USA TODAY International Edition
‘ TRUMBO’ SUMMONS ‘ UN- AMERICAN’ GHOSTS
Hollywood’s ordeal before Congress plays out in the life of one of its top screenwriters
WASHINGTON Even when empty, the Cannon Caucus Room, where men and women argued and fought for their lives and their livelihoods in front of the House Un- American Activities Committee decades ago, is filled with an unmistakable sense of history.
And after playing screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who defended his own beliefs in the committee’s hearings in Washington, D. C., in 1947, Trumbo star Bryan Cranston takes in all of it when he walks through the room’s grand doors. “Man,” he says. “You can feel the ghosts, can’t you?”
Trumbo ( in select theaters now and going nationwide later this month) chronicles much of the irascible scribe’s life as he went from being one of Hollywood’s top storytellers to getting hauled in front of the committee for his communist leanings — with the blacklisted writer going to prison after being convicted for contempt of Congress.
Walking around the Caucus Room, Cranston can’t help but stand on the central podium and state that infamous query Trumbo and the rest of the Hollywood Ten faced: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
Trumbo’s answer to that in the film: “Many questions can be answered yes or no, only by a moron or a slave.”
The scene where Trumbo, cigarette in hand, is being interrogated by the committee is one of Cranston’s favorites, and because footage exists of the real- life figure’s testimony, the actor was able to see how he handled himself in the thick of it.
In fact, he was as vicious with his answers as the committee was with its questioning.
When Trumbo doesn’t budge on giving up info on his affiliation, committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas ( James DuMont), a representative from New Jersey, barks, “Are you refusing to answer?” Trumbo replies, “Mr. Chairman, I shall refuse to answer none of your questions.”
“He did that on purpose. He wanted to tie this up,” Cranston says. “He wanted to have the audience — the witnesses, the spectators — to laugh and put a mirror up to the committee and show the ridiculousness of it.”
Even faced with jail time after his conviction, a reporter asks Trumbo, “Are you in contempt of Congress?” and he calmly says in cantankerous fashion, “Well, I have total contempt of this Congress.”
That was just Trumbo being Trumbo, says director Jay Roach. “He was a debater in high school and an orator, and he had an oldschool tendency to perform his arguments and his ideas like someone on a stage.”
And in the movie, he says, “Bryan really loved fully embodying that tendency of Trumbo and trying to channel that kind of zeal and passion and charisma.”
It was a serious situation the real Trumbo “handled with wit and humor,” Cranston adds, “and it’s emblematic of our movie.”