The Real Story Behind the Movie Trumbo

Soon after Trumbo’s congressional appearance, the leading Hollywood producers blacklisted the “unfriendly ten” and all others who might refuse to talk straight to Congress. The list soon grew to about 250 names. Trumbo and others became faceless talents, selling their scripts on the black market. Actors and directors were unlucky, he wrote bitterly in 1957, but all a writer needed was “paper, a pencil, and a nice clean cell.”

Trumbo got the cell in 1950, spent ten months at the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Ky. for contempt of Congress. He took pleasure in sharing the exercise yard with ex-Congressman Andy May (defense bribes) and even more pleasure in the news that at the Danbury, Conn., pen the Hollywood Ten’s Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr. were fellow inmates of ex-Congressman J. Parnell Thomas (padded office payroll), chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee during those 1947 hearings. “Almost every jail in the country during that curious time,” wrote Trumbo later, “found Congressman and contemptee standing cheek by jowl in the chow line, all their old malignities dissolved in common hunger for a few more of them there beans.”

In jail and out, in Hollywood and during a self-imposed exile in Mexico, Dalton Trumbo wrote some 30 movies under assorted pseudonyms. He refuses to say what they were, but during the 1957 Academy Award ceremonies, Robert Rich was announced as the writer of the year’s best original screen play, The Brave One. No Robert Rich came forward to accept the award; eventually, Trumbo was identified as the writer. He is now so fond of the name that, for nostalgia’s sake, he plans to use it again from time to time.