Original subtitles

I discovered the correspondence

as a processor at the Wisconsin Center for Theater Research.

And they were collecting the materials

of the Hollywood Ten.

One of the collections that I got to process

was the collection of Dalton Trumbo.

Box upon box upon box.

He would be one of our heroes

because he was, you know, an iconoclast.

It's the story of the blacklist

and what it did to people.

Dalton was a contrarian.

He had fights.

Just glad he never had a fight with me.

At rare intervals, there appears among us

a person whose virtues are so manifest to all,

who has such a capacity for relating

to every sort of human being,

who so subordinates his own ego drives

to the concerns of others,

who lives his whole life in such harmony

with the prevailing standards of the community,

that he is revered and loved

by everyone with whom he comes in contact.

Such a man, Dalton Trumbo was not.

During the Second World War, 277 members of the Guild

entered the armed services to fight what was then called

the war against fascism.

Five of them did not come back.

Within six years, 43 of those who did return

were denounced as un-American,

stripped of their names and passports,

and blacklisted.

I presume that over half of our members

have no memory of that blacklist,

because they were children when it began, or not yet born.

To them, I would say only this...

That the black list was a time of evil.

And that no one on either side who survived it

came through untouched by evil.

Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control

of mere individuals,

each person reacted as his nature, his needs,

his convictions, and his particular circumstances

compelled him to.

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.

Dalton Trumbo

is a very distinguished film writer,

has won Academy Awards.

He's a letter writer too.

They're obstreperous, they're funny, they're eloquent.

Well, I suppose so.

And so these letters that you wrote,

dealing with yourself,

your independence, your stubbornness...

Words are lost, only air, the spoken word.

You never know really what you said in the last conversation,

whereas if you sit down and write

a concise definition of your problem,

it commands the man's attention.

Your letters to all variety of people...

Friends and enemies.

And 1942 to 1962, it's almost,

you almost tell us the story of our country

through the eyes of this very stubborn man, Dalton Trumbo.

It was a very lively two decades, very lively.

One was rarely bored.

All your warts are here, too.

Because you're pretty rough, you know, at times.

Warty. I prefer the word "abrasive,"

but "warty" is just as good.

Trumbo is this person

with an unbelievably strong sense of justice

and what's right.

And the letters for him are his, as it were,

a forum to express that.

He was so opinionated and so passionate and so inventive

and sharp and funny,

that you just didn't win an argument with him.

He just plain was a little grandiose, I think.

He wasn't confrontational in the sense

he went out looking for trouble.

It seemed to come to him.

I think of myself as an extremely peaceable man.

God knows I've never wanted to fight in my life.

But sometimes I think they're forced upon peaceful men.

My father always had an ambition to become a writer,

and once he got started publishing his first book

in 1933 or 1934,

by 1940, he's published

three novels, won a National Book Award,

and written about 20 screenplays.

He's been nominated for an Oscar also.

So he has a sort of brilliant seven years beginning.

Up to about 1945, he was

very, very successful.

Everybody wanted

to use the name of Dalton Trumbo.

He probably was the best writer at that time.

And then it all fell apart.

In Washington, the Committee on un-American Activities

opens new hearings in a jam-packed caucus room.

Here, charges of red influence

directed against the motion picture industry are aired.

This committee, under its mandate

from the House of Representatives,

has the responsibility of exposing and spotlighting

subversive elements wherever they may exist.

What about Mr. Dalton Trumbo?

Do you know Mr. Trumbo?

Yes, I know Mr. Trumbo.

And Mr. Trumbo was the editor of the official publication

of the Guild, was he not?

Yes, at one time, Dalton Trumbo was editor of The Screenwriter,

the monthly publication of the Screenwriter's Guild.

Do you think that Dalton Trumbo was a communist?

Well, certainly I have no information on that

beyond what I've heard here this week.

People joined the Communist Party

because it was doing something.

It was an effective instrument. It was doing things that

they felt should be done.

It was opposing the rise of

fascism all through Europe.

It was helping those who were refugees.

I remember as a kid,

the conversations would be about the Soviet Union.

This was the depression.

The country was in a depression.

Socialism, communism seemed like somewhat of a solution

to everybody being out of work.

Russia had been our allies

Through the early 1940s, then all of a sudden,

they became our enemies.

We were ready for war and felt it was coming.

And people didn't want it, but they were frightened.

And with the public that frightened,

one can understand how things like this could happen.

If you want to scare a country, you go after its royalty,

and Hollywood was our royalty.

And they had two rounds of witnesses, and the first round

were mostly either friendly witnesses or executives.

The committee wanted to bask

in the publicity glow and fame

of the stars of Hollywood.

This is a foul philosophy, this communistic thing.

I would move to the State of Texas if it ever came here,

because I think the Texans would kill them on sight.

If I had my way about it,

they'd all be sent back to Russia

or some other unpleasant place.

And then they called, I believe, it was

19 people

and eventually it boiled down to the Hollywood Ten.

Well, we were called originally

"the Unfriendly Ten".

And I liked that much better.

Unfriendly to what?

That committee.

And to anybody else who interfered,

who tried to force compulsory confessions

of beliefs, faith, anything else.

An official purpose of theirs was

to discover communist propaganda in the films

that these folks had written.

It's a fallacy to think that they got overtly

leftist themes into films,

but as many scholars before me have noted,

quite elegantly, what they did is they were able

to shift subtly some of the archetypes

that were really important in American films of that era.

You wrote from a particular point of view.

The irony to me

of all these

radical communist writers, you know,

was that what they were trying to do really

was to be good liberals.

What is democracy?

Well, I was never very clear on it myself.

Like every other kind of government,

it's got something to do with

young men killing each other, I believe.

Why don't old men kill each other?

Well, the old men are needed to keep the home fires burning.

Couldn't the young men do that just as well?

Young men don't have homes,

that's why they must go out and kill each other.

When it comes my turn,

will you want me to go?

For democracy,

any man would give his only begotten son.

That was it.

He understood it now.

He had told them his secret.

And in denying him,

they had told him theirs.

He was the future.

He was a perfect picture of the future,

and they were afraid to let anyone see

what the future was like.

Already, they were looking ahead.

They were figuring the future, and somewhere in the future,

they saw war... to fight that war, they would need men,

and if men saw the future, they wouldn't fight.

So they were masking the future.

They were keeping the future a soft,

quiet, deadly secret.

They knew that if all the little people,

all the little guys saw the future,

they would begin to ask questions.

They would ask questions and they would find answers

and they would say to the guys who wanted them to fight,

they would say, "you lying, thieving sons of bitches,

"we won't fight. We won't be dead.

"We will live. We are the world. We are the future.

"And we won't let you butcher us no matter what you say,

"no matter what speeches you make,

"no matter what slogans you write.

"Remember it well, we, we, we are the world.

"We are what makes it go round.

"We make bread and cloth and guns.

"We are the hub of the wheel, and the spokes,

"and the wheel itself and without us,

"you would be hungry, naked worms and we will not die.

"It will not be us who die.

It will be you."

"It will be you.

"You who urge us on to battle.

"You who incite us against ourselves.

"You, who would have one cobbler kill another cobbler.

"You, who would have one man who works

"kill another man who works.

"You, who would have one human being who wants only to live

"kill another human being who wants only to live.

"If you tell us to make the world safe for democracy,

"we will take you seriously, and by God and by Christ,

"we will make it so.

"Make no mistake of it... We will live.

"We will be alive and we will walk and talk and eat,

"and sing and laugh and feel and love,

"and bear our children in tranquility,

"in security, in decency,

in peace."

Very much what my father

took to be his politics was

the Constitution of the United States

and the first 10 amendments.

That, for him, outlined a reasonable way

that human beings could live within a society.

That it guaranteed the individual specific rights,

and that it limited the rights of the State,

it limited the influence of religion,

and that very much

was his idea about what the west was.

It was an open place.

The ranch was fairly isolated.

There would be days on end where you do not see

any kind of automobile, so the sighting of an automobile

is really exciting for my older sister and me.

Doesn't mean that the car is coming to us,

but there's a possibility.

And this one did, and so we went out and opened up

the rather large, heavy gate and brought the man in

to the house, and he was the process server.

So that's how my father received his subpoena,

with the help of his children.

The man knocked on the door and you got that pink slip.

But the first thing you did was go out

and try to sell your house before anybody discovers.

So you could at least get a fair price for it,

or as fair as possible.

Don't let anybody know. Keep it quiet.

Get as much work as you can in before it becomes public.

Save every penny you have.

Sell what assets you have

and get ready to become nobody.

Do you solemnly swear the testimony

you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth,

nothing but the truth, so help you God?

I do. Sit down, please.

Would you state your full name?

Dalton Trumbo.

When and where were you born, Mr. Trumbo?

I was born in Montrose, Colorado, on December 9, 1905.

What is your occupation?

My occupation is that of a writer.

I have some other questions, Mr. Trumbo, I'd like to ask.

Are you now or have you ever been a member

of the Communist Party?

Mr. Stripling, you must have some reason

for asking me this question.

You can address the committee...

I understand that members of the press

have been given an alleged Communist Party card

belonging to me, is that true?

No.

You're not asking the question.

I was.

The chief investigator is asking the question.

I beg your pardon, sir.

Now, are you or have you ever been...

A number of Hollywood personalities

took the First Amendment... Not the Fifth Amendment

against self incrimination, but the First Amendment...

To refuse to answer their questions

about their political backgrounds.

Well, Mr. Stripling, I think that there is

a question of constitutional rights involved here.

I don't believe that you have...

When did you learn about the Constitution?

Now just tell me when you learned about the Constitution.

Mr. Scott, could you tell the committee

whether or not you are now

or have ever been a member of the Communist Party?

I believe that question also invades my right as a citizen.

I believe it also invades the First Amendment.

I believe that I should not engage in any conspiracy

with you to invade the First Amendment.

Well, now we can't tell, even from that answer,

whether you're a member of the Communist Party.

If you take the Fifth Amendment, you're talking about

your right not to be incriminated.

Well, they didn't feel they'd committed any crime.

Well, they believed that their freedom of speech

was being abridged.

I believe I have the right to be confronted with any evidence

which supports this question.

I should like to see what you have.

- Well, you would? - Yes.

Well, you will pretty soon.

The witness is excused.

Typical communist tactics.

Typical communist tactics.

Dear Sam, it's 4 a.m. And I've been working

since 10:00 last night,

back at last the hours I love.

And all night it's been snowing.

I just flashed the spots on and the sight

is wonderfully soothing and beautiful.

No corners anywhere in the world.

Everything round and smooth and immaculate.

The kids and Cleo are asleep.

The house is in order.

The machines all function smoothly.

The larder is full, and I feel for the moment, at least,

that I am the luckiest and most contented man in the world.

If you were here, we would break a bottle and light the fire

and watch the falling snow, and I would tell you all about it.

That being impossible,

I shall write.

First, I shall tell you something

which would embarrass us both greatly if I were to speak it.

Separated from people as I have been,

I have had a great deal of time to observe their reactions

to the present troubled times,

and I have seen many betray themselves.

I have seen many

fail any decent test of conduct.

Some of them my friends.

And I have shucked them off with as little feeling

as I would toss away a nail paring

and have experienced no sense of loss in the process.

But through this whole interesting experience,

my respect for you has deepened

and my affection has grown more profound,

not only for the money you lent me,

although that was a lifesaver

and a great demonstration of faith,

but for your attitude toward me and other persons

and toward life itself.

For your willingness to grant me any belief I cherish

so long as it is not harmful to others,

even when you disagree with it,

and for your personal sense of outrage

when that right is denied.

This, and this alone, makes decent men and decent societies,

and is rare,

and is why I feel warm in the knowledge

that we are friends.

Perhaps I should not be

as angry as I am against the weaklings,

the cravens and liars who have succeeded in banning me

from motion pictures.

For I feel a sense of relief and a sense of buoyancy

at no longer being an employee.

I'm sure I should never have had the courage,

or perhaps one should say the foolhardiness,

to have left it voluntarily.

My feeling now... As of today, that is...

With the hope of succeeding elsewhere still strong in me,

that I shall never return to films.

That if Metro asked me back tomorrow with all forgiven,

I should refuse.

Hunger, of course, could in time alter that decision,

but for the present,

it stands.

Well, now, enough.

I hope all things go well with you.

Cleo and I send you our best.

And the children have just risen and started shouting

through the house at the discovery of the snow.

Say hello to my friends

and piss on my enemies.

Wherever there's fear, there's hysteria.

Wherever there are people

who whip up fear for their own purposes,

they will produce the hysteria.

And they will try to do it again.

The fact that he followed the usual communist line

of not responding to questions of the committee

is definite proof that he's

a member of the Communist Party.

Therefore, by unanimous vote,

the subcommittee recommends to the full committee

that Dalton Trumbo be cited for contempt of Congress.

The committee recommends

appropriate action be taken

by the full committee without delay.

After the hearings, there was this meeting

at the Waldorf.

They united on a policy which basically was,

we don't believe in a blacklist,

but we're not going to employ anyone

who has been involved in any way,

shape or form with the Communist Party.

We will forthwith discharge or suspend,

without compensation,

those in our employ and we will not reemploy

any of the ten until such time as he is acquitted

or has purged himself of contempt

and declares under oath that he is not a communist.

You have a scapegoat. You have the communists.

There were about 80,000 communists in the country.

At the peak of the party's success, you know.

They weren't as dangerous as The Elks.

And didn't have nearly as many guns.

After the Waldorf agreement is signed

by the various producers and studios

and the blacklist is established,

my father's position became that he

would have to accept the idea that the blacklist existed

and operate under those conditions,

which meant finding work in another way.

They lost their jobs.

They were persona non grata in Hollywood.

And they began writing under assumed names.

And it was really contrary to what this country is all about.

I have the feeling...

That if you give

most people in the world

a choice between enough food for their children

and shelter and clothing,

in return for their freedom of speech,

that they will go for the food,

the shelter,

and the necessities,

and freedom of speech

becomes a luxury for which

few fight at the most.

Dear Guy,

I've had several days to ponder our discussion

of the Saturday before Christmas.

Though I have not yet had the opportunity

to talk it over with the others, I have had second thoughts

of my own, and the strong impression

I didn't make myself clear as to my real opinions.

That day, a prominent and liberal producer,

whose motives I do not at all doubt,

was quoted as saying to one of us...

"Look, you people are simply stubborn and foolish.

"The committee and its requirements

"are a part of our time.

"They are the law.

"They are the country. They are the flag.

"That's the way it is.

"And those who refuse to recognize this,

"no longer arouse sympathy.

"They only isolate themselves

and prevent their voices from being heard."

I know and can read the first amendment

as well as anyone else.

I know it is the basic law of this country.

I know that if it goes, all will go.

Thus, the court has presented us with a dilemma

that lies at the heart of all philosophies and religions.

The dilemma best symbolized in the Faustian legend...

"Yield up your principles and you shall be rich,

"cling to them, and you shall be

less prosperous than you presently are."

That's the problem... choice.

Not compulsion, choice.

Committee or no committee.

Law or no law. Capitalism or no capitalism.

Movies or no movies.

It is the constant necessity to choose

that dogs every action of our lives,

every minute of our existences.

Who is it then who compels us to inform?

Who is it that denies us work

until we seek out the committee and abase ourselves before it?

Since it is neither the court, nor the law, nor the committee,

the man who compels informing

can only be the employer himself.

He is the one who urges us to inform,

and he is the one who withholds work from us until we do.

He is, in fact, that same liberal producer

who was quoted at our Saturday discussion.

It is he, and not the committee, who applies the only lash

that really stings... Economic reprisal.

He is the enforcer who gives the committee

its only strength and all its victories.

Disliking the nasty business of blacklisting,

but nonetheless practicing it every day of his life,

he places upon his country and his flag

the blame for moral atrocities

that otherwise would be charged directly to himself.

And thus, since informing has nothing to do with the law,

and the country and the flag

and since the necessities of his life, as he sees them,

oblige him to enforce what the committee

can never compel,

and since without his enforcement

the committee would have no power at all,

what he actually said is that he is the law

and the country and the flag.

Thinking back to our producer and his concept

of country and flag,

I am more than ever bewildered.

I wonder if he has really seen this country.

If he has really seen these American people.

If he has really seen that flag.

If he has, and his conclusions are honest,

he has seen something I never imagined

and don't believe exists.

My mother and father always refused,

declined to state

their political affiliation in primaries.

And I learned to decline to state.

I learned that certain things were no bloody body's business

and that if you allow them to encroach upon this area,

then they can ask you anything about your wife,

about your children, about your politics.

They might even... and I can imagine a time in this country

when they may bring democrats up to the platform, and say,

"have you now or ever

been a member of the Democratic Party?"

My father loved it when he could be

in some kind of magnificent battle with somebody.

I always loved hearing his perspective on anything,

but especially political, because he was just so astute.

He was really smart. He was very funny.

He was charming. He was very charming.

He would enchant people.

He could also be difficult

and grumpy and cantankerous

and had a temper.

He was a terrible money manager.

As soon as money came in

for a script, he'd spend it,

is the only way I could think about it.

My father's relationship to money is,

he never managed to save any.

This was always the problem.

He was consistently catching up.

So all of his plans, or all of his dreams,

to actually become financially independent

never had a chance in the face of the things

that he was interested in doing with the money

at the time, which was like...

"Maybe we should put a lake in there."

That kind of thing.

And so as he was being unemployed by the studio

and his contract canceled,

he was in the middle of improving the ranch again.

Dear burglars,

our baby sleeps in one bedroom and we sleep in another

and when she yelps at night, we cannot hear her.

A man said you were the people to see about such things.

Can you install a speaker in her room

and one in ours so we can gossip back and forth with her

during the wee small hours?

Not one of your solid gold outfits.

Something sensible and serviceable.

I am not a rich man anymore.

Now, let's all get together and see if we can arrange

a decent, modest little outfit for an old customer

without screwing him to death in the process.

Irritably yours, Dalton Trumbo.

My dear Mr. Farness,

Your letter has arrived and been put

to the only sensible use I could think of.

When we Reds come into power, we are going to shoot merchants

in the following order... One, those who are greedy

and, two, those who are witty.

Since you fall into both categories,

it will be a sad story when we finally lay hands on you.

I had hoped time might have improved your character,

but the prices you quote convince me otherwise.

You still cannot imagine a happy moment

which does not find your fist in somebody else's pocket.

Since I have little choice in the matter, I must yield.

Send the set described

and with it, a man for installation.

I have no intention of creeping about the house on all fours

with a wire in one hand and a hammer in the other

and my larynx clogged with tacks.

The bill should be sent to my business manager,

whose name is Rex Cole.

I have employed him because he hates creditors

and does not pay them too promptly.

You will feel better over the Thanksgiving

and Christmas season if you have something to look forward to

during the hangover period which follows.

And I tell you quite frankly that it will probably be 60 days

before you get your money.

Considering what you've done to me,

I ought to make you wait the full nine months.

Please extend my good wishes for the holiday season

to everyone in the thuggery.

The guys went to jail

in '50.

And that was a big shock.

That was a real shock to all of us.

Only two people stood trial... Jack Lawson

stood trial first and then I.

Both Jack and I were judged guilty of contempt

Of the 83rd Congress, I think it was.

And as far as I was concerned,

it was a completely just verdict.

I had contempt for that Congress

and have had contempt for several since.

All through the appeals, things got very tight.

Everybody was working, scrambling terribly hard.

It went all the way up to the Supreme Court.

And by the way, they thought they were going to win.

Every law review in the country

thought we would win.

Now, we didn't win.

Others saw something that we had not had the advantage of seeing.

They saw ten men sell their houses,

say goodbye to their kids, and go off to jail,

lose their jobs,

and be subjected to public disgrace and punishment.

I had three children.

I had a nice wife.

Why should I go to jail?

My darling...

You know what I was thinking last night?

I was thinking of the night

a weary, frightened,

tearful girl climbed into my car

and let me drive away with her.

And I was thinking of the truly remarkable person

she has turned into.

And I came to the conclusion that the night in question

was the luckiest one in my life.

Yes, my parents' courtship

was the famous family story.

He had a friend named Earl Felton, who...

Told him that he had met the woman

that my father should marry.

And my mom worked

in a drive-in stand.

My mother came out, served them dinner,

whatever it was, and my father proposed to her.

My mother rejected him.

She married, I believe he was the cook at the drive-in stand.

I don't know if she did this in defiance or what.

Trumbo was dismayed

when she married this fellow

whom he had met somehow and didn't trust him worth a darn.

So he put a detective on this other man

and in due time discovered that the man was already married.

So to his great delight,

this invalidated Cleo's marriage to his competitor.

And before too long,

Cleo had chosen Trumbo.

Two days hence will be our 13th wedding anniversary,

and I have been lying here on my bunk thinking about it.

The 13 years seem so short a time because...

It has been so happy a time for me.

All that is any good in my life has grown out of it.

And I think back on each year with pride.

I think our children take pride in it,

and will take more pride as they grow older.

I think the three things I want most

when I get out of here are, one, a good drink;

two, a rare steak;

and, three, a symphony.

More and more I realize that when I emerge from here,

I must make the choice of what kind of writer I want to be.

I think it would be better for all of us

if I return to writing novels

with the occasional foray into theater.

It will probably take years to recover from the blow

dealt by the blacklist,

but the discovery of friends who rally around

with such incredible generosity, perhaps,

makes the whole experience worthwhile.

Much love...

Dalton Trumbo.

Prisoner number 7551.

P.S. As for the problem of your children...

I have no solution.

Except that I will adapt myself to the solution

which you conclude is reasonable.

It is your problem.

They are, after all, the fruits of your own unbridled lust.

And if they now appear inconvenient...

Remember the joy of their conception.

In 1951, when he gets out of jail,

my father came back to the ranch,

and all the attendant problems of, how do we start again?

What are we going to do? What's the world look like now?

Is it your opinion, senator, that we're any nearer

a war with Soviet Russia than we were a year ago?

As far as war is concerned, we're at war

with the communist half of the world.

That war wasn't started by us.

It can't be ended by us except by ultimate victory.

About this time, the government was beginning

to recondition the relocation centers

that the Japanese had been interned in during the war

for members of the left.

In other words, concentration camps for American radicals.

And that was really frightening.

We had had a long period of unemployment, which had scared

the living dickens out of us, so we realized

that there was a gray list

that was beginning to affect us.

But I had dinner with the kids

and the doorbell rang.

I went to the door,

knowing exactly what I would find.

And I looked through the Judas hole,

and it was two men in hats on the front porch.

And they asked for Hugo and I said he isn't there.

They asked where he was, and I said I didn't know.

They looked at each other and off they went.

And, oh!

I was a wreck

and I came back to the table.

And I telephoned Hugo... He came on the phone and I said,

"Honey, get on your horse."

And there was a pause, and he said, "No."

And we were on the run.

We all agreed that maybe we should all leave the country

because we couldn't see any way out.

We couldn't see what lay in store for us.

Oh, boy!

My limited view of the economy of Hollywood

indicates it's not too good.

Employment extremely low.

Many deserving hacks starving.

I find enough to do but don't enjoy doing it.

Stall a great deal of the time.

I just slunge around and bipper at people

and dream of the time I'll be shed of everything.

I'm impatient for something to happen...

Good, bad or indifferent.

I want to move somewhere.

I think we might live handsomely and grow rich in Mexico.

Don't you?

I'm perfectly willing to go anywhere

that I can live, not, perhaps, in peace,

but certainly in luxury.

If I could spend the next 5 or 10 years

in Mexico City or its environs, earn say

$40,000 or $50,000 a year, which isn't at all improbable,

and pay Mexican income taxes and stash

enormous sums of cash away, hell, I'd go for it instantly.

Cleo and I intend to swoop into Cuernavaca,

quiz Gordon Kahn about living costs,

schools, rents,

Mordito, immigrantes, and the virgin of Guadalupe.

All of which he is said to know more about

than any other living person.

Naturally, we shall share our findings with you.

We all send you felicitaciones y misereres,

y fraternidades, y commiserereres.

Ring Lardner and Hugo Butler

and Ian Hunter are my father's closest friends

And had been during the '40s,

and all of the families ended up, at some point,

in Mexico City.

We all moved to Mexico. First it was the...

The Butlers and the Trumbos went down in this caravan together,

and we followed in January.

I think they went down in November.

I've heard stories

about Ring and Hugo and...

Ian and pop.

There are actually some photos somewhere of them wrestling.

So this is the wrestling.

This is my dad, this is Ring.

And that's Hugo.

And this...

Unflattering picture here, this is Trumbo.

I think these are legs and they would be Ian's.

Somehow or other these four young writers

all got together,

all had a wonderful time together,

and made up a band, a little band of brothers.

They were adorable together. They were terribly funny.

Mostly what they did was have fun.

They would think of pranks.

They would drink, which was, you know,

a primary occupation.

They were all probably drunks.

I'm not sure about Hugo.

Trumbo seems to have been the most successful

in being able to drink and write.

My dear son, I am sending you two books

I think appropriate for a young man spending

five-sevenths of his time in the monkish precincts

of John Jay Hall.

The first is Education of a Poker Player

by Herbert O. Yardley.

Read it in secret,

hide it whenever you leave quarters,

and you'll be rewarded with many unfair but legal advantages

over friend and enemy alike.

The second book I think you should share

with your young companions.

It is Sex without guilt...

By a man who will take his place in History

as the greatest humanitarian

since Mahatma Gandhi... Albert Ellis, ph.D.

This good man has written what might be called

"a manual for masturbators".

The result... mailed in plain wrapper, under separate cover...

Is one of those fortuitous events

in which the right man collides with the right idea

at precisely the right time.

This whole new approach,

this fresh wind blowing under the sheets, so to speak,

this large-hearted appeal for cheerful self pollution,

invokes, perhaps, a deeper response in my heart

than in most, for I...

Sneaky, timorous, incontinent little beast

with my paphian obsessions was never wholesomely at home

with my penile problem.

All because of that maggoty, mountainous pustule

of needless guilt that throbbed like an abscess

in my young boy's heart.

This is an exercise of language and style.

He's just read Nabokov.

He's playing with it.

He's entertaining me.

He's entertaining himself.

On warm, summer nights,

while exuberant girl-hunting contemporaries

scampered in and out of the brush

beneath high western stars,

I... dedicated fool...

lay swooning in my bed with no companion

save the lewd and smirking demons of my bottomless guilt.

The first thing I did was start laughing,

and the second thing I did was get a dictionary.

Cowering there in seminal darkness,

liquescent with self-loathing,

attentive only to the stealthy rise and crafty-ebbing

of my dark scrotumnal blood,

fearful as a lechwe yet firmer of purpose

than any rutting buffalo,

I celebrated the rights of Shuah's son

with sullen resignation.

Poor little chap on a summer's night morosely masturbating.

Tck-tck-tck.

Even now, more than three decades later,

even now when I forget a friend's name

or mislay my spectacles or pause...

in mid-sentence idiocy...

Even now, such lapses set a clammy chill

upon my heart.

It's then, while panic tightens my sagging throat,

that I whisper to myself,

it's true, after all. It does make you crazy.

It does cause the brain to soften.

Why, oh, why did I like it so much?

Why didn't I stop while I was still ahead of the game?

Well, little good to know it now.

The harm's done, the jig's up, you're thoroughly rattled.

Better you'd been born with handless stumps.

I recall a certain chill winter night

on which my father took me

to one of those Calvinist fertility rites

disguised as a father and son banquet.

Master of the revels was an acrid old goat

named Horace T. McGinnis.

He opened his discourse with a series of blasphemous demands

that the almighty agree with his ghastly notions

and then got down to the meat of the program,

which, to no one's surprise, was girls.

"When you go out with a young lady," he slavered,

"you go out with your own sister."

It seemed plain to me that if one day I did

burst upon the world as the hymeneal Genghis Khan

of my dreams,

I would be in for an extremely incestuous time of it.

I can still hear that demented old reprobate howling

his bill of particulars against poor Onan...

The Bible's first recorded masturbator.

Shaking his fist at us and sweating like a diseased stoat.

"He wasted his seed!

"Monstrous, shameful, nameless act.

"He spilled it, right out onto the ground... all of it.

And this displeased the lord and the lord slew him."

Yet, the more I think on it, the more positive I become

that you will never truly be able to comprehend

in all its horror that interminably sustained

convulsion which was your father's youth.

It's only reasonable that this should be so since

you had so many advantages that were denied to me.

To name but three of them... A private room,

s masturbating father and Albert Ellis ph.D.

I carried the ball for all of us.

And carried it farther than anyone had a right to expect.

I was the Prometheus of my secret tribe.

A penile virtuoso.

A gonadic prodigy...

A spermatiferous thunderbolt.

In fine... a masturbator's masturbator.

I dreamed of living in luxurious exile in Mexico City.

Well, it was luxurious for the first year,

it was absolutely hellish for the second year.

Because I had assumed that I could get

a little underground work from the north.

It turned out that I could get none

and I was sort of heroically broke.

Cleo was staunchly loyal to Trumbo.

Staunchly loyal.

And everything that he stood for.

So she accepted what had to be.

By now, the Trumbos had kind of used up most of their reserves,

and they knew that they were going to have to,

sooner or later, come back, and it had better be sooner.

There were ideas that perhaps there were ways

of breaking into the Mexican film industry

or something like that.

For my father, none of this ever paid off.

Dear Dorothy and Seniel,

To start in, I was a fool for moving south of the border.

The line of supply to my living source was so tenuous

that when I did work, the people who owed me for it

mistook my absence for my death

and simply did not pay

without the strongest kind of pressure being exerted.

We lived out an old truism...

The first time you see Mexico

you are struck by the horrible poverty.

Within a year, you discover it's infectious.

I'm as broke as a bankrupt's bastard.

When I arrived from Mexico, I pulled into town with a wife,

three children, a dog, a cat, one mortgaged jeep

and $400 in my pocket.

There were other problems.

I'd lost all my life insurance

during that disastrous Mexican holiday.

I lived on borrowed money

for the last nine months of the visit.

Couldn't even get my furniture out of storage,

because of a $1200 storage bill I couldn't pay.

I sat down in a motel in Pasadena with a dog,

a cat and one child, while Cleo and the two girls

moved in with my sister.

Most of my black market connections had dissolved

during my absence.

It was like trying to find work at midnight

in a thick fog among strangers.

Hence, I started at the bottom, like any newcomer.

For as little as $1000 a script.

In the first 18 months, I wrote 12 scripts,

which normally would take between 4 and 6 years to do.

The necessity of keeping the money grinding in

made it impossible for me to take as much as a month off

and gamble on an original

which might sell for enough to give me more gambling room.

Also, I am overly timid and evasive

when I owe money

and I can't see just how I'm going to pay it back.

This letter, then, is an apology,

which I hope you will be generous enough to accept.

I enclose a check for $50,

which I shall now be able to repeat every month

until the money you so very graciously lent me

is paid off in full.

One of the objects of a blacklist is to deprive

the victim of economic security

and to drastically lower his living standards

to the point where he will yield.

Well, that being their objective,

my objective was to maintain those living standards

in spite of it.

Trumbo began to work very, very hard and very fast.

He would have three stories going at once

because he was beginning

to have to sell stuff under other names or with a front.

So there were a lot of secrets. He had many different names.

And the phone would ring

and it was never a wrong number as far as I was concerned.

I'd always just call my dad.

I had 13 pseudonyms, all told.

I had Irish names.

I had Jewish names. I had Anglo-Saxon names.

Give them their preference.

So you say, "Sam Jackson calling," or Doc Abbott

or Theodore Flexman or Evelyn Domain.

My dad, his best friend, one of the members of this group,

was Ian Hunter.

And Ian had an Academy Award.

Ian's was for this beautiful movie called Roman Holiday.

It wasn't until I was in my early 30s

that I learned that Ian had not written Roman Holiday.

Trumbo had written the original story.

Ian had fronted for Trumbo.

Ian hadn't been blacklisted yet.

And when the credits were re-distributed sometime

in the '90s to Trumbo,

the whole experience

was embarrassing.

Just the blacklist is a little bit more complicated.

It just has

these sort of repercussions.

I thought a little wine might be good.

Shall I cook something?

No kitchen. Nothing to cook.

I always eat out.

Do you like that?

Life isn't always what one likes.

Is it?

No, it isn't.

Ray Murphy was

a young man my father met in the South Pacific.

Ray later became a front for my father.

And we needed the money, as usual,

when the script sold, and my father was expecting it

and it wasn't coming.

So he made inquiries and a few weeks later discovered

that Ray Murphy had died suddenly.

Dear Mrs. Murphy, I want to tell you

about your son and my relationship with him

and of my wife's sorrow and my own

that he is no longer living.

It has been my privilege since 1945 to be Ray's friend.

It came about in the following manner.

In June of 1945, a party of 6 or 7 war correspondents

embarked from San Francisco by air on a three month tour

of Pacific battle areas.

Among the correspondents were Ray and I.

During the invasion of Borneo, Ray and I went ashore

in a landing craft between the first and secondary,

dodging mortar fire as we sprinted across the sand.

From a slit trench outside the governor's palace,

Ray and I spotted a hilltop which we believed

would give us a better view of what was going on

and decided to climb it.

When we finally reached the top of the hill,

we found an abandoned AA gun that had been knocked out

by naval fire, and no sign of a human being.

We took what cover we could when we heard sounds

of approaching troops, thinking the Japanese were returning.

Moments later, a grim-looking Australian assault group

with fixed bayonets appeared, expecting to meet the enemy.

Well in advance of our armed forces,

as it turned out, Ray and I had accidentally captured the hill.

On the fourth day of the campaign,

the outcome being beyond doubt,

our group decided to return to Tawi Tawi.

Once off, we retired into the main cabin.

Somewhere off Japanese-occupied Celebes,

the alarm signifying an air attack went off in the cabin.

It could only mean that a Zero had risen

from Celebes and was attacking.

I was on the top bunk. I looked down.

Ray was lying full length on the floor

between two other men, his helmet on.

He looked up at me and although his face was, I dare say,

as pale as my own, he smiled.

And then he said, "Goodbye, Trumbo".

I cannot quite describe my emotions at that moment.

Perhaps I thought of my own son, then only 4.

Perhaps I thought of my father long dead.

I certainly felt that a son, not my son, had chosen me

from among that company as the one he wished

to say goodbye to.

And that a father, not his father, had responded.

The fact, as it later turned out,

that there was no Zero within a hundred miles and no danger,

that the whole incident was a ludicrous mistake of nerves

on the part of the crew in no way diminishes

my memory of that moment

nor the surge of love I felt for your son.

We managed to correspond intermittently ever since.

Ray went to India and later published his first novel.

I went before

the House Committee on un-American Activities

and later served my first term in a penitentiary.

I was at that time, as I am now, blacklisted by motion pictures,

publishers, and magazines.

It was typical of his generous nature that he offered

to collaborate with me for motion pictures

and to put his name alone

to the product of our mutual endeavors.

It was typical of my need that I accepted.

During our last visits,

in a moment of temporary depression common to young men,

who are both sensitive and intelligent beyond their years,

Ray told me that he thought he believed in nothing.

He felt himself a complete cynic.

It was of course, not true.

A day or two later, when he brought a copy of my novel

Johnny Got His Gun for me to inscribe,

I wrote in it what I really felt about him and his future.

He telephoned me the next day to thank me.

He said, "I hope I can live up to it."

I should have told him then, and now

have only you to tell that he already had.

Prisoner! Show yourself.

Give me the name and you're back on full rations.

Just one name.

I was born skinny.

Then you'll die.

In 1957 or '58, the situation in Hollywood

in terms of blacklisted writers is,

unless you cooperate with the committee,

unless you do what it asks you to, you won't be employed.

The next generation

of witnesses

faced a different sort of choice.

They could take the First Amendment like the 10

and then their assumption was they would go to prison.

They could take

the Fifth Amendment, which would keep them out of prison,

but they would then be blacklisted.

Or, they could cooperate with the committee.

If they did that,

and admitted that they had been members of the Communist Party,

the next question was, "And who else was a member with you?"

And it's only a matter of time.

You think so?

He's on half rations now. He can't exist on that.

You're forced to choose between starvation and telling.

What would you do?

We're not talking about me. What would you do?

I looked hard at Dalton and I thought,

what is it about this guy that would not,

which would make him say, "No, I'm not giving names"?

And that was a psychic death, kind of.

Because you just lost everything.

You were never to work again.

You were never to have any money, you went to jail.

I'm really speaking

of the personal experience of a man

who was fortunate during this period.

It was a matter of total

disaster for others.

Financial, matrimonial.

For some of their children.

Wherever you are, at some point somebody discovers

that Dalton Trumbo is Dalton Trumbo.

We clearly stood out.

We were a different kind of family.

It is that we were thrust inward as a family.

We were thrust upon ourselves.

And we relied upon each other

more and trusted each other more and helped each other more.

I felt we were a very close family.

What you need is a person who is outraged

by the fact that Dalton Trumbo lives in the neighborhood

and, two, that his daughter actually goes to school

with their children.

it was beginning fifth grade.

I think I was 10 years old.

And it was pretty awful at school,

and I didn't tell them about it because when you're a kid,

you pretty much think it's your problem to deal with,

so...

Until it got to the point where I just couldn't

go to school anymore and finally let them know

what was happening.

To Mrs. Eleanor Barr Wheeler, principal,

Annandale Elementary School.

My dear Mrs. wheeler,

We entrusted to your care

a happy,

healthy, comparatively well-adjusted

and demonstrably intelligent child

who loved school,

adored her teachers,

and enjoyed the friendship

of her small circle of contemporaries.

Eight months later, you return to us

a spiritually devastated human being

who begs us not to send her to school.

I am informed that within the PTA and the Bluebirds,

there have been a series of small secret meetings

devoted to a discussion of Mrs. Trumbo's character

and of mine.

And what to do about us.

Since no one has come to our home to discuss

at first hand the problems which so deeply trouble them,

we have obviously been tried and condemned in absentia.

And the verdict has filtered down from parent to child.

Mitzi, who started out the school year

with many friends,

has found herself in the past three months

the object of the scorn

and ridicule and hatred of those she liked most.

Small, childish conspiracies are directed against her,

patterned in secret

after the conspiracies of the parents.

And she is quietly and incessantly

persecuted and boycotted

and shunned as long as the school day lasts.

This slow murder of the mind and heart and spirit

of a young child is the proud outcome

of the patriotic meetings held by a few parents

under the sponsorship of the PTA and the Bluebirds.

I should like you to watch

how decently and bravely our daughter

tries to suppress her bewilderment

at her first encounter with barbarism

parading as American virtue.

Barbarism which began at your school among adult persons.

Now that we have discovered the source of Mitzi’s agony,

we shall naturally secure competent treatment

to rid her of the scars already inflicted.

If it then seems advisable,

we shall employ competent counsel

to seek a court test of the responsibilities

of the school and of school organizations

for the mental health of the children entrusted to it.

For it is within these school organizations

that Mitzi has suffered an assault.

That the assault has been upon her personality

and that the injury she has sustained is psychic

makes it no less real than if, in a physical sense,

the men and women of the PTA

and the officials of the Bluebirds

had incited their children to trample her senseless

on the blacktop of the playground.

That was the quality of hatred.

It wasn't just

against me or our daughter.

It was against everything that is strange.

Everything that is different.

And that, of course, is...

Is the beginning of...

of the apocalypse.

One Sunday, Hugo and I

and Trumbo and Cleo went to a bullfight.

Hugo identified with the bullfighter

and Trumbo identified with the bull.

So in this case,

it was a bad kill.

The bull was stabbed

through the throat and bled profusely.

And Trumbo and Cleo were absolutely livid.

They were simply horrified.

They could hardly speak.

And within a couple of months, Trumbo has gotten the idea

for an original, which emerged finally as The Brave One.

On the day that the Academy nominations

were announced, it was announced that Robert Rich was nominated.

Robert Rich

was one of my father's fronts.

Robert Rich was an actual person.

He was the nephew of the King brothers,

who had produced the picture.

Night of nights in Hollywood as the film industry presents

the 29th annual Motion Picture Academy Awards.

In 1957,

at the Academy Awards, The Brave One received

the Academy Award

for Best Original Story.

For The Brave One...

And the Academy Award was given to Robert Rich.

That night, no one appeared

to pick up the award.

The next morning six other Robert Riches announced

that they had written it and demanded the award.

That Oscar became

the only unclaimed Oscar, I believe,

in the whole history of the Academy Awards.

I remember as a child seeing a photo composite

that they were trying to reconstruct who Robert Rich was.

As a result, there came to be

a search for Robert Rich.

This was an opportunity that my father seized upon

and used to bring

the idea of blacklisted writers to a head,

that it couldn't be ignored anymore.

Mr. Trumbo, did you write The Brave One?

Well, you see,

I've been accused of writing many pictures

in the last ten years during the period of the blacklist.

So I've had to make a policy about such questions.

My policy is that I modestly

refuse either to confirm or to deny.

In this way I receive just a little bit of credit

from almost every good picture that's made

and, for some reason, I never get blamed for the scamps!

The name "Robert Rich"

lends itself magnificently to jokes

and may even be the invention of a jokester.

But it nonetheless contains, as every really good joke must,

an essential element of tragedy,

or horror, or disgrace,

or doom.

Robert Rich is the unknown artist.

He is the fugitive American of our time.

And it is my purpose and determination

that his name shall be remembered

as a symbol of this national disgrace

long after the blacklist itself has been destroyed.

For I have seen the blacklist that produced Robert Rich.

I know its pain and its frustration and its horror

and its shattering cruelties.

I have seen families rendered by it destitute overnight.

I have seen broken homes and heartbroken children

and sorrowing friends.

I have seen its hideous waste of talent, and of love,

of friendship, and of life.

I have long served in this lowly

marching army of the anonymous.

And walking among its ranks,

I have seen the figure of death.

And helplessly, I have watched decent men and women die

before their stories had been told,

before their work was finished,

before their normal span of years had been lived out.

Every trade,

every profession now has

its roll call of honored dead.

I can make no more jokes about Robert Rich.

They turn sour on my tongue.

I can invent no more witticisms

about the Oscar he dares not claim,

because that small, worthless, golden statuette is covered

with the blood of my friends.

I cannot laugh about it any longer

because my belly is filled with the poison

of this blacklist and my heart is filled

with its grief and my ears roar with rage at its injustices.

And my heart, for the first time,

is filled with something very close to hate.

I have a daughter, 13 years old.

I've been blacklisted since she was 3.

She's known the title of every motion picture

I've written in this study.

And she's kept that title secret.

My parents and I watched the Academy Awards

the night that Robert Rich won and I was so thrilled

and I was saying, "Daddy, let's go get it tomorrow.

Let's go pick it up."

He said, "No, we can't".

When her friends say to her, as children do,

"My father does so and so, what does your father do?"

This has confronted her with a very real problem.

It confronts her with the problem,

and has since she was 3,

of who her father really is

and what her father really does.

I...

think I will give this Oscar, if I get it, to that girl.

I think I will tell her, well, here is one secret

you no longer need to be burdened with.

I'll tell her, we have our names back again.

I bring a message from your master,

Marcus Licinius Crassus, Commander of Italy!

By command of his most merciful excellency,

your lives are to be spared!

Slaves you were and slaves you remain,

but the terrible penalty of crucifixion has been set aside

on the single condition

that you identify the body or the living person

of the slave called Spartacus!

I'm Spartacus!

You know,

when you get close to 90 years of age,

you look back and you try to remember

the things that we were not quite proud of

and the things you're proud of.

I find one thing that I was very proud of.

I employed Dalton Trumbo

to write the screenplay of Spartacus.

Trumbo's name appears on two films in 1960,

on Exodus and Spartacus,

after years in which none of his peers

could get credited on films.

I know it. I feel it.

Either you compromise or you lose.

We won't lose.

And I remember going to see Spartacus

and I remember going to see Exodus with my family.

I sensed the family pride,

you know, the pride of the community,

you know, that...

This man's name was on the work

and it might make it easier for the others.

Everything for him comes down

to some very simple attitudes and some very simple beliefs.

And he just doesn't stray from those,

which goes back to his ideas about the First Amendment,

freedom.

What it is, the way a man operates in society.

We were talking and he looked at us and he said,

"Don't forget to be happy."

And I thought, God, reflected in that

must be so much pain and suffering

for the political commitment he made

that put him on that blacklist.

All over the world...

here, there and everywhere...

is this immoral assertion of power

over the most private thoughts of men

and the assertion by government

that it has the power to compel men to tell, to recant,

to disgrace themselves, to swear they were idiots,

to revoke their past and to spit on their work.

This is what government wants, in greater or less degree,

all over the world, and this is what nobody...

Nobody can do!

I've delivered newspapers, peddled vegetables,

clerked in stores, waited on tables,

washed automobiles, picked fruit,

hosed down infected cadavers, shoveled sugar beets,

iced refrigerator cars,

laid rails with a section gang,

reported for newspapers,

served an eight year hitch

on the night shift of a large industrial plant.

I've looked at many American faces.

I've seen them as flak burst around them

9,000 feet over Japan.

In a slit trench on Okinawa,

watching the night sky to see where the next bomb would fall.

In an assault boat as they moved toward a beach that tossed

more violently than the surf through which they rode.

I've counseled with a paroled prostitute on

how she might escape the clutches

of a policeman who had caught her

and was stealing half her earnings

and sending his friends to her with courtesy cards

that entitled them to take her without pay.

I've been asked by Louis B. Mayer

why I had no religion

and by a ranking member of the State Department,

how I could bring myself

to work with "all those Hollywood Jews."

I've seen American faces in a Congregational church

in New Hampshire where a colleague and I traveled

with a bodyguard of students.

I've seen their faces in a miners' union hall

in Duluth on a night when the wind off the lake

blew the snow so killingly and so deep,

cars couldn't be used, everybody walked to the meeting.

I've seen their faces

in the banquet room of a New York hotel,

when the American Booksellers Association

gave me a National Book Award.

And I've seen them again in the jury box

as each of them twice said, "Guilty as charged,"

while one of them wept as she said it.

While one of them wept as she said it.

I've been stripped by Americans

and paraded naked with them

and before them and obediently bent over on command

to present my anus for contraband clearance.

I've lived with and trusted and been trusted

by car thieves, abortionists, moonshiners, embezzlers

and burglars and Jehovah’s witnesses and Quakers.

I've stood on a gray day

in the Fifth Marine Division Cemetery on Iwo Jima

and looked off at the graves of 2,198 Americans.

In the center of all those graves

on a slim white pole on a concrete pedestal

flew the American flag

and I swear it was not the flag of informers.

And if I could take a census

of all the American faces I have seen

and of all the dead whose graves I have looked on,

if I could ask them one simple question...

"Would you like a man who told on his friend?"

There would not be one among them who would answer 'Yes.'

but show me the man who informs on friends,

who have harmed no one, and who thereafter earns money

he could not have earned before, and I will show you

not a decent citizen, not a patriot,

but a miserable scoundrel, who will, if new pressures arise

and the price is right, betray not just his friends,

but his country itself.

I do not know one Hollywood informer who acted

except under duress and for money.

Such men ought to be watched.

I cannot imagine they are not watched.

I've been noticing lately that I sneak small naps

in the afternoon.

It's just a little more difficult to summon the energy

to write this letter than it was five years ago.

Wine goes to my head more quickly than it used to.

I walk forward instead of running.

And although there is much life in me,

much is also gone.

So to sum up,

I evaluate, I calculate my course more thoughtfully.

There are certain men of my time who have waged great battles

and now look out upon the world from hilltops or from peaks

where the horizon must be immensely wider

and more revealing, but I have only skirmished.

Stand on a ridge.

Lower than I had hoped for,

and yet perhaps higher than I deserve.

The horizons I had thought to see will probably be denied.

I still hope, if I conserve energy and absorb

the meaning of my experiences,

that I shall be able to ascend one of the middle hills,

a little hill, but still a hill and not a ridge.

Be that as it will be, even from my ridge, I look back

on two decades through which

good friends stood together, moved forward a little,

dreamed that the world could be better and tried to make it so,

tasted the joy of small victories,

wounded each other, made mistakes, suffered much injury,

and stood silent in the chamber of liars.

For all this, I am grateful, that much I have.

That much cannot be taken from me.

Barcelona fell.

And you were not there and I was not there,

and perhaps if we had been, the city would have stood,

and the world been changed and better.

But we were here, and here together we remain.

And our city won't fall... And if it should,

better that we lie buried in its ruins

than found absent a second time.

We are not guaranteed happiness.

We are only guaranteed the right to pursue it.

Which does imply that we all have adversity,

and...

it's not too bad.