TRUMBO Read online

  Could Trumbo then be put forward as the “author” of Lonely Are the Brave? Obviously, he doesn’t think so. He could, of course, stake a much stronger claim on, say, Spartacus and Exodus, two adaptations of much inferior novels with which he took far greater liberties; both screenplays are arguably better, even as literary works, than the originals from which they are taken. But even here his contribution is something less than a piece of pure creation. That he came to do them at all was more or less the luck of the draw, as are most assignments for most screenwriters (the very term “assignment”—a job to be done—connotes this). And once he took them on, his artistic choices were severely limited by any number of factors, the original material not least among them. Any adaptation, then, no matter how “creative,” is likely to be only ambiguously the work of the writer whose name appears in big letters up on the screen.

  And what about originals? He wrote a number of them during the blacklist, when he was obliged to keep busy every moment of every working day—even when he was writing on his own and between assignments. He found himself then almost in the position of a beginner, having to establish himself anew with each script he did and prove himself worthy of the cut rates at which he was being paid. He did that, again and again, more often than not in the beginning with originals. They were good, workman-like jobs, most of them genre films—thrillers like Gun Crazy, The Prowler, and He Ran All the Way—in which he proved he had not forgotten the lessons he had learned working on the B units of Warners, Columbia, and RKO. His Academy Award film, The Brave One, was simply a genre picture of another sort, the kind they call a Disney picture, the story of a boy and his bull, the same kind of child-and-beast story that had been done before and has been done often since. In writing all these, Trumbo was working within fairly strict limitations: the rules of genre (what has worked before becomes a “rule” all too quickly in the movie business); the exigencies of budget (working for independents like the King brothers, who made their movies on a shoestring, he was limited on the size of his cast, the number of sets, and so on); and on a couple of occasions by the story requirements of a producer (when Sam Spiegel said he wanted something on the order of Double Indemnity and had a story outline in hand, as he did for The Prowler, then that’s what he got). Screenwriting of this kind, done to very specific requirements, is the equivalent of genre-writing in fiction: a mystery must begin with a murder and end with a solution. John D. MacDonald acquitted himself admirably writing paperback thrillers, yet nobody, I think, accused him of committing art.

  The most truly original of all Trumbo’s blacklist originals was Roman Holiday. One of the few comedies he did, it is certainly the most charming and distinctive of Trumbo’s films, so universal in its fairy-tale appeal that it was at least as popular in Soviet Russia and Japan as in the West. Who can resist the story of the princess who plays hookey? What writer would not be proud to let his reputation ride on it? Yet he did it in the darkest days of the blacklist, with Ian McLellan Hunter fronting for him, so that it is a film—one of the few during the period—that Trumbo is not even rumored to have written. And quite frankly, the question of authorship, in this case, is a bit fuzzy, for though Trumbo wrote it as an original screenplay, Hunter came on at Paramount and did a lot of rewriting on it before he himself was blacklisted. Then John Dighton worked on it after that, bringing it to the shape it was in when William Wyler shot it. With such a history, if Roman Holiday were to have been submitted to the Guild for arbitration, it would probably have come back as one of those monstrosities with three names on the screen for writing credit. To what extent is it Trumbo’s? or Hunter’s? or Dighton’s? Weren’t most of the changes in it made to satisfy the director, William Wyler?*

  Trumbo was fond of saying, “Movies are an art that is a business, and a business that is an art.” But Jean Cocteau once said, even more persuasively, “Films will not be art until the materials to make them are as cheap as paper and pencil.” The screenwriter’s materials are as cheap as paper and pencil—in fact, that’s more or less what they are. However, what a screenwriter brings forth is not a film, it is a screenplay. And for that screenplay to become a movie, the writer’s personal vision will, almost certainly must, be compromised. “No script can be shot as written,” said Trumbo. “It cannot be done. Not necessarily major changes, but a piece of business, at least, or a scene, that may be the director’s, or the producer’s, or the actor’s.” But something anyway. Even to that limited extent, then, the screenwriter is denied authorship—as he will be, too, in production, on the set, where his lines are interpreted, where the shots he has called are set up, and the entire visual character of the film is established. And finally, even in the editing process, the screenplay will be further altered, sometimes in very subtle ways—perhaps a word or a line trimmed, or a reaction shot inserted, all of which may change the meaning of an entire scene. But the end result of this long and complicated process is the finished film, and unless the screenwriter controls the process, he is not the author of the film.

  It is not for nothing that the question of authorship has been thrashed and re-thrashed by the auteurists and counter-auteurists. For only the author of the film is—or can be—its artist. All the rest of his collaborators, no matter how important their individual contributions, can be considered only craftsmen. Trumbo’s success as a screenwriter may be attributed directly to his grasp of this fundamental principle. He was satisfied with his role as a collaborator. Not that he was docile or could be intimidated, or that he was unwilling to argue fiercely on points that he felt worth arguing. But finally, he was a film craftsman—not an author and not a film artist—willing to take a craftsman’s pride in his work, in getting the job done. Nobody knew the rules better than he, and therefore nobody played the game as long or as successfully.

  The two of them never really got along. In a way, you couldn’t expect them to. Trumbo was irascible, extravagant, almost obsessive in his likes and dislikes. And Alvah Bessie was much the same: “I have a genius for alienating people like Trumbo has,” he said—and he was right. But he also attracted them similarly. A tall, gaunt character, in his seventies when I interviewed him, Bessie lent the Hollywood Ten, a singularly conservative-looking and well-tailored band of rebels, a certain dash of left-wing adventurism. At the time of the hearings, he looked tough and ready, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who sported a Clark Gable mustache and was better known as a writer than most of the rest, except for Trumbo and Albert Maltz. He was a novelist. He had then published three books: Men in Battle, his Spanish Civil War story; and two proletarian novels, Bread and a Stone and Dwell in the Wilderness. However, with only two years in at Warner Bros., he was barely established as a screenwriter when his subpoena came and was in bad financial shape even then. Except for one season of success (his notorious Marilyn Monroe novel, The Symbol, made some money for him), the many years after that were one long scramble for survival.

  “Sam Ornitz and I were the paupers of the group,” says Bessie. “I had been blacklisted, in effect, a year and a half earlier, during the strike at Warners. When they threw pickets around the studio, the Writers Guild shop called a meeting to determine whether or not to go through the picket lines. I urged them to support the strike, and I guess I was pretty persuasive because it was on that basis they stayed away. But you know how Hollywood is. When the strike was over, I was out at Warners. I hadn’t worked in all that time when I got my subpoena with the rest.”

  We are talking in Alvah Bessie’s office. It is attached to his modest suburban home in Marin County, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. The house is all he has to show for The Symbol, which ABC did as a Movie of the Week after scheduling, canceling, and equivocating nervously for a season as to just whether or not it was too “hot” for television. Bessie himself is a likable enough man, polite and fairly frank in these circumstances, though as a hard-bitten veteran of the Marxist religious wars, he must have been (as Trumbo must also have been)
rather ruthless and tough in earlier days. There is some slight tension as we talk. I did not like his novel, The Symbol, and said so in a review of the book. He remembers, and though he makes no direct reference to it, I know he remembers, and so there is that between us.

  Alvah Bessie did his year for contempt of Congress in the federal prison at Texarkana, Texas. When he was released, his prospects for employment on the movie black market were far dimmer than Trumbo’s, even at the lower rates that then prevailed. There was never a lot of work to go around, and a screenwriter who was as unproven as Bessie simply hadn’t much chance even with independents like the King brothers. The future looked pretty bleak when a phone call came from Harry Bridges in San Francisco. It happened Bessie had met the radical boss of the West Coast Longshoremen at a party at Trumbo’s house in Beverly Hills toward the end of the war. “Bridges used to hang around Hollywood a lot back then to chase women,” says Bessie. The two had seen one another on a couple of occasions afterward, but the phone call, when it came, was a complete surprise. Bridges asked him if he would like to come up to San Francisco to work for the local there. The money wasn’t much, but it was a job, and Bessie was glad to get it. He worked for the Longshoremen’s Union for five years, doing odd-job writing for Bridges and helping put out the local’s weekly paper. “But then the International told Harry he had to contract his force, and I was the one who was elected to go,” says Bessie. “Harry told me he could do my job with one finger up his ass. So I was out.

  “That same week I bounced into a job at the hungry i in San Francisco. I knew guys who played there—the Gateway Singers, who became the Limelighters, and Professor Irwin Corey—and they heard I was out of a job. So Irwin Corey took me in to Enrico Banducci, who is the hungry i, and I was hired at eighty dollars a week to run the lights. It took me five minutes to learn the job, and I stayed there twelve years. It would have been an ideal job for a writer if it had just paid enough because it gave me the whole afternoon for me to do my own work.”

  It was while he was there that he wrote Inquisition in Eden, his autobiographical account of the Hollywood Ten ordeal, and The Symbol. And all the while he was at the hungry i he kept after Trumbo to do what he could to get him some movie work, on or off the black market, for credit or straight cash. He would write chiding letters, sometimes almost desperate ones, asking for help in getting an assignment—rewrites, television, anything. And Trumbo kept writing back telling him that “you have to be close to the tit to get the milk”; that if Bessie were really serious about breaking back into movies, he would have to move down to Los Angeles. Although Alvah Bessie chose to remain in the San Francisco area, he did eventually manage to get some movie work. His son was then in Hollywood, working in production, and through him he got a shot at his first post-blacklist script, a thriller that was never produced. However, he did the adaptation of his novel, The Symbol, for ABC, and had hopes when we met for a couple of original screenplays he had done.

  His relationship with Trumbo, an unequal and uneasy one, had led to bad feelings on both sides. “Well,” says Bessie, “since you ask me what I think of Trumbo, I will say this: I think he has faults as great as mine but a talent much greater—or he had one. He’s a poor boy who made it but never forgot where he came from. He’s the only man I know of all of us who is still with the same wife he started with. All of us, including me, have had three wives. And just look at Cleo! What a woman! She looks the same today as she did in 1943 when I first met her. I told Trumbo that, and I told him, too, that he looked like something that had come out from under a rock—his eating and drinking habits are just ridiculous, and he takes absolutely no exercise.”

  “Well, all right,” I say to Bessie, “but what’s this trouble between you? This ‘dead Bavarian’ business?”

  “Oh God, that! Really, it’s a tempest in a teapot. I’ve always admired the man enormously. I don’t see why that business should define our relationship. I hope it doesn’t.”

  “What happened?” I ask. But before he can answer, his wife, Sylviane, arrives. It is late in the afternoon, and I realize I may have overstayed my leave. We have kibitzed and digressed far more than what I have written here would indicate, discussing his books, his projects, his plans for the future. His latest book, Spain Again, has him excited and he wants to talk about that. It’s worth listening whenever Alvah Bessie wants to talk. His wife is a charming woman: colonial French, bright, frank, direct. I tell them both I think I had better be going, and Bessie walks with me out to my rented car.

  “I’ve been thinking about this crazy disagreement,” he says to me at the car. “You know, I’ve written apologies to him, to Cleo, to Chris. But frankly, I don’t think I should apologize. I tried to tone down the piece. But somehow I’ve come out the villain, the devil of the entire business. You know, Trumbo called up Jerry Zinnamon afterward, and he wound up absolving him. He said, ‘You exaggerated as all writers do. Bessie was responsible, not you. Bessie was the devil in the affair.’

  “You know, his picture was a flop. Does he think it was my fault? This is the first picture he ever directed. That he should have decided that this was what ruined his picture, that I ruined his picture, well, that really scares me.

  “The whole business, it’s so sad, really.”

  What happened was this: After years of hoping, planning, and a little scheming, Trumbo had finally decided that the only way Johnny Got His Gun would ever be made into a motion picture would be for him to raise the money and do it himself. As early as 1940, an adaptation of sorts had been done. Jimmy Cagney played Joe Bonham in an hour-long radio play based on the novel. In spite of the limitations of time and those inherent in the medium, it was very effective. The first time a movie version was seriously discussed was just after the war and a little before the House Committee on Un-American Activities let the ax fall. At that time John Garfield was interested in playing Joe, and it looked as though a production might be mounted, but the hearings put an end to the project. Trumbo set it aside during the blacklist, though not out of his mind completely. In fact, it was because of the interest of Luis Buñuel, whom he had met earlier in Mexico, that he began work in 1964 on the screenplay of Johnny himself. He did it all in that year, sandwiched between drafts of Hawaii. Once finished, he was pleased with it and so was Buñuel. Production plans were announced, but at the last moment financing fell through.

  Trumbo was left with a script on his hands in which he firmly believed and of which he was sole owner. As America sunk deeper into Vietnam and each year more men were killed and wounded, it became almost a matter of urgency to him that the movie be made, that its antiwar message be communicated to a new and potentially more responsive generation. If it were ever to be produced, this was surely the time. That, too, was what Campbell-Silver-Cosby thought when Trumbo’s old friend and admirer John Bright brought the screenplay to their attention. Bill Cosby, Roy Silver, and Bruce Campbell were the principals of an independent production company. Until then, they had only done a couple of the comedian’s television specials, but they were interested in getting into movie feature production, and it looked to them as though Johnny was the right vehicle for such an entry.

  This was in 1968. Campbell-Silver-Cosby undertook the project and began the complicated and chancy process of putting together a first production. In fact, the company dissolved in the course of these efforts, though this was due to other factors. However, Bruce Campbell, the youngest of the three, believed so in the production of Johnny that he proposed to Trumbo that they proceed on their own. Trumbo had already made it plain he would have to direct his own script; and Campbell, of course, with help from Trumbo in raising the money, would produce. On that basis, they worked at it through 1969, Campbell full-time and Trumbo giving it as much time as he could between jobs. The hardest part of all was raising the money. Johnny Got His Gun was simply not the kind of project that could be taken to a major studio for financing with any expectation of success, though Campbell did
try it out on a couple of the more venturesome. Allied Artists actually came up with an offer which, however, didn’t seem right at the time (it would have later on). In the end, of course, they did what they had expected they would have to do right from the start: they formed a private syndicate expressly for the production of the film and raised the movie’s budget of six hundred thousand dollars through relatively small contributions by private investors; in other words, they financed Johnny the way that most Broadway plays are financed.

  Casting was, in a way, less difficult. It is a measure of Trumbo’s personal standing in Hollywood that once word was out on the production, there was no problem in interesting actors in the project—even though this was to be his first effort as a director. The cast that was finally assembled for the picture—which included Jason Robards, Diane Varsi, Marsha Hunt, and Donald Sutherland, all of whom have enjoyed star billing at one time or another—must have been the most illustrious ever for so small a production. Trumbo did find himself in a predicament, however, in filling the role of Joe Bonham. It was an extraordinary part: it was not just the lead; it held the entire picture together. And while a number of actors were considered for Joe (among them, Ryan O’Neal, Jon Voight, and Robert Blake), none had quite the qualities of vulnerability and innocence that Trumbo was looking for. It seemed he would have to go to an unknown to get it, but that suited him well enough. Only a few weeks before production was to begin, when the part had been tentatively cast, a young actor was brought to Trumbo who was just out of high school and had practically no professional experience. Trumbo took a look at him and was very interested indeed. He did a videotape test and knew he had his Joe Bonham. The young actor was Timothy Bottoms, and Johnny Got His Gun was his first picture.