In November a new movie will be released about the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. The author will be played by the “Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston, and among his famous co-stars are Helen Mirren, John Goodman, and the comedian Louis C. K.
What probably won’t be presented, even though Trumbo himself acknowledged it, is that he and his Communist Party Screenwriters Guild confederates blacklisted anti-communists before they themselves were blacklisted. In this way they prevented the making of a motion picture of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.
Trumbo had also “named names.” Prior to the McCarthy hearings, he had contacted the FBI to inform on all those who wrote to him protesting his declaration of support for U.S. military action in response to the Nazi invasion of the USSR. Later, of course, when Congress asked Trumbo about his involvement in clandestine work on behalf of a foreign power, he ostentatiously refused to testify and fled the country.
That tale will doubtless not be provided to the movie’s audience. But it’s part of a larger, mostly forgotten story of what really happened during the blacklist period and what inspired it. And this elevation of Trumbo and others, like Lillian Hellman, isn’t significant simply as an act of deception and misrepresentation about those harmed by the blacklist and the misdeeds of the Communist Party. A further matter is less often noted: it serves to help submerge the accomplishments of writers whose work fails to fall
