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| Born | James Dalton Trumbo December 9, 1905 Montrose, Colorado |
| Died | September 10, 1976(1976-09-10) (aged 70) Los Angeles, California |
| Cause of death | congestive heart failure |
| Spouse | Cleo Beth Fincher (1938-) |
Dalton Trumbo (December 9, 1905 – September 10, 1976) was an American screenwriter and novelist, and a member of the Hollywood Ten, a group of film professionals who refused to testify before the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) about alleged communist involvement.
Born in Montrose, Colorado, Trumbo attended the University of Colorado for two years. The central fountain at the University was named in his honor in the mid-1990s. He got his start working for Vogue magazine. He started in movies in 1937; by the 1940s, he was one of Hollywood's highest paid writers for work on such films as 1940s Kitty Foyle, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945).
In 1947, Trumbo, along with nine other writers and directors, was called before HUAC as an unfriendly witness to testify on the presence of Communist Party influence in Hollywood. Trumbo refused to give information. Though only convicted of contempt of Congress, he was blacklisted, and in 1950, spent 11 months in prison.
After Trumbo was blacklisted, some Hollywood actors and directors, such as Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets, agreed to testify and to provide names of fellow Communist party members to Congress. Many of those who testified were immediately ostracized and shunned by their former friends and associates, and in later years, were frequently viewed with contempt by many in Hollywood. However, Trumbo always maintained that those who testified under pressure from HUAC and the studios were equally victims of the Red Scare, an opinion for which he was severely criticized. It should be noted that Trumbo was in fact a member of the Communist Party of the United States at the time he was called by HUAC. According to Victor Navasky, a former editor of The Nation, in his famous work, Naming Names, Trumbo joined the party in 1943.
After completing his sentence, Trumbo and his family moved to Mexico with Hugo Butler and his wife Jean Rouverol, who had also been blacklisted. There, Trumbo wrote thirty scripts under pseudonyms, such as the co-written Gun Crazy (1950) (Millard Kaufman acted as a "front" for Trumbo). He won an Oscar for The Brave One (1956), written under the name Robert Rich.
Finally in 1960, with the support of Kirk Douglas, he received credit for the motion-picture epics Exodus and Spartacus, which led to the end of the blacklist. He was reinstated in the Writers Guild of America, and was credited on all subsequent scripts. In 1993, Trumbo was awarded the Oscar posthumously for Writing (Motion Picture Story) Roman Holiday (1953). The screen credit and award were previously given to Ian McLellan Hunter. Hunter was a "front" for Trumbo.
Trumbo's vivid anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, won a National Book Award (then known as an American Book Sellers Award) in 1939. The inspiration for the novel came to Trumbo when he read an article about a British officer who was horribly disfigured during World War I.
In 1971, Trumbo directed his own film adaptation of the novel, which starred Timothy Bottoms, Diane Varsi and Jason Robards. Footage and dialogue from the movie were licensed for use in the music video for heavy metal band Metallica's 1988 song One.
One of his last films, Executive Action, was based on various conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination.
His account and analysis of the Smith Act trials is entitled The Devil in the Book.
He is often quoted as having said, "I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of."
He died from a congestive heart failure at the age of 71.
Works
Selected film works:
- Road Gang, 1936
- Love Begins at 20, 1936
- Devil's Playground, 1937
- Fugitives for a Night, 1938
- A Man to Remember, 1938
- Five Came Back, 1939 (with Nathanael West and J. Cody)
- Curtain Call, 1941
- Bill of Divorcement, 1940
- Kitty Foyle, 1940
- The Remarkable Andrew, 1942
- Tender Comrade, 1944
- A Guy Named Joe, 1944
- Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, 1944
- Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, 1945
- Gun Crazy, 1950 (co-writer, front Millard Kaufman)
- He Ran All the Way, 1951 (co-writer, front Guy Endore)
- Roman Holiday, 1953 (front Ian McLellan Hunter)
- The Brave One, 1956 (front Robert Rich)
- Spartacus, 1960, dir. by Stanley Kubrick
- Exodus, 1960 (a film based on Leon Uris's novel by the same name, 1958)
- The Last Sunset, 1961
- Lonely are the Brave, 1962
- The Sandpiper, 1965
- Hawaii, 1966 (based on the novel by James Michener, 1959)
- The Fixer, 1968
- Johnny Got His Gun, 1971 (also dir.)
- The Horsemen, 1971
- F.T.A., 1972
- Executive Action, 1973
- Papillon, 1973 (based on the novel by Henri Charrière, 1969)
Novels, plays and essays:
- Eclipse, 1935
- Washington Jitters, 1936
- Johnny Got His Gun, 1939
- The Remarkable Andrew, 1940 (also known as Chronicle of a Literal Man)
- The Biggest Thief in Town, 1949 (play)
- The Time Out of the Toad, 1972 (essays)
- Night of the Aurochs, 1979 (unfinished, ed. R. Kirsch)
Non-fiction:
- Harry Bridges, 1941
- The Time of the Toad, 1949
- The Devil in the Book, 1956
- Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942–62, 1970 (ed. by H. Manfull)
See also
- The Hollywood Ten documentary
- "Trumbo" documentary