“Trumbo,” Peter Askin’s poignant, mind-stirring documentary about the defiantly prolific screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten blacklisted during the McCarthy era, based on a play written by his son Christopher (from letters Trumbo wrote during that tumultuous period) is essential viewing for all film critics—any professional writer really—recently affected by the economic recession. To call Trumbo tenacious, awe-inspiring, a courageous hero doesn’t do the man justice. How many writers working today would accept poverty and prison, shame and exile to stand by their convictions—and do it for ten long years? How many writers in 2008 would have prefaced that with nearly another decade stoically working as a night bread wrapper for an L.A. bakery while studying at USC, repossessing motorcycles, reviewing films for a trade magazine—and churning out six novels and eighty-eight short stories (all of which would be rejected for publication)? To all those laid off writers I say, if you can’t write without a paycheck being involved then you’ve no business considering yourself in the same profession as Mr. Trumbo (thus you probably didn’t deserve that paycheck in the first place. Ah, isn’t karma sweet?
To read the rest of my review visit The House Next Door.
(And for an equally enlightening take on the other side, read - "Trumbo” talking head - Victor Navasky’s Naming Names. It never hurts to be reminded that guys like Kazan and Budd Schulberg had enormous, personal artistic axes to grind with the Communist Party and its leaders in Hollywood.)
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