CHAPTER TWELVE
IN THE MATERIAL WORLD
So Trumbo, at last, was no longer a ghost. But others who had been blacklisted, bleak specters who had also been haunting the movie black market in Hollywood or who had perhaps drifted off to New York or to Europe, found the arduous process of materialization eased only somewhat for them by his success. He showed it could be done—and how. To win back their names, their identities, and their incomes, they would have to make themselves valuable to producers and directors, as Trumbo had done—so valuable that credit would be offered as a consequence of having proven their worth on the market. They would, in other words, have to work their way back. This they did, one by one, emerging from the shadows, blinking in the sunlight, suddenly, substantially there for the world to see.
Not that it was ever easy for those who struggled back. Not that the process went smoothly or predictably. For instance, the same year that Preminger announced Trumbo as the author of the Exodus screenplay, Frank Sinatra stepped forth boldly and declared that he had chosen Albert Maltz to write the screenplay for his forthcoming production of The Execution of Private Slovik. This caused an even greater furor than the one that followed Preminger’s explosive report. The American Legion threatened—and in the end, Sinatra gave in. As it happened, his association with the Kennedy family may well have been the factor that put an end to these plans. He was known as a friend of the senator, who was by then the Democratic candidate for president. It was feared by those associated with the Kennedy campaign that Sinatra’s action might appear too “radical” and would reflect badly on the candidate. Therefore, a few weeks after his original announcement, Sinatra withdrew, saying: “In view of the reaction of my family, my friends and the American public, I have instructed my attorneys to make a settlement with Mr. Maltz and to inform him that he will not write the screenplay for The Execution of Private Slovik. I had thought that the major consideration was whether or not the resulting script would be in the best interests of the United States.… But the American public has indicated it feels the morality of hiring Albert Maltz is the more crucial matter and I will have to accept this majority opinion.” There was, of course, no “majority opinion.” Sinatra simply gave in to the personal pressures that were brought to bear on him. Years later, Maltz said of the episode and of Sinatra’s conduct in it, “I hold him in high regard. I think he was very sincere in all this. Something just happened that he couldn’t withstand. It all had the unfortunate effect of making me a hotter potato than ever.” Maltz did not get his name back on the screen until 1967 with Two Mules for Sister Sara.
In spite of the Oscars he had won during his very active blacklist career, Michael Wilson was denied credit in North America for Lawrence of Arabia (playwright Robert Bolt’s name was the only one that appeared on the screen) when it was released in 1962. Everywhere else in the world, however, he was acknowledged as co-author of the screenplay. Even Kirk Douglas withheld Trumbo’s name from Town Without Pity when it was released in 1961—evidently because he felt the writer’s name had been identified with too many of his films, and he didn’t wish to seem dependent upon him. As late as 1966, screenwriter Lester Cole’s name was deleted from the credits for Born Free. That was the year after Ring Lardner, Jr., made his comeback with The Cincinnati Kid. Writers as able and well established as Abraham Polonsky and Waldo Salt did not see their names on screen until 1967 (Madigan) and 1969 (Midnight Cowboy), respectively.
These are just a few examples—enough, I hope, to show there was neither pattern nor consistency to the lifting of the blacklist; that it became a matter between individual employer and employee, one usually with economic rather than political or moral implications. In general, the writers made it back before the directors (Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey, John Berry), and the directors made it back before the actors (Lionel Stander, Howard Da Silva, Zero Mostel, Jeff Corey). Some, as noted earlier, never made it back at all. And still others—in many ways, these were the saddest cases of all—almost made it back from the blacklist without ever quite recovering from the mess it had made of their lives.
Adrian Scott was one of these. At the time he was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he was a producer at RKO, the brightest, hottest young producer on the lot with hits like Murder, My Sweet and Crossfire to his credit. He was married to a star, actress Anne Shirley, and he had the respect of his coworkers because he had paid his dues as a writer (The Parson of Panamint, Mr. Lucky) before becoming a producer. He had, in short, everything going for him, every reason to cooperate with the Committee, to tell them whatever they wanted to know and get on with his career. But that he would not do. He kept faith with the rest, followed the game plan, and pleaded the First Amendment. And like the rest he went to jail.
He was one of the most decent men I have ever met. There was nothing sanctimonious about him, nothing of the professional victim. His chin was up. He talked of his plans for the future. He was still going to show them what he could do.
A young man of thirty-four at the time of the hearings, he was himself almost movie-star handsome then, resembling the French actor Jean Marais a little in some of the photographs of the Ten. But the man who presented himself when we met for lunch in Beverly Hills was an aged caricature of that younger self. He was fifty-eight, and he looked older. His face was heavily lined, his skin somewhat yellowed, and his tall, angular frame barely filled out the dungarees and chambray shirt he wore that day. He seemed, well, sort of unhealthy. He was.
Scott asked, as we sat down, if I didn’t think that people were a little tired of this subject of the blacklist by now—indicating, to me at least, that he was tired of talking about it. When I told him I didn’t think so, he allowed that I was probably right because I was the third person in as many months who had come around to talk. “I’m amazed,” he said, “at the knowledge of the period you people show and your interest in it.”
He carefully banged out the corncob pipe he had been puffing on and dug out the dottle at the bottom of the bowl—all done neatly into the ashtray. “It’s me, I guess,” he resumed. “I’d just as soon blot the whole experience from my memory. It complicated my life terribly. We assumed the blacklist wouldn’t last permanently, and frankly we didn’t think it would last as long as it did. That it ended at all was due to the work of Dalton Trumbo. You have to give him credit—the Robert Rich episode followed by his credits for Exodus and Spartacus, well, it was just too much for them. The blacklist had been broken by one man. That showed it could be broken by all.”
“When did it end for you?” I asked him.
“The blacklist? That’s a little hard to say. In 1961, we went to England, and I began to do some work there, but I didn’t begin functioning openly even there until 1963. You see, a little while after the hearings in 1947, I went to Europe with an eye toward doing some work there then—things were starting to open up there in pictures at the time. But I went on some kind of temporary five-month passport, which was not to be renewed without a decision by the State Department. I was in the process of setting up a picture when they refused to renew. I had friends in England and France who said I was foolish to go back then, because I knew by this time I was going back to stand trial for contempt of Congress, you see. They said they’d hide me out and then fix it up with the government. I was tempted. It could have been arranged. But nine of us couldn’t go to court with the tenth on the lam. That would have made it impossible for the rest who were left.
“So by the time I could leave the country, which was 1958, I was interested in going abroad because of the possibilities I had seen in Europe right after the war. But I didn’t get the opportunity to go until 1961 when I was hired as executive assistant to the head of M-G-M’s English operation. I can’t account for it. He just hired me. Nothing was said about my past or what I had been doing the last dozen years or so. He knew, of course, but he just hired me, and told Metro later. I was kept more or less under wraps, though, for the first two years. And so, from 1961 to 1968, I was in England, and there was no problem whatever with the blacklist. Sometime during that period, I guess, you could say that was when the blacklist ended for me.”
“And what had you been doing before?” I asked. “During that last dozen years or so?”
“During the fifties, you mean? What saved me was TV. It was a matter of feeding the monster. I worked under the table on television from 1954 to 1961—totally as a writer. To be a producer, of course, there has to be a body to appear at conferences and so on. And my body just wasn’t acceptable.”
Adrian Scott made contact with a young lady named Joan LaCour who wanted to write for television. She had no experience, but she did have ideas, energy, and a name to offer. They formed a partnership, these two. In the beginning, she merely fronted for him, proposing his ideas, delivering material he had written, and sitting in on rewrite conferences with story editors and producers. The credits and 50 percent of the money they earned went to her. But as time went on, she began to take a more active part in the enterprise, and it became something more in the nature of a true collaboration—ideas tossed back and forth, lines written and rewritten between them. The split of the take remained the same, though, for the two eventually married. Then came England and what were very good years for them. But Adrian Scott wanted to return. There were a couple of projects he wanted to mount, personal projects, things he believed in. With the new climate in Hollywood—it was 1968, after all—he thought he might be able to function once again as a writer-producer.
“I left Metro in England,” he continued, “and came back here and free-lanced for a while—television again. But what I was really trying to do was get back into producing feature films. I almost pulled it off. I got up to the starting line a number of times with projects, only to see them fall apart. It happens all the time. It had nothing to do with being on the blacklist. Finally, I did get one through, and I think it turned out pretty well—The Great Man’s Whiskers. It was a two-hour television children’s feature that I did at Universal. It was from a play I had done—oh, let’s see, years before, even before the blacklist. Did you happen to see that?”
“About Lincoln before he became president?”
Scott nodded.
“Yes, I did. I liked it. Good production and a good script.”
He looked at me a moment and must have decided I really meant it, for he smiled then, and went on: “I’ve got another script about my prison experiences—not really autobiographical but about prison and prison reform. I was afraid that because it’s basically a polemic, people would say it’s not entertainment. But it’s funny in a kind of Rabelaisian way and pretty human, and I’ve gotten a pretty good reception around town with it. I’d love to produce it, as well, and if I do a good job on it, I have a reasonable expectation of being sought after. That’s the way this town operates. If you have something they want, then that’s it. You’re back on top. And I really think this prison picture is going to be made.”
“And in the meantime?”
He shrugged. “Television. Ironside, The Bold Ones, what have you.”
“So much of this just happened to you,” I said to him. “You couldn’t choose not to be blacklisted. You couldn’t choose not to be called up before the Committee. In the limited area that choice was open to you, would you have done things any differently from the way you did them?”
“I think you’re asking me in a gentle, roundabout sort of way if I might give names if I had it to do over again.”
“Maybe that’s what I’m asking.”
“Well, if that’s the question, then the answer is no. I would still not cooperate—even if I were hauled before the Committee tomorrow. Because I sincerely believe that if there is an American fascism, then the House Un-American Activities Committee is an agency of it.”
He paused, sighed, and then continued: “But let’s see. Would I do anything differently? Well, I made a number of speeches in the heat of the moment back then that today seem oversimplistic to me in what they said. If I had it to do over again, I would write them better and make fewer of them. And also, I would take the Fifth Amendment and not the First. We knew we were taking a chance, and it seemed worth it at the time, but now I see it was just so much lost time, going to jail. It did no good. The only good thing that happened to me there was that Dalton Trumbo and I became good friends. We were in Ashland together, and that was where we really got to know one another. He’s been a friend, a real one, ever since.”
We talked on through that lunch. In the course of it, he revealed that his second marriage (to Anne Shirley) had broken up as a result of his refusal to cooperate with the Committee, and he also told me that on and off afterward, his health “hadn’t been good.” As for the blacklist, his final word on that was that there had been complications to it—“social complications, financial complications, every kind you can think of—that just couldn’t be imagined, hardly even described. But why try?” he added. “It’s over now, anyway, I guess.”
As we finished, standing in the lobby of the place, saying our goodbyes, I felt called upon to say something to him, anything, in commiseration. Finally, I put out my hand and said, “Mr. Scott, I don’t know what to say. I think you’ve had more than your fair share of trouble heaped on you in your lifetime. I just want you to know I’m sorry.”
He nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I guess I have. I appreciate your saying so.” He left then, and that was the last I saw of him. He died a year and some months later of cancer.
There were other deaths. The years following Trumbo’s return from the blacklist, which were by and large happy ones for him and his family, were punctuated at intervals by incidents of death and episodes of dying. Hugo Butler, Trumbo’s junior by a decade, was the first to go. It was a grim, sad story, marked by a sudden personality change which Jean Butler took at first for a nervous breakdown. He separated from his family and went for a while to live with the Trumbos while he got psychiatric help, which was really no help at all, for it was discovered at UCLA Hospital five weeks before he died in 1968 that his problem was physiological—Alzheimer’s disease. “Trumbo helped pay the money to get treatment for him,” Jean Butler told me. “Then, for a while, he and Ingo Preminger and Bob Aldrich were kicking in each month to support the kids and me. This went on until we could sell the big house we had with a swimming pool and all. For a while there we were living in poverty—but we had a swimming pool. Now I’ve been getting some writing jobs myself, and we’re getting back on our feet.”
One of the Hollywood Ten, director Herbert Biberman, who was not perhaps a friend but a comrade of Trumbo’s and a friendly adversary, died in 1971. Cancer again. Biberman had been the driving force in the making of the all-blacklist feature, Salt of the Earth. After repeated attempts to get back into films as a director during the sixties, he succeeded at last in 1969 when he got a chance to direct the Theatre Guild’s feature, Slaves. Neither critically successful, nor especially successful with the black audiences at which it was aimed, the picture put him back more or less where he had started, scrambling to put together another feature. That was where he was when he died—another, like Adrian Scott, who almost made it back from the blacklist.
Earl Felton, completely apolitical and one of Trumbo’s oldest and best friends, committed suicide in 1972. It had been Felton, of course, who picked out Cleo for Trumbo and introduced them. And he had also been among the first to offer to front for Trumbo on the black market. An unhappy man, crippled and physically deformed from birth, he sustained himself for years only with his wit and energy and his passion for friendship. It was only his energy that failed him, but when it did, he gave in at last and shot himself. Afterward, his friends—a disparate group that included Trumbo, Richard Fleischer, Edward Anhalt, and Stanley Kramer—gathered to scatter his ashes out on the Pacific and toast his memory at a nearby bar.
Maud Trumbo died. Dalton’s mother was eighty-three. She was weak and had been in generally failing health for years. Whatever difficulties had arisen between mother and son through the years had long before been resolved. They were friends. Trumbo had a big birthday party for her on her eightieth birthday. The Trumbos, all of them, remembered it as a grand family occasion, full of fun and laughter at the old stories. A family reunion. Maud came in an ambulance, had a high old time with her children and grandchildren, and when the time came to leave, she didn’t want to go home. She kept sticking her head out of the back door of the ambulance to add one more comment and poke one more bit of fun. They liked to remember that as the way she left them—and not the long period in the hospital room.
Things were quite different for Dalton Trumbo when he resumed his career as a screenwriter under his own name. There was a hiatus, a kind of enforced vacation undertaken at the orders of a doctor. Trumbo had, during the last few years, worked himself to a state of exhaustion. And so, in the spring of 1960, he and Cleo accepted Otto Preminger’s invitation and, crossing the Atlantic for the first time, visited the Exodus location on Cyprus. Trumbo’s status there was strictly defined by Preminger his first day on the set. As the crew was setting up to film a scene, Peter Lawford spied the Trumbos sitting off to one side and looking on. He came over and quietly and earnestly began to discuss possible changes in his lines. Preminger, who is absolutely locked into a script once he begins production, observed this narrowly from some distance away and marked out in that drill sergeant’s voice that Lawford was not to discuss changes of any sort with Mr. Trumbo. “He is here as a guest and not as a writer,” said Preminger. Lawford’s reply was a meek, “Yes, Otto,” and that ended it there.
The movie business itself changed drastically during the course of the sixties. The preceding decade had seen the movies at war with television, a war the industry had no real hope of winning. Movie theaters were closing down all over the country; audiences huddled in twos and threes, hidden away in their living rooms, giggling at I Love Lucy, thrilling to Have Gun, Will Travel, nodding in sober agreement at the homilies by Ronald Reagan tacked onto the end of Death Valley Days. This mass audience was, by and large, lost to motion pictures during the fifties. But it took the men who run the industry many years into the sixties, and many lost millions in movie extravaganzas, before this lesson was learned. (And they may not have learned it yet!) Because Trumbo had been propelled into prominence during the breaking of the blacklist, he was then the best-known screenwriter in Hollywood, probably the only one at all familiar to people outside the industry. And because the two pictures with which he did finally come out into the open—Exodus and Spartacus—were enormously successful, this modest celebrity was instantly translated into stardom, or the closest thing to it a screenwriter could claim. This made him, according to the reasoning popular at the time, the ideal writer for the sort of lavish, big-budget productions that were made in the increasingly desperate effort to attract people away from their television sets and into the theaters. When a producer could say, “I’ve signed Dalton Trumbo to do the script,” he had a much better chance of putting together the sort of package of stars and director that he would need to attract the multimillion-dollar financing which became the rule during the period.
As a result, Trumbo wrote only a handful of films* in the years following the blacklist but made a great deal more money. His fee increased with the projected budget of the production—standard practice in the movie industry. In many ways, his situation (working much less for very much more money) was quite ideal, but there were signs that he himself was not entirely pleased with it. The clearest of them was that following a run of such projects he plunged into his own small-budget, independently financed production of Johnny Got His Gun. Except for Lonely Are the Brave (more of that one later), which was begun during the blacklist though finished afterward and released in 1962, things went wrong with all those big movies of his in production.
Of all the costly mistakes made by producers and studio executives during this period, the most disastrously expensive was Cleopatra. It very nearly left Twentieth Century-Fox bankrupt. The production became an almost legendary example of all that can go wrong with a film when its stars—in this case, of course, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton—exercise near-complete control over it. As it happened, Trumbo became involved in a Taylor-Burton film just a couple of years later that failed (though less spectacularly) for the same reason. He had taken an assignment writing a screenplay for Dino De Laurentiis, The Dark Angel. He and Cleo lived in Rome while he was working on the script, and when he had finished, he let it out that he would be willing to take on a short assignment—a “polish”—so they could stay on there a little longer. A producer, Martin Ransohoff, who had heard the story of Trumbo’s collaboration-by-mail with Michael Wilson during the blacklist, asked Trumbo if the two of them might like to try the same thing on a script for Taylor and Burton. With Wilson in Paris, and facing the happy prospect of staying on a while longer in Rome himself, Trumbo took a look at the money Ransohoff and M-G-M were offering (which was considerable) and agreed.
It was no “polish” job, though. The two of them plied their trade as professionals, following the same routine that had worked for them earlier on the blacklist westerns: Michael Wilson did the story and sent it off to Trumbo, who then did the screenplay. What they came up with was a script that pleased everyone concerned, not least the Burtons—or so they said. In production, however, improvisations of every sort altered the tone, style, and sense of what they had written. Their little picture about a beach girl who lives in a hut on Big Sur was transformed into one about a rather mysterious matronly woman (Mrs. Burton didn’t feel like losing the weight that looking twenty required) who lives in a glorious beach house, changes costume twenty-two times in the course of the picture, and talks as though she were living hand-to-mouth. Richard Burton himself either couldn’t remember the lines or chose not to. In any case, he ad-libbed freely, often changing the content of scenes. It was a mess. Audiences laughed when it was previewed. Critics attacked it unmercifully. The Sandpiper, released in 1965, sank without a trace.
With Hawaii, there were other problems. This one was, at least at its inception, the biggest production with which Trumbo had ever been involved. The screen rights to the James Michener novel had been purchased for six hundred thousand dollars. One screenwriter, Daniel Taradash, had been brought in already on the project and had done what seemed to Trumbo quite a creditable job of adaptation. Still, the Mirisch brothers, who were producing the picture, wanted something different. And Fred Zinnemann, who was then set to direct it, brought in Trumbo. Fundamentally, the problem with Hawaii was similar to the one Exodus had offered earlier: that of adapting a novel which was just too big to be made into a movie. Where Trumbo and Preminger had earlier solved it by taking the climactic episode and making the picture from that story alone, this time Trumbo and Zinnemann handled it by preparing to make not one but two movies from the novel. Director and screenwriter worked fairly closely on the scripts—Hawaii I and Hawaii II, as they were designated—for about a year. But United Artists, which was financing the project, got cold feet, for the two-picture approach would have cost fifteen million dollars; they said it would have to be done in one big movie. At that point, Fred Zinnemann withdrew from the project and, after a delay, George Roy Hill came on board. When he did, he had his own 350-page script of Hawaii under his arm. Everyone—Hill included—knew it was far too long, and so Trumbo was brought back in to work with him on it. The two approached one another warily but ended up working closely together, ultimately in complete agreement and as very good friends. When they finished, they both knew that the script United Artists had agreed to go with was still too long, but it held together, and they were pleased with it. But after a portion of the picture had already been shot, United Artists tallied up recent losses on other films and sent word to George Roy Hill that the script simply had to be cut in half. In other words, they were going back, in mid-production, to the Hawaii I and Hawaii II concept—though doing it on the cheap. Trumbo came out to Hawaii himself; he and Hill worked feverishly during production trying to save at least one picture from such radical surgery. By and large, they succeeded in doing that. Their Hawaii, which starred Max von Sydow, Julie Andrews, and Richard Harris, does have style and a certain epic sweep. But dramatically, there is a kind of sustained grayness to the picture that would have been relieved if the second story (about the Chinese in the islands) had not been ripped out so rudely and at so late a date. A few years later another picture was made from this material, but neither Trumbo nor George Roy Hill had anything directly to do with it. It came out so badly that it was barely even let out by United Artists.
Trumbo’s commitment to The Fixer was more profound than to the other two. Trumbo, director John Frankenheimer, and producer Edward Lewis each deferred one-third of their salary just to get the picture made. None of them was likely to get back that third, for it was the kind of movie that would not turn a profit. Part of the difficulty in making a successful film of The Fixer was inherent in the novel itself. It is not, certainly, that it is inferior material; on the contrary, it is arguably “too good” for the movies. But that won’t do, either, for finally the literary qualities of a book offer no direct index to its suitability for film. Some of the trashiest books make the best films, and sometimes (though less often) the best books make the worst films. But what the author Bernard Malamud managed to accomplish with the density and texture of his prose was to provide insulation—or more, a certain sense and dignity—to the squalid, brutal story of injustice told in The Fixer.
Some novels (and for very different reasons) simply defy translation to the screen. The Fixer may have been one of these; Johnny Got His Gun, as we shall see, may have been another. To have reproduced the overt action of the Malamud novel would have been to make a movie that was unendurably grim and brutal: an audience tends to back off, to withhold empathy, when things get too rough. Trumbo knew all this and carefully constructed his screenplay so that the psychological and physical brutality to the defenseless Yakov is relieved by episodes—little victories—in which the fixer fashions a device for keeping time, or fantasizes an assassination of the czar. He added a couple of others, too, not involving Yakov directly, in which the scene is shifted from his cell, and the audience is given at least temporary liberation from the claustrophobic restriction of the jail setting. These sequences are all important to the dramatic pacing of the script, and that is why they are there—ultimately to keep a hold on the audience. They were in the final draft of the script, and they were shot by director John Frankenheimer. But these were precisely the bits that were edited when the film was trimmed down to final cut. Not only that, but the beating administered to Yakov in the film far exceeded what was called for in the script. In fact, it was so graphically real and severe that in the filming of the sequence Alan Bates’s well-padded double sustained two broken ribs at the hands—or rather, fists—of the guards who were, of course, doing their best to pull their punches for the camera. In other words, John Frankenheimer chose to emphasize precisely those elements in the film that would alienate the audience, while cutting those that might have attracted and held it. This had predictable results: the audience was alienated, and so were the critics. The Fixer failed with both.
It may seem that I am doing all I can here to shift blame from Trumbo for the relative failure of these three pictures. But all I am doing, really, is underlining the collaborative nature of film. With all due respect to the auteur theory (which asserts that the director is the “author” of the motion picture), the very essence of filmmaking is such that it requires the participation of a whole company of artists and craftsmen, and even of businessmen, each of whom makes his separate contribution, and any one of whom may tip the balance in the direction of success or failure for any given production. This is both the strength and weakness of the process. To what extent can even an auteur-director such as Vincente Minnelli be given credit or blame for a picture like The Sandpiper? Or, for that matter, just how culpable are Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson? In neither case can they be said to have had much responsibility for the final product—not when the two stars of the picture exercised the degree of control over it that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton did over that one. And wasn’t the true auteur of Hawaii the head bookkeeper at United Artists, who decided in mid-production to eliminate an entire subplot from the script? Wasn’t it he who gave Hawaii its distinctive quality—not the director, George Roy Hill?
Trumbo would be the last to dispute the primacy of the director on any given production, or to deny him his place as the focal figure in any aesthetic consideration of film. “There must be an absolute supremacy of the director,” said Trumbo. “No one, in any way, must try to undermine his authority. That means [the writer] must be very careful in talking to an actor, because actors always want things changed.” Trumbo worked comfortably in the old studio setup in which writer and director were usually kept quite apart, and he worked just as comfortably under the practice, which encouraged a much closer working relationship between writer and director. He was actually available and on the set during the production of four of his eleven post-blacklist films.
One of these, of course, was Papillon, in which he was not often on the set but was constantly available at a nearby hotel working only pages ahead of the shooting schedule. “On that one, for example,” said Trumbo, “Frank Schaffner and Steve McQueen and I were talking about a knife fight that occurs in the hold of the boat at night. Well, I don’t bother to describe those bloody fights in the script, or even pretend to. When you get to a fight you simply say what must happen, and then you go on. But Steve had a lot of ideas about it. He had a great deal of power in this picture—he was getting paid two million dollars, and that’s all the power you need.… We were talking about it there in the hotel, and I said, ‘What happens is up to Frank. He’ll figure it out when you get there and when you’re doing it.’
“And McQueen said to me, ‘You be there, too, because you can call me out [tell me what to do].’
“And I just said, ‘No, I won’t. I’m not going to come.’ Frank was sitting right there as we were talking. I said, ‘I would never call an actor out. I never would talk to an actor without the director being with me and wanting me to talk to the actor.’
“And Steve just said, ‘Well, I see you’re being a very nice guy, and I suppose I don’t know the pecking order.’
“I said, ‘It’s not the pecking order. It’s a professional obligation.’ And it truly is. A writer on the set in this way is a temptation, an open invitation to change, and unless he is highly ethical he can undermine the director, and he can harm the picture.”
One factor that gave Trumbo an edge during his days writing on the black market was that he came about as close as a screenwriter can to guaranteeing his work. When he took a job, it was with the understanding that he would make all changes necessary, in order to bring the script to the point where it was ready for production. And unlike many screenwriters of the day, Trumbo wrote then—and continued to write—shooting scripts, with fairly detailed camera instructions together with dialogue and action. The point is, he continued to be a participating screenwriter, one who wrote explicitly for production and implicitly subscribed to the dictum that there are no great scripts, there are only great films.
“In a sense,” said Trumbo, “the writer is the ship’s architect, and the director is the captain. It may have been a greater achievement to have designed some particular ship—still, if that ship is not sailed right, it is going to sink. So I’ve never felt any form of rivalry, or had any trouble with directors.”
Which is, in a way, quite remarkable, for a desire for recognition grew in later years among screenwriters. Some simply envied the power of directors and wished to become directors themselves; when and if they did, their problem would be solved. For others, the matter was more complex and not so easily dealt with. Unlike Trumbo, they felt that writers were not given sufficient credit for their contribution to the finished film, and that they should be given a much stronger voice in production. What they sought was a relationship between writer and director much nearer to that of the dramatist and the director of the play. (The standard Dramatists Guild contract stipulates that no change can be made in a playwright’s work without his consent; screenwriters, of course, enjoy no such control over their work.) In support of this insurrection there even developed a kind of counter-auteur theory of cinema, which argued that in many cases the true author of the film is not the director, but the author of the screenplay.*
One difficulty with such theorizing is that most movies are made from some previous source: a play, a novel, or a narrative of some sort. “The industry is based on adaptation,” said Edward Lewis, who worked with Trumbo on a number of pictures. “Originals are written by two kinds of writers—those who are starting out and those who can take time off, who may not be in demand.” Neither described Trumbo’s situation. And as a result, all but one of the movies he did after coming off the blacklist were adaptations from a book source of some sort. That single exception, Executive Action, was an extensive rewrite of an original screenplay by Mark Lane and Donald Freed. The best of all his post-blacklist movies, in fact, was an adaptation, which according to Trumbo required very little in the way of alteration to bring it to the screen: “Lonely Are the Brave—now there’s a picture in which I got more credit than the director, David Miller. It was unfair, in my view, and I wrote a letter to Newsweek, pointing out the contribution of the director, who was not even mentioned in the review. For God’s sake, he did the picture! And what about the young professor, Edward Abbey, who wrote the novel? The Brave Cowboy, which was his title, was a very good novel, and I followed it very closely because it required very little.”
It did, of course, require something. Compare the novel, The Brave Cowboy, with the film, Lonely Are the Brave, and you find in the latter a general shift of emphasis to the final part of the story, the pursuit of the “brave cowboy” by a modern sheriff’s posse, complete with helicopter and airplane. The anarchist message of the novel has been muted slightly—not because it is anarchist but because it is a message. Since this is a narrative translated into a drama, the dialogue must bear a greater burden of exposition, and because it is a drama in a visual medium, there should be less of it. As a result, very few lines in Lonely Are the Brave have been taken word for word from Brave Cowboy. But the characters remain the same; the construction of the movie is essentially that of the novel; and it says implicitly the same thing. Everything that Trumbo did in adapting it enhanced those qualities of the novel that had made it right for film in the first place.
Could Trumbo then be put forward as the “author” of Lonely Are the Brave? Obviously, he doesn’t think so. He could, of course, stake a much stronger claim on, say, Spartacus and Exodus, two adaptations of much inferior novels with which he took far greater liberties; both screenplays are arguably better, even as literary works, than the originals from which they are taken. But even here his contribution is something less than a piece of pure creation. That he came to do them at all was more or less the luck of the draw, as are most assignments for most screenwriters (the very term “assignment”—a job to be done—connotes this). And once he took them on, his artistic choices were severely limited by any number of factors, the original material not least among them. Any adaptation, then, no matter how “creative,” is likely to be only ambiguously the work of the writer whose name appears in big letters up on the screen.
And what about originals? He wrote a number of them during the blacklist, when he was obliged to keep busy every moment of every working day—even when he was writing on his own and between assignments. He found himself then almost in the position of a beginner, having to establish himself anew with each script he did and prove himself worthy of the cut rates at which he was being paid. He did that, again and again, more often than not in the beginning with originals. They were good, workman-like jobs, most of them genre films—thrillers like Gun Crazy, The Prowler, and He Ran All the Way—in which he proved he had not forgotten the lessons he had learned working on the B units of Warners, Columbia, and RKO. His Academy Award film, The Brave One, was simply a genre picture of another sort, the kind they call a Disney picture, the story of a boy and his bull, the same kind of child-and-beast story that had been done before and has been done often since. In writing all these, Trumbo was working within fairly strict limitations: the rules of genre (what has worked before becomes a “rule” all too quickly in the movie business); the exigencies of budget (working for independents like the King brothers, who made their movies on a shoestring, he was limited on the size of his cast, the number of sets, and so on); and on a couple of occasions by the story requirements of a producer (when Sam Spiegel said he wanted something on the order of Double Indemnity and had a story outline in hand, as he did for The Prowler, then that’s what he got). Screenwriting of this kind, done to very specific requirements, is the equivalent of genre-writing in fiction: a mystery must begin with a murder and end with a solution. John D. MacDonald acquitted himself admirably writing paperback thrillers, yet nobody, I think, accused him of committing art.
The most truly original of all Trumbo’s blacklist originals was Roman Holiday. One of the few comedies he did, it is certainly the most charming and distinctive of Trumbo’s films, so universal in its fairy-tale appeal that it was at least as popular in Soviet Russia and Japan as in the West. Who can resist the story of the princess who plays hookey? What writer would not be proud to let his reputation ride on it? Yet he did it in the darkest days of the blacklist, with Ian McLellan Hunter fronting for him, so that it is a film—one of the few during the period—that Trumbo is not even rumored to have written. And quite frankly, the question of authorship, in this case, is a bit fuzzy, for though Trumbo wrote it as an original screenplay, Hunter came on at Paramount and did a lot of rewriting on it before he himself was blacklisted. Then John Dighton worked on it after that, bringing it to the shape it was in when William Wyler shot it. With such a history, if Roman Holiday were to have been submitted to the Guild for arbitration, it would probably have come back as one of those monstrosities with three names on the screen for writing credit. To what extent is it Trumbo’s? or Hunter’s? or Dighton’s? Weren’t most of the changes in it made to satisfy the director, William Wyler?*
Trumbo was fond of saying, “Movies are an art that is a business, and a business that is an art.” But Jean Cocteau once said, even more persuasively, “Films will not be art until the materials to make them are as cheap as paper and pencil.” The screenwriter’s materials are as cheap as paper and pencil—in fact, that’s more or less what they are. However, what a screenwriter brings forth is not a film, it is a screenplay. And for that screenplay to become a movie, the writer’s personal vision will, almost certainly must, be compromised. “No script can be shot as written,” said Trumbo. “It cannot be done. Not necessarily major changes, but a piece of business, at least, or a scene, that may be the director’s, or the producer’s, or the actor’s.” But something anyway. Even to that limited extent, then, the screenwriter is denied authorship—as he will be, too, in production, on the set, where his lines are interpreted, where the shots he has called are set up, and the entire visual character of the film is established. And finally, even in the editing process, the screenplay will be further altered, sometimes in very subtle ways—perhaps a word or a line trimmed, or a reaction shot inserted, all of which may change the meaning of an entire scene. But the end result of this long and complicated process is the finished film, and unless the screenwriter controls the process, he is not the author of the film.
It is not for nothing that the question of authorship has been thrashed and re-thrashed by the auteurists and counter-auteurists. For only the author of the film is—or can be—its artist. All the rest of his collaborators, no matter how important their individual contributions, can be considered only craftsmen. Trumbo’s success as a screenwriter may be attributed directly to his grasp of this fundamental principle. He was satisfied with his role as a collaborator. Not that he was docile or could be intimidated, or that he was unwilling to argue fiercely on points that he felt worth arguing. But finally, he was a film craftsman—not an author and not a film artist—willing to take a craftsman’s pride in his work, in getting the job done. Nobody knew the rules better than he, and therefore nobody played the game as long or as successfully.
The two of them never really got along. In a way, you couldn’t expect them to. Trumbo was irascible, extravagant, almost obsessive in his likes and dislikes. And Alvah Bessie was much the same: “I have a genius for alienating people like Trumbo has,” he said—and he was right. But he also attracted them similarly. A tall, gaunt character, in his seventies when I interviewed him, Bessie lent the Hollywood Ten, a singularly conservative-looking and well-tailored band of rebels, a certain dash of left-wing adventurism. At the time of the hearings, he looked tough and ready, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who sported a Clark Gable mustache and was better known as a writer than most of the rest, except for Trumbo and Albert Maltz. He was a novelist. He had then published three books: Men in Battle, his Spanish Civil War story; and two proletarian novels, Bread and a Stone and Dwell in the Wilderness. However, with only two years in at Warner Bros., he was barely established as a screenwriter when his subpoena came and was in bad financial shape even then. Except for one season of success (his notorious Marilyn Monroe novel, The Symbol, made some money for him), the many years after that were one long scramble for survival.
“Sam Ornitz and I were the paupers of the group,” says Bessie. “I had been blacklisted, in effect, a year and a half earlier, during the strike at Warners. When they threw pickets around the studio, the Writers Guild shop called a meeting to determine whether or not to go through the picket lines. I urged them to support the strike, and I guess I was pretty persuasive because it was on that basis they stayed away. But you know how Hollywood is. When the strike was over, I was out at Warners. I hadn’t worked in all that time when I got my subpoena with the rest.”
We are talking in Alvah Bessie’s office. It is attached to his modest suburban home in Marin County, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. The house is all he has to show for The Symbol, which ABC did as a Movie of the Week after scheduling, canceling, and equivocating nervously for a season as to just whether or not it was too “hot” for television. Bessie himself is a likable enough man, polite and fairly frank in these circumstances, though as a hard-bitten veteran of the Marxist religious wars, he must have been (as Trumbo must also have been) rather ruthless and tough in earlier days. There is some slight tension as we talk. I did not like his novel, The Symbol, and said so in a review of the book. He remembers, and though he makes no direct reference to it, I know he remembers, and so there is that between us.
Alvah Bessie did his year for contempt of Congress in the federal prison at Texarkana, Texas. When he was released, his prospects for employment on the movie black market were far dimmer than Trumbo’s, even at the lower rates that then prevailed. There was never a lot of work to go around, and a screenwriter who was as unproven as Bessie simply hadn’t much chance even with independents like the King brothers. The future looked pretty bleak when a phone call came from Harry Bridges in San Francisco. It happened Bessie had met the radical boss of the West Coast Longshoremen at a party at Trumbo’s house in Beverly Hills toward the end of the war. “Bridges used to hang around Hollywood a lot back then to chase women,” says Bessie. The two had seen one another on a couple of occasions afterward, but the phone call, when it came, was a complete surprise. Bridges asked him if he would like to come up to San Francisco to work for the local there. The money wasn’t much, but it was a job, and Bessie was glad to get it. He worked for the Longshoremen’s Union for five years, doing odd-job writing for Bridges and helping put out the local’s weekly paper. “But then the International told Harry he had to contract his force, and I was the one who was elected to go,” says Bessie. “Harry told me he could do my job with one finger up his ass. So I was out.
“That same week I bounced into a job at the hungry i in San Francisco. I knew guys who played there—the Gateway Singers, who became the Limelighters, and Professor Irwin Corey—and they heard I was out of a job. So Irwin Corey took me in to Enrico Banducci, who is the hungry i, and I was hired at eighty dollars a week to run the lights. It took me five minutes to learn the job, and I stayed there twelve years. It would have been an ideal job for a writer if it had just paid enough because it gave me the whole afternoon for me to do my own work.”
It was while he was there that he wrote Inquisition in Eden, his autobiographical account of the Hollywood Ten ordeal, and The Symbol. And all the while he was at the hungry i he kept after Trumbo to do what he could to get him some movie work, on or off the black market, for credit or straight cash. He would write chiding letters, sometimes almost desperate ones, asking for help in getting an assignment—rewrites, television, anything. And Trumbo kept writing back telling him that “you have to be close to the tit to get the milk”; that if Bessie were really serious about breaking back into movies, he would have to move down to Los Angeles. Although Alvah Bessie chose to remain in the San Francisco area, he did eventually manage to get some movie work. His son was then in Hollywood, working in production, and through him he got a shot at his first post-blacklist script, a thriller that was never produced. However, he did the adaptation of his novel, The Symbol, for ABC, and had hopes when we met for a couple of original screenplays he had done.
His relationship with Trumbo, an unequal and uneasy one, had led to bad feelings on both sides. “Well,” says Bessie, “since you ask me what I think of Trumbo, I will say this: I think he has faults as great as mine but a talent much greater—or he had one. He’s a poor boy who made it but never forgot where he came from. He’s the only man I know of all of us who is still with the same wife he started with. All of us, including me, have had three wives. And just look at Cleo! What a woman! She looks the same today as she did in 1943 when I first met her. I told Trumbo that, and I told him, too, that he looked like something that had come out from under a rock—his eating and drinking habits are just ridiculous, and he takes absolutely no exercise.”
“Well, all right,” I say to Bessie, “but what’s this trouble between you? This ‘dead Bavarian’ business?”
“Oh God, that! Really, it’s a tempest in a teapot. I’ve always admired the man enormously. I don’t see why that business should define our relationship. I hope it doesn’t.”
“What happened?” I ask. But before he can answer, his wife, Sylviane, arrives. It is late in the afternoon, and I realize I may have overstayed my leave. We have kibitzed and digressed far more than what I have written here would indicate, discussing his books, his projects, his plans for the future. His latest book, Spain Again, has him excited and he wants to talk about that. It’s worth listening whenever Alvah Bessie wants to talk. His wife is a charming woman: colonial French, bright, frank, direct. I tell them both I think I had better be going, and Bessie walks with me out to my rented car.
“I’ve been thinking about this crazy disagreement,” he says to me at the car. “You know, I’ve written apologies to him, to Cleo, to Chris. But frankly, I don’t think I should apologize. I tried to tone down the piece. But somehow I’ve come out the villain, the devil of the entire business. You know, Trumbo called up Jerry Zinnamon afterward, and he wound up absolving him. He said, ‘You exaggerated as all writers do. Bessie was responsible, not you. Bessie was the devil in the affair.’
“You know, his picture was a flop. Does he think it was my fault? This is the first picture he ever directed. That he should have decided that this was what ruined his picture, that I ruined his picture, well, that really scares me.
“The whole business, it’s so sad, really.”
What happened was this: After years of hoping, planning, and a little scheming, Trumbo had finally decided that the only way Johnny Got His Gun would ever be made into a motion picture would be for him to raise the money and do it himself. As early as 1940, an adaptation of sorts had been done. Jimmy Cagney played Joe Bonham in an hour-long radio play based on the novel. In spite of the limitations of time and those inherent in the medium, it was very effective. The first time a movie version was seriously discussed was just after the war and a little before the House Committee on Un-American Activities let the ax fall. At that time John Garfield was interested in playing Joe, and it looked as though a production might be mounted, but the hearings put an end to the project. Trumbo set it aside during the blacklist, though not out of his mind completely. In fact, it was because of the interest of Luis Buñuel, whom he had met earlier in Mexico, that he began work in 1964 on the screenplay of Johnny himself. He did it all in that year, sandwiched between drafts of Hawaii. Once finished, he was pleased with it and so was Buñuel. Production plans were announced, but at the last moment financing fell through.
Trumbo was left with a script on his hands in which he firmly believed and of which he was sole owner. As America sunk deeper into Vietnam and each year more men were killed and wounded, it became almost a matter of urgency to him that the movie be made, that its antiwar message be communicated to a new and potentially more responsive generation. If it were ever to be produced, this was surely the time. That, too, was what Campbell-Silver-Cosby thought when Trumbo’s old friend and admirer John Bright brought the screenplay to their attention. Bill Cosby, Roy Silver, and Bruce Campbell were the principals of an independent production company. Until then, they had only done a couple of the comedian’s television specials, but they were interested in getting into movie feature production, and it looked to them as though Johnny was the right vehicle for such an entry.
This was in 1968. Campbell-Silver-Cosby undertook the project and began the complicated and chancy process of putting together a first production. In fact, the company dissolved in the course of these efforts, though this was due to other factors. However, Bruce Campbell, the youngest of the three, believed so in the production of Johnny that he proposed to Trumbo that they proceed on their own. Trumbo had already made it plain he would have to direct his own script; and Campbell, of course, with help from Trumbo in raising the money, would produce. On that basis, they worked at it through 1969, Campbell full-time and Trumbo giving it as much time as he could between jobs. The hardest part of all was raising the money. Johnny Got His Gun was simply not the kind of project that could be taken to a major studio for financing with any expectation of success, though Campbell did try it out on a couple of the more venturesome. Allied Artists actually came up with an offer which, however, didn’t seem right at the time (it would have later on). In the end, of course, they did what they had expected they would have to do right from the start: they formed a private syndicate expressly for the production of the film and raised the movie’s budget of six hundred thousand dollars through relatively small contributions by private investors; in other words, they financed Johnny the way that most Broadway plays are financed.
Casting was, in a way, less difficult. It is a measure of Trumbo’s personal standing in Hollywood that once word was out on the production, there was no problem in interesting actors in the project—even though this was to be his first effort as a director. The cast that was finally assembled for the picture—which included Jason Robards, Diane Varsi, Marsha Hunt, and Donald Sutherland, all of whom have enjoyed star billing at one time or another—must have been the most illustrious ever for so small a production. Trumbo did find himself in a predicament, however, in filling the role of Joe Bonham. It was an extraordinary part: it was not just the lead; it held the entire picture together. And while a number of actors were considered for Joe (among them, Ryan O’Neal, Jon Voight, and Robert Blake), none had quite the qualities of vulnerability and innocence that Trumbo was looking for. It seemed he would have to go to an unknown to get it, but that suited him well enough. Only a few weeks before production was to begin, when the part had been tentatively cast, a young actor was brought to Trumbo who was just out of high school and had practically no professional experience. Trumbo took a look at him and was very interested indeed. He did a videotape test and knew he had his Joe Bonham. The young actor was Timothy Bottoms, and Johnny Got His Gun was his first picture.
They got the money for the picture together in March 1970. The thirteen-week shooting schedule began on July 2, 1970, and concluded in September. Alvah Bessie, Jerry Zinnamon, and “the dead Bavarian” figured in that schedule somewhere around the middle. Zinnamon was a writer whom Bessie had known in San Francisco. He had subsequently moved down to Los Angeles to try to break into movies as a screenwriter. He had some experience as an actor, though not much, and when Johnny Got His Gun was to begin production he was encouraged to try for a part in the picture by Bessie, who put in a word for him. There wasn’t much of a part for Zinnamon, but since he was a friend of Alvah’s, they decided he could play the dead Bavarian, that very prominent corpse who is festooned festering on the barbed wire just in front of Joe Bonham’s trench. The image of the dead Bavarian recurs through the novel, and though it was naturally not a speaking part, it was at least prominent in the picture. So this was Jerry Zinnamon’s role. It required three days of shooting. He came, he did his bit, and he left. Nothing at all out of the ordinary happened during that time. Zinnamon came, went through costume and makeup, did an uncomfortable three days on the wire due to the intense August heat in which the picture was being shot—and then he went home. It was what happened afterward that made Trumbo furious, and with some justification. Zinnamon sent a long letter (seven typewritten pages) to Alvah Bessie in which he described in humorous, though not terribly accurate, detail what had happened during those three days. He embroidered, he exaggerated, he even told a few funny lies, probably without malicious intent. But when Bessie received it, he thought it was all so funny that he sent it on to Esquire. The magazine accepted it for publication, and it appeared in the December 1970 issue under the title “Letter from a Dead Bavarian.” Trumbo did not take kindly to the joke, nor especially did he care for the untruths in the piece. He was then engaged in a life-or-death struggle to get his picture edited and in the hands of a distributor, and he was simply unwilling to laugh it all off. He wrote an angry letter to Bessie and talked to Zinnamon on the telephone, with the result that Zinnamon wrote a letter to Don Erickson admitting that many of the statements in the piece were “blatantly false,” especially those about disharmony on the set. Too late, of course. The damage had been done—though Trumbo may well have overestimated the extent of it.
Bessie wrote his apologies to Trumbo and to Cleo and the younger Trumbos in two separate letters, insisting that he had not sent it to Esquire expecting that it would be published—or if so, that it would be published as it stood (in fact, some changes were made, though obviously not enough to prevent offense). Esquire had earlier that year published a humorously acrimonious exchange of letters between Trumbo and Steve Allen, which they titled “The Happy Jack Fish Hatchery Papers,” and in another issue that year they published a selection of the blacklist letters which appeared in Trumbo’s collection Additional Dialogue. Bessie declared that he had expected the magazine to honor “its friendship” with Trumbo by showing him the letter before publishing it. In any case, he was truly sorry and on a number of occasions afterward he sought to make public amends for his part in the affair.
It might all have been forgotten if things had gone a little better for Johnny. During post-production on the film, money began running low. With nowhere else to go for it, Trumbo dug into his own bank account and put up the twenty-five thousand dollars they needed to finish dubbing and looping. What followed was, as he later called it, “a series of small calamities.” Twentieth Century-Fox had offered the syndicate of Johnny’s backers eight hundred thousand dollars for all distribution rights, but the company insisted on total control on the release of the film. Trumbo opposed the sale to Fox. Why? “I knew that this was not going to be an immensely popular picture. An honest truck driver is not going to take his wife and children and spend twelve to fifteen dollars to see Johnny. It isn’t what they want to see. It did have an audience out there for it, however, and I thought that if we let it go for an eight hundred thousand advance, then that was all we would ever see from the picture. I’d seen it happen again and again. The picture would have to start out well, or there would be nothing done with it by a big major distributor.” Trumbo argued persuasively that it would be wise to pass up the offer and hold out for a distributor that had experience handling pictures for special audiences. And in fact Donald Rugoff, whose Cinema 5 was doing extremely well just then with Z, was quite interested in Johnny Got His Gun.
“We took the film to Cannes,” said Trumbo. “Cannes is a place where you sell.” But by the time he arrived there with Johnny Got His Gun, he had so ruffled his investors by taking the stand he did against Fox that they withheld from him authorization to deal for the syndicate there on his own; he would have to convey offers to them and have them voted on before accepting or rejecting. (Rugoff had backed out between votes during the second or third go-round with the syndicate—that was how they lost him.) And so Trumbo was going to Cannes to show his film and attract offers that he was not free to accept. None of this would have mattered much, except that Johnny turned out to be a sensation of the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. It not only received the Prix Spécial du Jury, it also brought Trumbo the International Critics Award. He and Johnny were on top of the world that night.
But what good did it do them? “When you win, as we did at Cannes, you should open in Paris within two weeks. And you should sell, sell, sell right then because that is the hottest you’ll ever be. [The investors] didn’t get around to selling the European rights until after our American opening, which was not good.”
No, the American opening was not good. The important reviews from the younger reviewers who might have saved the film all ran against it. To what extent were they reviewing the film and to what extent were they reviewing Trumbo? A curious reaction set in against him, especially among these same younger critics who seemed so determined not to be intimidated by his reputation that they approached every picture with which his name was associated with a sort of hypercritical, show-me attitude, so much so that the gang seemed almost to be lying in wait for Johnny, the only picture ever to bear his auteur signature.* And the job they did on it was something more than criticism and something less than a mugging.
But never mind that. What about the movie itself? Trumbo had bet everything on Johnny Got His Gun; not just money (though he was to lose plenty on the picture), but more than that, much more. For one thing, when a man undertakes to direct his first feature at the age of sixty-five, he is putting physical demands on himself that perhaps he should not. And in insisting that he could and should direct it, Trumbo was laying his reputation as a screenwriter on the line. It was not just any film he was directing, but his film, an adaptation of his own novel. It added up to this: there could be no further appeal; Trumbo was asking, demanding, to be judged, telling everybody the buck stops here.
He was perhaps too close to the entire project to see that the fundamental difficulty with Johnny as a film lay with Johnny as a book. The action of the novel takes place inside the head of Joe Bonham. He is not only a prisoner of his hospital room, he is a prisoner of his senses, a man forced to dwell completely within his memories, fantasies, and hallucinations. In his novel, Trumbo managed to sustain this brilliantly with the strength of his prose and by using devices borrowed from screenwriting (but because they have been once borrowed does not mean, simply, that they can be returned). Since film is a visual medium, Trumbo had to establish two realities: the objective one, in which Joe is situated in the hospital room with the nurse coming and going; but more important and difficult, the subjective reality that tells us in images what is going on inside his head. And what is more, Trumbo had to move from one to the other without disorienting his audience and thus losing it. This was a problem, all right, and by and large Trumbo solved it by technical means. The hospital sequences are in black and white, and the rest is in color. Moving from sequence to sequence and scene to scene, action flows rather slowly because Trumbo made much heavier use of dissolves and fade-outs than is usual today—there are no jump cuts in Johnny. In fact, as Trumbo pointed out to me, “there is not a swift action in the whole movie.” (This is not necessarily a good thing.) He also “opened up” the action quite successfully, mixing Joe’s memories and fantasies and giving a free-ranging sense of movement to the entire film.
Trumbo achieved some remarkable things in Johnny Got His Gun. There are moments of extreme tenderness that translate beautifully from the novel: a number between Joe and his father which Timothy Bottoms and Jason Robards realize perfectly; and scenes with Kareen (played by Kathy Fields) that work perhaps a little better than in the book. Joe’s Morse code breakthrough to the outside world is, just as it should be, tremendously exciting and moving. Let me underline that: whatever its flaws, Johnny is an immensely moving film. And its flaws are of the kind—bizarre imagery, occasional didacticism, and an almost relentless emotional intensity—that were forced upon the film by the novel. In fact, to do the novel at all as a film was to run the risk of alienating the audience, or a large part of it, through emotional overload—simply giving more than most people can take. Trumbo ran that risk, knowing perfectly well that he would lose some of the audience in the bargain (“the honest truck driver” and his family); yet the film never had a chance to find the audience for which it was intended.
In any case, it failed commercially. The North American distributor on which at last they settled, Cinemation, was probably the wrong one for it. Johnny actually did better in other countries—in Japan and France, for example, where it played successfully for weeks and weeks—than it did in America. “You really can’t blame anyone for it,” said Trumbo, “except that the investors should have understood these things a little better when they went into the film. When you make an investment, you make a gamble.”
Trumbo had gambled. He bet his time—a year and a half of it—on the film. During that period, he drew a salary of ten thousand dollars and nothing more: “The result of all those months and months of no income is worse than no income. It becomes debt. The whole thing was quite a disaster for me financially.”
Trumbo leased his share in the picture at a fraction of what he himself had invested in cash. Late in 1971, he called up George Litto, his agent, who had succeeded Ingo Preminger when the latter retired.
“You know I’m not used to calling agents, George,” Trumbo said to him.
“I know that,” said Litto.
“But I’ll tell you, I’m really busted. All the money I’ve got in the world is in my art collection. Can you get me a television show to write?”
“Dalton, if you do that, you’ll never live it down.”
“Well, maybe you’re right. How about lending me some money then? That’s what agents are for.”
George Litto did lend him some money. He also sent some business his way. In 1972, Trumbo wrote Executive Action for Edward Lewis, which David Miller directed the following year. Litto brought him The Osterman Weekend, which Trumbo adapted from the novel by Robert Ludlum. And then, toward the end of the year, he came to him with a deal for good money which required Trumbo to do a running rewrite of a script right on location. The movie, of course, was Papillon.