The secret Oscar winner
Dalton Trumbo’s screenplays won Academy Awards during the period in which he was blacklisted by Hollywood studios. Tom Brook reports on a new film about his life.
“He had dignity and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind… and more importantly, defend the opinions of others.” Actor Bryan Cranston tells Tom Brook about the man he stars as in his latest film.
Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for being a member of the Communist Party – yet he still managed to pen Oscar-winning scripts for Roman Holiday and The Brave One under a pseudonym.
The new film Trumbo charts his journey from the industry’s highest-paid screenwriter to being shunned by the studios. “He was a mainstream Hollywood screenwriter,” the film’s director Jay Roach tells Brook. “That somehow he could be seen as subversive, that he was… hypnotising America through subversive ideas in movies was amazing.”
Trumbo’s career was revived after he was revealed as the true writer of Spartacus in 1960. Brook talks to Cranston’s co-star Helen Mirren about how Americans were thinking at the height of the anti-Communist hysteria – and whether she would have been tempted to name names in the same position.