The indie documentary Trumbo, which opened in limited release in late June, tells the remarkable story of Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, incarcerated and blacklisted in the Red Scare of the 40s and 50s but a triumphant Oscar-winner in the end.

The screenwriter of Roman Holiday, Papillion and Spartacus, Trumbo won an Academy Award for The Brave One in 1957. The trophy went unclaimed until 1975, having officially been awarded to “Robert Rich,” one of several pseudonyms Trumbo used to scrape by in his years in the show-business wilderness. He won yet another Oscar in 1953 under the name of Ian McClellan Hunter, and didn’t receive credit for that until 1992, when the Academy decided to officially credit him in their records. The Oscar was finally presented to him posthumously, and it was accepted by his widow in May of 1993.

In many ways, Trumbo could have received a writing credit for this eponymous 2008 release too, which takes as its centerpiece the theatrical readings of his personal correspondence by a cavalcade of stars – Nathan Lane, Brian Dennehy, Kurt Russell, Donald Sutherland, David Straitharn, Liam Neeson and Joan Allen, just to name a few.

The format seems simple, but Trumbo’s path to the big screen has been every bit as convoluted as its subject’s path to the award podium.
It began in 1970, when the University of Wisconsin asked Trumbo for his personal papers while researching McCarthyism’s effect on the arts. As Dalton’s son Christopher explains, the writer happily complied.

 “Among the inducements was a tax deduction,” he said. “And [Dalton] thought that was a wonderful thing, especially since it wouldn’t require any work.”

Trumbo turned over “more paper than you ever want to read, and certainly more than you could lift,” and, as editor Helen Mansfull sifted through the mound of letters, bank statements and other documents, she began to realize that Trumbo had a unique and powerful voice. Professionally, his writing was largely serious, as in Spartacus, Papillion and his anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, but personally, he wielded a rapier-sharp wit against both the absurdity of McCarthyism and the inanity of everyday life, as in this excerpt from a letter to a stubborn phone company:

 “When we Reds come into power, we are going to shoot merchants in the following order: 1)Those who are greedy, and 2) those who are witty.  Since you fall into both categories, it will be a sad day when we finally lay our hands on you.”

And so the story seemed to end, at least until 1998, when Christopher Trumbo turned to the letters as a practical solution for an apparently intractable problem, not unlike his father’s resort to writing pseudonymously.  

As the younger Trumbo explains it, his wife needed to quickly raise “several hundred thousand dollars” for an art work at the University of Southern California by Jenny Holzer memorializing the battle of artists against Red Scare censorship.

“She said if we do something theatrical, maybe we’ll get a lot of people into the theater and charge them exorbitant amounts of money, so I said sure,” said Christopher, who by that point already had several screenwriting credits to his name.

“My problem was that you need actors with names who are attractive to people in order to get them into the theater,” Christopher continued. “I didn’t see how I could get actors to memorize a play for a one-night performance. So I gravitated to the idea of using the letters.”

The show that developed, starring Ed Asner and Steve Martin in its maiden performance, was, like Trumbo the movie, structurally simple. At one end stood Asner at a lectern, narrating and playing the role of Christopher himself. At the other end stood Martin, as Dalton Trumbo, theatrically reading the words written nearly a half-century earlier. In the center was a table for two supporting actors to recreate scenes necessary to hold it altogether.

The play was a success (Holzer’s Blacklist can still be seen on USC’s campus), and, by 2003, an even more stripped-down version, without the two supporting roles, opened Off-Broadway, with Nathan Lane as Dalton Trumbo and Peter Askin directing. The New Yorker called the production “moving and evocative.”

The film now in theaters is essentially that play, fresh off a national tour starring Brian Dennehy, and with some archival footage and interviews for support. Lane, Russell, Sutherland, et. al. take turns as Dalton Trumbo. Christopher Trumbo plays himself.

Askin is still in the director’s chair, now surrounded by his fleet of thespians, but Dalton Trumbo remains the star, buoyed by his honesty, wit and brashness. Just as censorship ultimately failed to silence his pen, so his words have been given life again and, according to Christopher, it’s a fitting tribute to a man who was always fully “alive.”

“So many of us aren’t,” he said. “It’s like we spend our lives sleepwalking and suddenly we say, how come my life passed by and I didn’t really do more, or do anything? Not true of him – his life was full.”