting biography of your father; if you allow, i will show how i read your comments. More adjustments pending.-t
A READER’S FIRST DRAFT
Suggested: Film titles in quotes; underline Oscar category
Thesis: The right composer behind “The Brave Oneâ€
Intro:
Juan Duval, poet, dancer, choreographer, composer and director of stage and film was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1897. He matriculated from the Monastery at Monserrat and moved to Paris in 1913 where he studied with his uncle M Duval. Juan Duval was renowned as a Classical Spanish and Apache dancer and performed in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain. Juan was fluent in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and English
A thesis statement:
Aside from some accounting of political history in this article, still, Trumbo was no hero. Trumbo was self-promoting at best and this film about him is mostly the fabrication by the director from a loosely written bio. Trumbo lied about being the author of the original screenplay which the 1956 Oscar for [Best Original Story] (edit: underline) awarded to “The Brave Oneâ€. My father wrote the original screenplay and died before film production.
Chapter: Dalton Trumbo the persona:
The movie “Trumbo†misrepresents the avarice conniving man that Trumbo was. Trumbo was all about the money and getting attention to that end. Trumbo was not a hero, he was just a grandstander who took credit from other people’s work if he could get away with it, especially my father, Juan Duval, who wrote the original screenplay that was the basis for the 1956 Oscar winning category [Best Original Story] (Edit: underline), “The Brave Oneâ€. My father died before film production and the King Bros and Trumbo took advantage of it.
Trumbo was a prodigious writer and during the Blacklist period he was forced to write and rewrite scripts for less money for low-life producers like the King Bros and anyone else who paid him under the table. The King Bros’s nephew Robert Rich, who was one of four listed as the author, was an afterthought and not initially intended to be a front for Trumbo. Per the FBI, Rich was an office errand boy and bag man who picked up scripts and delivered cash to pay Trumbo.
“Roman Holiday†may be Trumbo’s original story for all I know (and I love the film), but he was not in Italy during the shooting where much of the script was re-written by Director Billy Wyler and screenwriter Ian Hunter. They wrote script on set day to day and the nights before shooting the film, as was Wyler’s method of film making. Ian Hunter’s son (and rightly so) would not return the Oscar when asked by the Academy to do so in order that the Academy issue Trumbo the Oscar decades later.
Trumbo’s skills in film-making:
I do not judge the fine actors nor their performance in this make-believe film, but I take exception that there is value or a substantive message learned from untold truth, innuendo and the manipulation of facts.
Facts:
Trumbo re-wrote my father’s original screenplay and removed 50 pages from it, some of which, was about the Catholic ritual of blessing the bulls before a bull fight. If you read the screenplay marked #1 and the redacted letters in Trumbo’s book, “Additional Dialogue, Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962†and compare them to the rewritten scripts and un-redacted letters archived at the University of Wisconsin Library, it’s obvious that Trumbo didn’t write the original screenplay, otherwise, why would he criticize and complain to the King Bros in so many letters about the original screenplay.
“The Brave One†script marked “#1†with 170 pages is archived in the University of Wisconsin Library where Trumbo donated all his work. The “#1†script’s Title page was removed and no author was mentioned.
The “first version†(133 pages) and “second version†(119 pages) of the scripts listed “Screenplay by: Arthur J. Henleyâ€.
The last two scripts listed “Screenplay by Merrill G. White and Harry S Franklin on the early movie posters and “Original Story by Robert L. Rich†was added to scripts later.
When the King Bros listed their nephew Robert Rich as author they had no idea that “The Brave One†would be nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Story. At first, Frank King said that there was no such person as Robert Rich and later he said that they bought a 6-page script from a Robert Rich who was away in Germany or Spain.
Robert Rich (the nephew) did not attend the Oscar awards because he turned informant for the FBI who were watching Trumbo and Rich didn’t want to be publicly humiliated when the truth came out. And Trumbo used the excuse for not being able to produce the original screenplay for The Brave One on his residence being burgled while intimating that it was the FBI who tossed his residence (FBI File Number: 100-1338754; Serial: 1118; Part: 13 of 15). The FBI did in fact toss his residence but had no interest in scripts. And Trumbo was never an informant for the FBI.
White and Franklin were editors and acting as fronts for Trumbo before and after “The Brave One†movie. The King Bros did not initially intend that their nephew Robert Rich be a front for Trumbo as White and Franklin were first listed as the screenwriters on the movie posters of The Brave One. It was only after the media played up the no-show at the Oscars that the King Bros and Trumbo saw an opportunity to play the media and sell tickets (per Trumbo’s letters to the King Bros).
Chapter: Aligning the record
I understand that Trumbo worked on my father’s screenplay, but it was my father’s original story and not Trumbo’s, which was the category the Oscar was awarded. The Academy should issue a posthumous Oscar [for “The Brave Oneâ€]? to my father, like they did for Trumbo for “Roman Holiday.”
Juan Duval, who wrote the original screenplay that was the basis for the 1956 Oscar winning category Best Original Story, “The Bravo One.†My father died before film production and the King Bros and Trumbo took advantage of it.
Chapter: Remembering the inner man, my father
Duval – In 1915, Juan Duval was conscripted into the French Army and fought in Tunis and Verdun, where he suffered head wounds and was partially gassed. He came to the US in 1918 and joined the US Army and was then stationed with the 50th Infantry in occupied Germany for two years before immigrating to the US where he directed live theater and taught dancing and acting at his Studio of Spanish Dancing on Hollywood Blvd across from the Warner Bros Theatre. Juan produced Cave of Sorrow (Play); Lila (Musical Comedy); Spanish Love (Drama); Café Madrid; Spanish Revue; Night In Paris (Drama) and choreographed “One Mad Kiss†(musical) and at least one sword fighting scene with Rudolf Valentino. He directed movies in Mexico and Cuba including the 1935 highest grossing Spanish speaking film, “El Diablo Del Mar†starring Movita (Marlon Brando’s second wife).
Besides making me want to see this film, this articles informative stroll down America’s not so proud historical congressional pass, helps explain why America basically has no substantial representative left wing. If America had been allowed to form a suitable left wing, then we would see that maturity in our current presidential elections. Oh, if only Henry Wallace would have been Vice President, instead of ‘the Buck Stops Here Harry Truman’, what a different world it be be. But, it wasn’t to be. Only now we citizens need to continue advocating for a better press. We, need to applaud Hollywood for their good products (such as Trumbo), and boo the awful propaganda garbage they try and sell us (example: Zero Dark Thirty). It’s always nice to read something which helps explain how we got here, and with this added knowledge, to try and figure out how to get to the next phase of this human experience in one piece. Happy Holiday to All!
“if only…”
does it matter ? ? ?
for the sake of argument, let’s say the most smartest, wisest, fairest, stalwartest, and wonderfulest of people are elected pwesident…
meaning -of course- me and you, dear reader…
(preferably me, i’m not so sure about you)…
*HOW* do you turn the titanic if everyone pretends they didn’t hear the order ? ? ?
hee hee hee
*WHAT* are you going to do when 90% of the korporate media is blaring 24/7/365 that you are a low-down piglet fucker ? ? ?
ho ho ho
*WHERE* are you going to find support among the permanent bureaucracy you must dismantle or otherwise re-invent in order to make any progress at all ? ? ?
ha ha ha
*WHY* is anyone going to listen to someone they know will be reined in by the spooks to get with the pogrom ? ? ?
ak ak ak
seriously, WHO among us could resist the blandishments or iron fist of Empire when push came to shove? ? ?
i can talk big and say i would do ‘what is right’ and ‘get shit done’, and ‘kick ass’, etc; but when i’m taken aside by some faceless spook you never quite know which alphabet soup agency they are with, and they show you a live shot of your parent’s house with a crosshair superimposed, do you wise up, or do your parents end up dead from a ‘botched armed burglary attempt’, and you end up small-planed 3 months later ? ? ?
i figure i’m putting on my cheerleader outfit and shaking my pompoms for Empire ! ! !
(to my eternal shame)
“The ability of Americans to resist these current excesses is crippled by the failure of politicians, the courts and the media to stop the Red Scare that started in Hollywood in 1947.”
This was the second Red Scare, which is said to have lasted from 1947 to 1957. There was a first Red Scare, also known as the Big Red Scare of 1919, which began in reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It was led and/or instigated by President Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, who, incidentally, was a Democrat. There was thus a right-wing anti-left faction in the U.S. for nearly 20 years prior to the second Red Scare, and many of these people fought against enactment of the “socialistic” New Deal programs during the 1930s. The second Red Scare may have been a reaction to the Soviet Union’s defeat of the Nazis during WWII.
Jacob:
I am fully aware of the advent and circumstances of the first Red Scare. I wrote about it in my review of Clint Eastwood’s stinker of movie J. Edgar, which I wrote for this site. (You can look it up.) Hoover was the common denominator for them both.
But, IMO, the effects of the second Red Scare were more pertinent to the world we live in today. For the reasons I stated in the review. And they are certainly more relevant to the movie under review.
British intelligence brought to America in 1913 professional mind-directing smoke- screen Propaganda designed to elicit support for wars that led to the formation of Israel in the middle of British Palestine. Bernay emerged, a propaganda expert.
After the wars, the propaganda was used to promote the interest of those who owned an interest in Israel and the triad of extremely powerful, experienced government war contractors, who evolved into powerful commercial monopolies [communications, energy, and academic engineering) able to shape the political landscape and to control the public propaganda and to gate the access of individuals seeking entry into the political system. My point is your observations have very broad implications.
maybe typo- Bernay? Edward Bernays- nephew of Sigmund Freud …
maybe typo- Bernay? Edward Bernays- nephew of Sigmund Freud
Go to EIR website. Go to search box in upper left corner. Type in some of the words from Article titles:
Read this article from June 25th, 2004 Executive Intelligence Review (EIR):
The Congress for Cultural Freedom; Making the Post-War World safe for Fascist “Kulturkampf”. I call it “The Empire Strikes Back”
wich will probably lead you to THIS article from May 30th, 2003 in EIR:
Synarchism; The Fascist Roots of the Wolfowits Cabal. This article shows clearly the “Oligarchs’ Plan” to break up European Nation-States (republicanism) to form a Feudal Empire modeled after the Empires of Rome and Napoleon, as a bulwark against Bolshevism (ALSO republicanism).
“Red Scare”-ism is just a particular Front in the centuries-long WAR between EMPIRE and REPUBLIC; Zionism is just another particular Front, in a long War of MANY Fronts and Campaigns. The second Red Scare was an intervention of Churchill, with his Iron Curtain speech. It was meant to sew the seeds of enmity between USA and USSR to prevent an alliance of two very powerful Republics; also to dismantle all New Deal policies and FDR’s Vision for the people’s Welfare and well-being.
A Neo-Feudal Empire only wants docile, serf-like subjects, NOT empowered citizens of a people’s Republic.
Read the Articles.
spel czech backstop:
sew the seam, sow the seeds…
makes perfect sense in english…
hhh
The sow ate the cedes, sew good they were; but the boar couldn’t Bear it. Tough thought all the way through though, woodst not thou thinketh upon it? English is a language with no rules. I think it was spell-according-to-taste as late as the sixteen hundreds. It’s dew/do/due for an upgrade in rational uniformity-of-spelling.