TRUMBO Page 37

  Things were quite different for Dalton Trumbo when he resumed his career as a screenwriter under his own name. There was a hiatus, a kind of enforced vacation undertaken at the orders of a doctor. Trumbo had, during the last few years, worked himself to a state of exhaustion. And so, in the spring of 1960, he and Cleo accepted Otto Preminger’s invitation and, crossing the Atlantic for the first time, visited the Exodus location on Cyprus. Trumbo’s status there was strictly defined by Preminger his first day on the set. As the crew was setting up to film a scene, Peter Lawford spied the Trumbos sitting off to one side and looking on. He came over and quietly and earnestly began to discuss possible changes in his lines. Preminger, who is absolutely locked into a script once he begins production, observed this narrowly from some distance away and marked out in that drill sergeant’s voice that Lawford was not to discuss changes of any sort with Mr. Trumbo. “He is here as a guest and not as a writer,” said Preminger. Lawford’s reply was a meek, “Yes, Otto,” and that ended it there.

  The movie business itself changed drastically during the course of the sixties. The preceding decade had seen the movies at war with television, a war the industry had no real hope of winning. Movie theaters were closing down all over the country; audiences huddled in twos and threes, hidden away in their living rooms, giggling at I Love Lucy, thrilling to Have Gun, Will Travel, nodding in sober agreement at the homilies by Ronald Reagan tacked onto the end of Death Valley Days. This mass audience was, by and large, lost to motion pictures during the fifties. But it took the men who run the industry many years into the sixties, and many lost millions in movie extravaganzas, before this lesson was learned. (And they may not have learned it yet!) Because Trumbo had been propelled into prominence during the breaking of the blacklist, he was then the best-known screenwriter in Hollywood, probably the only one at all familiar to people outside the industry. And because the two pictures with which he did finally come out into the open—Exodus and Spartacus—were enormously successful, this modest celebrity was instantly translated into stardom, or the closest thing to it a screenwriter could claim. This made him, according to the reasoning popular at the time, the ideal writer for the sort of lavish, big-budget productions that were made in the increasingly desperate effort to attract people away from their television sets and into the theaters. When a producer could say, “I’ve signed Dalton Trumbo to do the script,” he had a much better chance of putting together the sort of package of stars and director that he would need to attract the multimillion-dollar financing which became the rule during the period.

  As a result, Trumbo wrote only a handful of films* in the years following the blacklist but made a great deal more money. His fee increased with the projected budget of the production—standard practice in the movie industry. In many ways, his situation (working much less for very much more money) was quite ideal, but there were signs that he himself was not entirely pleased with it. The clearest of them was that following a run of such projects he plunged into his own small-budget, independently financed production of Johnny Got His Gun. Except for Lonely Are the Brave (more of that one later), which was begun during the blacklist though finished afterward and released in 1962, things went wrong with all those big movies of his in production.

  Of all the costly mistakes made by producers and studio executives during this period, the most disastrously expensive was Cleopatra. It very nearly left Twentieth Century-Fox bankrupt. The production became an almost legendary example of all that can go wrong with a film when its stars—in this case, of course, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton—exercise near-complete control over it. As it happened, Trumbo became involved in a Taylor-Burton film just a couple of years later that failed (though less spectacularly) for the same reason. He had taken an assignment writing a screenplay for Dino De Laurentiis, The Dark Angel. He and Cleo lived in Rome while he was working on the script, and when he had finished, he let it out that he would be willing to take on a short assignment—a “polish”—so they could stay on there a little longer. A producer, Martin Ransohoff, who had heard the story of Trumbo’s collaboration-by-mail with Michael Wilson during the blacklist, asked Trumbo if the two of them might like to try the same thing on a script for Taylor and Burton. With Wilson in Paris, and facing the happy prospect of staying on a while longer in Rome himself, Trumbo took a look at the money Ransohoff and M-G-M were offering (which was considerable) and agreed.

  It was no “polish” job, though. The two of them plied their trade as professionals, following the same routine that had worked for them earlier on the blacklist westerns: Michael Wilson did the story and sent it off to Trumbo, who then did the screenplay. What they came up with was a script that pleased everyone concerned, not least the Burtons—or so they said. In production, however, improvisations of every sort altered the tone, style, and sense of what they had written. Their little picture about a beach girl who lives in a hut on Big Sur was transformed into one about a rather mysterious matronly woman (Mrs. Burton didn’t feel like losing the weight that looking twenty required) who lives in a glorious beach house, changes costume twenty-two times in the course of the picture, and talks as though she were living hand-to-mouth. Richard Burton himself either couldn’t remember the lines or chose not to. In any case, he ad-libbed freely, often changing the content of scenes. It was a mess. Audiences laughed when it was previewed. Critics attacked it unmercifully. The Sandpiper, released in 1965, sank without a trace.

  With Hawaii, there were other problems. This one was, at least at its inception, the biggest production with which Trumbo had ever been involved. The screen rights to the James Michener novel had been purchased for six hundred thousand dollars. One screenwriter, Daniel Taradash, had been brought in already on the project and had done what seemed to Trumbo quite a creditable job of adaptation. Still, the Mirisch brothers, who were producing the picture, wanted something different. And Fred Zinnemann, who was then set to direct it, brought in Trumbo. Fundamentally, the problem with Hawaii was similar to the one Exodus had offered earlier: that of adapting a novel which was just too big to be made into a movie. Where Trumbo and Preminger had earlier solved it by taking the climactic episode and making the picture from that story alone, this time Trumbo and Zinnemann handled it by preparing to make not one but two movies from the novel. Director and screenwriter worked fairly closely on the scripts—Hawaii I and Hawaii II, as they were designated—for about a year. But United Artists, which was financing the project, got cold feet, for the two-picture approach would have cost fifteen million dollars; they said it would have to be done in one big movie. At that point, Fred Zinnemann withdrew from the project and, after a delay, George Roy Hill came on board. When he did, he had his own 350-page script of Hawaii under his arm. Everyone—Hill included—knew it was far too long, and so Trumbo was brought back in to work with him on it. The two approached one another warily but ended up working closely together, ultimately in complete agreement and as very good friends. When they finished, they both knew that the script United Artists had agreed to go with was still too long, but it held together, and they were pleased with it. But after a portion of the picture had already been shot, United Artists tallied up recent losses on other films and sent word to George Roy Hill that the script simply had to be cut in half. In other words, they were going back, in mid-production, to the Hawaii I and Hawaii II concept—though doing it on the cheap. Trumbo came out to Hawaii himself; he and Hill worked feverishly during production trying to save at least one picture from such radical surgery. By and large, they succeeded in doing that. Their Hawaii, which starred Max von Sydow, Julie Andrews, and Richard Harris, does have style and a certain epic sweep. But dramatically, there is a kind of sustained grayness to the picture that would have been relieved if the second story (about the Chinese in the islands) had not been ripped out so rudely and at so late a date. A few years later another picture was made from this material, but neither Trumbo nor George Roy Hill had anything directly to do with it. It came out
so badly that it was barely even let out by United Artists.

  Trumbo’s commitment to The Fixer was more profound than to the other two. Trumbo, director John Frankenheimer, and producer Edward Lewis each deferred one-third of their salary just to get the picture made. None of them was likely to get back that third, for it was the kind of movie that would not turn a profit. Part of the difficulty in making a successful film of The Fixer was inherent in the novel itself. It is not, certainly, that it is inferior material; on the contrary, it is arguably “too good” for the movies. But that won’t do, either, for finally the literary qualities of a book offer no direct index to its suitability for film. Some of the trashiest books make the best films, and sometimes (though less often) the best books make the worst films. But what the author Bernard Malamud managed to accomplish with the density and texture of his prose was to provide insulation—or more, a certain sense and dignity—to the squalid, brutal story of injustice told in The Fixer.

  Some novels (and for very different reasons) simply defy translation to the screen. The Fixer may have been one of these; Johnny Got His Gun, as we shall see, may have been another. To have reproduced the overt action of the Malamud novel would have been to make a movie that was unendurably grim and brutal: an audience tends to back off, to withhold empathy, when things get too rough. Trumbo knew all this and carefully constructed his screenplay so that the psychological and physical brutality to the defenseless Yakov is relieved by episodes—little victories—in which the fixer fashions a device for keeping time, or fantasizes an assassination of the czar. He added a couple of others, too, not involving Yakov directly, in which the scene is shifted from his cell, and the audience is given at least temporary liberation from the claustrophobic restriction of the jail setting. These sequences are all important to the dramatic pacing of the script, and that is why they are there—ultimately to keep a hold on the audience. They were in the final draft of the script, and they were shot by director John Frankenheimer. But these were precisely the bits that were edited when the film was trimmed down to final cut. Not only that, but the beating administered to Yakov in the film far exceeded what was called for in the script. In fact, it was so graphically real and severe that in the filming of the sequence Alan Bates’s well-padded double sustained two broken ribs at the hands—or rather, fists—of the guards who were, of course, doing their best to pull their punches for the camera. In other words, John Frankenheimer chose to emphasize precisely those elements in the film that would alienate the audience, while cutting those that might have attracted and held it. This had predictable results: the audience was alienated, and so were the critics. The Fixer failed with both.

  It may seem that I am doing all I can here to shift blame from Trumbo for the relative failure of these three pictures. But all I am doing, really, is underlining the collaborative nature of film. With all due respect to the auteur theory (which asserts that the director is the “author” of the motion picture), the very essence of filmmaking is such that it requires the participation of a whole company of artists and craftsmen, and even of businessmen, each of whom makes his separate contribution, and any one of whom may tip the balance in the direction of success or failure for any given production. This is both the strength and weakness of the process. To what extent can even an auteur-director such as Vincente Minnelli be given credit or blame for a picture like The Sandpiper? Or, for that matter, just how culpable are Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson? In neither case can they be said to have had much responsibility for the final product—not when the two stars of the picture exercised the degree of control over it that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton did over that one. And wasn’t the true auteur of Hawaii the head bookkeeper at United Artists, who decided in mid-production to eliminate an entire subplot from the script? Wasn’t it he who gave Hawaii its distinctive quality—not the director, George Roy Hill?

  Trumbo would be the last to dispute the primacy of the director on any given production, or to deny him his place as the focal figure in any aesthetic consideration of film. “There must be an absolute supremacy of the director,” said Trumbo. “No one, in any way, must try to undermine his authority. That means [the writer] must be very careful in talking to an actor, because actors always want things changed.” Trumbo worked comfortably in the old studio setup in which writer and director were usually kept quite apart, and he worked just as comfortably under the practice, which encouraged a much closer working relationship between writer and director. He was actually available and on the set during the production of four of his eleven post-blacklist films.

  One of these, of course, was Papillon, in which he was not often on the set but was constantly available at a nearby hotel working only pages ahead of the shooting schedule. “On that one, for example,” said Trumbo, “Frank Schaffner and Steve McQueen and I were talking about a knife fight that occurs in the hold of the boat at night. Well, I don’t bother to describe those bloody fights in the script, or even pretend to. When you get to a fight you simply say what must happen, and then you go on. But Steve had a lot of ideas about it. He had a great deal of power in this picture—he was getting paid two million dollars, and that’s all the power you need.… We were talking about it there in the hotel, and I said, ‘What happens is up to Frank. He’ll figure it out when you get there and when you’re doing it.’

  “And McQueen said to me, ‘You be there, too, because you can call me out [tell me what to do].’

  “And I just said, ‘No, I won’t. I’m not going to come.’ Frank was sitting right there as we were talking. I said, ‘I would never call an actor out. I never would talk to an actor without the director being with me and wanting me to talk to the actor.’

  “And Steve just said, ‘Well, I see you’re being a very nice guy, and I suppose I don’t know the pecking order.’

  “I said, ‘It’s not the pecking order. It’s a professional obligation.’ And it truly is. A writer on the set in this way is a temptation, an open invitation to change, and unless he is highly ethical he can undermine the director, and he can harm the picture.”

  One factor that gave Trumbo an edge during his days writing on the black market was that he came about as close as a screenwriter can to guaranteeing his work. When he took a job, it was with the understanding that he would make all changes necessary, in order to bring the script to the point where it was ready for production. And unlike many screenwriters of the day, Trumbo wrote then—and continued to write—shooting scripts, with fairly detailed camera instructions together with dialogue and action. The point is, he continued to be a participating screenwriter, one who wrote explicitly for production and implicitly subscribed to the dictum that there are no great scripts, there are only great films.

  “In a sense,” said Trumbo, “the writer is the ship’s architect, and the director is the captain. It may have been a greater achievement to have designed some particular ship—still, if that ship is not sailed right, it is going to sink. So I’ve never felt any form of rivalry, or had any trouble with directors.”

  Which is, in a way, quite remarkable, for a desire for recognition grew in later years among screenwriters. Some simply envied the power of directors and wished to become directors themselves; when and if they did, their problem would be solved. For others, the matter was more complex and not so easily dealt with. Unlike Trumbo, they felt that writers were not given sufficient credit for their contribution to the finished film, and that they should be given a much stronger voice in production. What they sought was a relationship between writer and director much nearer to that of the dramatist and the director of the play. (The standard Dramatists Guild contract stipulates that no change can be made in a playwright’s work without his consent; screenwriters, of course, enjoy no such control over their work.) In support of this insurrection there even developed a kind of counter-auteur theory of cinema, which argued that in many cases the true author of the film is not the director, but the author of the screenplay.*

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p; One difficulty with such theorizing is that most movies are made from some previous source: a play, a novel, or a narrative of some sort. “The industry is based on adaptation,” said Edward Lewis, who worked with Trumbo on a number of pictures. “Originals are written by two kinds of writers—those who are starting out and those who can take time off, who may not be in demand.” Neither described Trumbo’s situation. And as a result, all but one of the movies he did after coming off the blacklist were adaptations from a book source of some sort. That single exception, Executive Action, was an extensive rewrite of an original screenplay by Mark Lane and Donald Freed. The best of all his post-blacklist movies, in fact, was an adaptation, which according to Trumbo required very little in the way of alteration to bring it to the screen: “Lonely Are the Brave—now there’s a picture in which I got more credit than the director, David Miller. It was unfair, in my view, and I wrote a letter to Newsweek, pointing out the contribution of the director, who was not even mentioned in the review. For God’s sake, he did the picture! And what about the young professor, Edward Abbey, who wrote the novel? The Brave Cowboy, which was his title, was a very good novel, and I followed it very closely because it required very little.”

  It did, of course, require something. Compare the novel, The Brave Cowboy, with the film, Lonely Are the Brave, and you find in the latter a general shift of emphasis to the final part of the story, the pursuit of the “brave cowboy” by a modern sheriff’s posse, complete with helicopter and airplane. The anarchist message of the novel has been muted slightly—not because it is anarchist but because it is a message. Since this is a narrative translated into a drama, the dialogue must bear a greater burden of exposition, and because it is a drama in a visual medium, there should be less of it. As a result, very few lines in Lonely Are the Brave have been taken word for word from Brave Cowboy. But the characters remain the same; the construction of the movie is essentially that of the novel; and it says implicitly the same thing. Everything that Trumbo did in adapting it enhanced those qualities of the novel that had made it right for film in the first place.