Unless one is a history buff, more likely than not, the blacklist tends to be a foreign event to people. When the blacklist is brought up and talked about, they’ll express their surprise, wondering how the blacklist would ever be allowed happen. These people tend to be blissfully unaware that their favorite older movies could be affected by the blacklist in some way, whether that be the people who appear in front of the camera or even those who are not seen working behind the scenes. One popular person who found themself blacklisted and even in prison for a brief period of time was Dalton Trumbo, a famous screenwriter in the mid 1900’s.
Trumbo began writing around 1925 while he was working to support his family as a bread wrapper at night. While working there he had written and submitted “eighty-eight short stories and six novels” but they were all rejected. While working at the bakery in Los Angeles, he worked other miscellaneous jobs such as repossessing motorcycles. After working at the bakery for nearly 10 years, in 1933 he decided to risk it all and quit the bakery to become a full time writer in hopes it would support his family. After being published by several magazines, including Vanity Fair and The Saturday Evening Post, his first book was published in 1934 titled Eclipse.
In 1935 was when his career with Warner Brothers started, and he pumped out all different kinds of screenplays like wildfire. 1939 was when Johnny Got His Gun was published and was awarded the most original book of the year, and within a few years became known “Hollywood’s most valued screenwriters.” Considering all this, prison was most likely the absolute last place he would find himself to be in, but within a short ten years, prison was exactly where he ended up. In 1947, Trumbo, as well as many others, found himself on trial in front of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee for being involved in some way with the communist party and his communist influences and the subliminal messages in his movies. Trumbo was one of the first ten to testify in front of HUAC and had declined to state if he had ever been apart of the Communist party. These ten are now known as the Hollywood Ten, and within a month of the trials closing, all ten were blacklisted, never being allowed to work in Hollywood studios.
While being blacklisted had prevented many Hollywood writers and actors from finding work, being blacklisted didn’t stop Trumbo from working under the radar. While he did find himself in prison in 1950 for roughly a year, he went right back to writing more after being released. He had briefly moved to Mexico City with his wife and kids, and there he had found himself working for the King Brothers, a studio creating inexpensive B movies. Because Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted, they were able to hire him for almost nothing, which was a big change for one of Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriters, earning nearly $80,000 a year. They had him rewriting screenplays they had acquired as well as creating screenplays of his own. While
One of the ways he had found a way to write screenplays and still get paid for it was through fronting. He had written Roman Holiday and had handed it to Ian McLellan Hunter, who working for Hollywood and wasn’t blacklisted at the time, though he was blacklisted later on. Hunter had then passed the screenplay off as his own work and would then split his earnings with Trumbo. Roman Holiday had then won an Oscar for best screenplay, so Hunter had to accept the Oscar for Trumbo even though he wasn’t the one to write it. While Trumbo wouldn’t get credit fo his work until much later, long after the blacklist was over, fronting was one of the many ways for him to earn money and support his family while still being blacklisted.
Eventually Trumbo decided to turn to creating false names for himself. After writing The Brave One, he had used the name “Robert Rich” to get the screenplay out there. It had again won an Oscar for Best Story in 1957, but “Robert Rich” was not there to take his award, and the only think known about him was that his father was a producer, and because of that, rumors had spread that maybe Trumbo had written The Brave One instead of “Robert Rich”.