Trumbo

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, Sept. 5, 2003
One-to-One Words of a Blacklistee
By BRUCE WEBER

Even beyond the sonorous trochees that make it stick in the mind like a 
musical phrase, Dalton Trumbo is a memorable name in Hollywood. You can 
still see it on the screen a lot. Trumbo, who died in 1976, was a 
prolific screenwriter whose 50 or so film credits included "Thirty 
Seconds Over Tokyo," "Lonely Are the Brave," "Spartacus," "Exodus," 
"Papillon," "The Fixer," "The Sandpiper," "Hawaii" and "Johnny Got His 
Gun," which he adapted and directed from his own antiwar novel. And of 
course he was a leading member of the Hollywood 10, a group of writers, 
producers and directors who, after appearing before the House 
Un-American Activities Committee in Washington in 1947, were branded as 
Communist sympathizers and blacklisted by the studios.

These are among the celebrated highlights of Trumbo's résumé. He wasn't 
known for his letters until now, but in a new theater piece cobbled from 
them by his son, Christopher, the case is made that he was something of 
an epistolary genius. The show, called simply "Trumbo," opened Off 
Broadway at the Westside Theater last night with Nathan Lane in the 
title role. (He and his co-star, Gordon MacDonald, will be in it through 
Sept. 21; the cast will then revolve through the open-ended run.) And 
though "Trumbo" is less a full-fledged play than an enhanced reading 
(both Mr. Lane and Mr. MacDonald, who plays Christopher and functions as 
a narrator, are holding their scripts), the text, especially of the 
letters themselves, is a joy to hear read.

Written on subjects as diverse as financial hardship, personal 
integrity, fatherhood and masturbation, to recipients ranging from his 
wife and son to a cowardly former friend to the mother of a young man 
who had just died to another blacklisted writer, the letters are 
thrilling, uneconomical torrents of words, alternately grandiloquent, 
ferocious, withering, sentimental, thunderously overwrought and always 
tailored, often hilariously, to their intended readership of one.

To the headmistress of the school where his young daughter, Mitzi, was 
ostracized and ridiculed because of her father's reputation, he wrote: 
"This slow murder of the mind and heart and spirit of a young child is 
the proud outcome of those patriotic meetings held by a few parents, 
under the sponsorship of the P.T.A. and the Bluebirds. It is a living 
test of the high principles of both organizations — principles noble in 
word, ignoble and savage in application. The principles are what they 
say: Mitzi is what they do. I should like you to watch how decently and 
bravely our daughter tries to suppress her bewilderment at her first 
encounter with barbarism parading as American virtue. Barbarism which 
began at your school among adult persons."

To the treasurer of the screenwriters' guild during the blacklist he 
wrote: "I have received your letter warning that I am now in jeopardy of 
being placed in bad standing for nonpayment of dues. I thought it rather 
loud and more than ordinarily witless, but to deny you these qualities 
would be to silence you altogether; and that, for constitutional reasons 
alone, I should not like to see happen."

To the president of a company who quoted him a price for installing a 
baby-monitoring intercom, he wrote, "Your letter has arrived and been 
put to the only sensible use I could think of."

As rendered by Mr. Lane with the punch of his muted-trumpet voice, such 
verbal pyrotechnics seem to give off actual sparks. And among other 
things, the show makes you lament the invention of e-mail. But that 
doesn't make "Trumbo" dramatically satisfying. For one thing, there's 
little or no action on the stage, and little or no interaction between 
the two actors. Mr. MacDonald, who gives Christopher the wistful air of 
a proud son at a memorial service, spends most of the time seated on one 
side of the stage or another, engaging the audience rather than Mr. Lane.

For his part, Mr. Lane, dressed in a navy suit with wide lapels and 
elegant chalk-stripe, spends the entire play seated behind a writing 
desk. And though, with his agile and remarkably angled eyebrows 
squeezing his wide face into masks of caricature, he is certainly 
capable of expressing both comic extravagance and fierce sincerity from 
the waist up, he still seems rather hamstrung.

Of course, this may simply be the solution the director, Peter Askin, 
came up with to accommodate his actors' need to have the scripts in 
front of them, but it's a static solution. He has added a few projected 
film clips (and a terrific audio clip of an indignant Humphrey Bogart) 
from the days of the blacklist, and they're welcome. Would there were a 
few more, in fact. You know you're visually hungry in the theater when 
you start noticing the lighting, and though Jeff Croiter's work is quite 
handsome (sunlight streaming into the office as if through blinds is a 
nice touch), it doesn't exactly stand in for lively exchanges between 
people.

And the portrait of Trumbo drawn by the show feels incomplete. That's 
understandable; it's drawn of a father by an admiring son, after all. 
But it is evidently true that as a man, Trumbo was famously difficult: 
acerbic, unforgiving and complicated. In a eulogy for his friend, Ring 
Lardner Jr. called him fascinating and abrasive and then added a list of 
equally contradictory adjectives to describe him: "wise, funny, greedy, 
generous, vain, biting, solicitous, ruthless, tender-hearted, devious, 
contentious, superbly rational, altruistic, prophetic, shortsighted and 
indefatigable."

But Lardner's list is about the only acknowledgment in the show that its 
subject might have had actual shortcomings and not just bearable 
eccentricities. Over the course of the show's 90 minutes, we never get 
to the parts of Trumbo that would qualify as, say, devious, 
shortsighted, greedy or ruthless. His characteristically pug defiance of 
authority is presented as wholly heroic, exemplified by his continuing 
to write during the blacklist under pseudonyms or with other writers 
fronting for him, and is rewarded in true Hollywood fashion, with quiet 
triumph and the humiliation of his enemies. In 1956, a screenplay Trumbo 
wrote for "The Brave One" won an Oscar, though the award was presented 
to Jesse Lasky Jr., the vice president of the screenwriters' guild, 
accepting on behalf of someone named Robert Rich, who received the 
screen credit though he didn't exist.

It all makes a movie script of a life story, doesn't it? But perhaps 
that's one difference between the screen and the stage. In the movies 
you can be satisfied with inspiration. The theater makes you hungry for 
the whole truth, no matter how eloquent one side of the story is.


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