By Photo: Trumbo_and_Cleo_1947_HUAC_hearings.png: Unknown derivative w, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Dalton Trumbo was born in 1905 in Montrose, Colorado, and grew up in Grand Junction, where he worked as a cub reporter for the local newspaper while in high school. His family moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s, and after working in a bakery and writing on the side, he became a screenwriter.
He published the antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun in 1939, and he was among the best-paid writers in Hollywood by the 1940s.
The blacklist
In 1947, Trumbo was one of ten screenwriters and directors called before the House Un-American Activities Committee who refused to answer questions about Communist Party membership. The Hollywood Ten were convicted of contempt of Congress, and Trumbo served 11 months in federal prison in 1950-51.
The studios blacklisted him. He kept writing under pseudonyms and through other writers acting as fronts. Roman Holiday won the Oscar for best story in 1954 under Ian McLellan Hunter’s name, and The Brave One won in 1957 under the name Robert Rich. The academy later corrected the credits.
Breaking through
In 1960, Kirk Douglas and director Otto Preminger openly credited Trumbo on Spartacus and Exodus, which helped break the blacklist.
Trumbo died in 1976. In 2007, Grand Junction installed a statue of him writing in a bathtub, his favorite place to work, outside the Avalon Theatre downtown. A 2015 film starring Bryan Cranston brought his story to a new audience.
