Son chronicles father's persecution

By TOM CARR
Special to the Record-Eagle

August 01, 2008 12:00 am

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TRAVERSE CITY -- Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted during the post-World War II red scare and spent years selling screenplays under assumed names.

Now his son Christopher Trumbo is here to present "Trumbo," his own movie about his late father, telling the tale of that part of his life through letters his father wrote. Yet not all the correspondences used are personal or have to do with his tribulations stemming from the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation of Communist influence on the film industry.

"They were letters to a whole bunch of people; to me, to the telephone company," said Trumbo, who lives north of Los Angeles. "It shows that 'they may be sending me to jail, but right now I want a telephone in my home.'"

But the letters -- read by stars like Paul Giamatti, Nathan Lane, Joan Allen, Liam Neeson and others -- illustrate in a personal light his persecution, move to Mexico with his family for about two years when Christopher was 11, and the subsequent redemption of his reputation, Trumbo said.

"You get a different feel from people when you talk to them," he said.

His father -- who wrote such classics as "Spartacus," "Roman Holiday" and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" -- actually did go to jail for contempt of Congress for not answering questions to the committee's satisfaction.

Established in 1938 as a special investigating committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, the group aimed its work mostly at German American involvement in Nazi and Ku Klux Klan activity. But it also carried out a brief investigation into the wartime internment of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, and probed the possibility that the American Communist Party had infiltrated the Works Progress Administration, including the Federal Theatre Project.

In 1947, the committee held nine days of hearings into alleged communist propaganda and influence in the Hollywood motion picture industry. Dalton and nine other writers and directors who refused to testify -- dubbed the "Hollywood Ten" -- were later boycotted by the studios.

Christopher Trumbo originally used the letters to write a play about his father to raise funds for a monument to blacklisted artists. It ended up being performed in New York a few years ago and toured the country with Brian Dennehy playing the lead.

The core of the documentary, which screens at 3 p.m. Saturday at City Opera House, is the same as the play, he said. He's added home movies, footage of the hearings and TV interviews of his father, who died in 1976, to round it out.

Trumbo said his father's plight is illuminating for any time in history.

"It shows you can stand up to power and you can stand up to unjust authority," he said.

Besides "Trumbo," the festival will show "Johnny Got His Gun," a 1971 adaptation of Dalton Trumbo's novel of a badly injured World War I veteran. It will screen at noon Sunday at City Opera House.

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