Golden Globe, SAG Nominee Bryan Cranston Explains How ‘Trumbo”s True Hollywood Blacklist Story Got Made

Why did this need to be a theatrical feature and not another HBO project?

Roach: First of all, I thought the scope of what he went through — the span, the epic sweep — because he goes from being the highest-paid screenwriter in the business, with the best contract: the only writer who had a contract that had no morals clause in it. We know that, because he sued and won against MGM, who fired him because of the blacklist, without thinking that they can’t fire someone for that unless they have a morals clause built in, which says, “You’re not allowed to have an ethical system which makes you controversial.” He had that taken out. He made $75,000 a year, at the time, which is an astronomical sum for a writer like him. And he was nominated for an Academy Award on “Kitty Foyle.” He had access to all the best actors for one of his scripts, and the best directors.

So you couldn’t have a guy more in his prime, more set up to just continue writing hit movie after hit movie. Suddenly he’s a traitor and an enemy of the state, forced to stop, says “hold on,” and doesn’t go to jail for his political beliefs in particular, but for saying, “You can’t ask me about my political beliefs, because it’s not constitutional.” 

He sells his house, but begs for work from people like Frank King [John Goodman], at the lowest low of the production scale. When I came out of film school, I worked for Roger Corman. It’d be like shooting B-camera on “Slumber Party Massacre.” He was begging for work as a screenwriter with people like them, they pay him very little money, but he ends up writing good stuff, wins an Academy Award. They had no idea they’d get such a great writer and also win an Academy Award for “The Brave One.”

What makes it so deeply cinematic for me is how he takes a whole gang of movie writers and helps them coordinate into a black-market enterprise — almost in a heist-movie way. They’re using different names, they have the phones all set up, they’re answering the door, they pretend to be different people. He has people accusing him of being greedy, of being a sell-out, of being a traitor to their cause because he won’t come out and openly defend his point-of-view — won’t even say if he’s in the communist party or not.

So he’s pulled in all different directions and keeps going, all the way to the point where he wins two Academy Awards, helps a lot of his friends get work, and starts writing for Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger at the same time! Plays them off of each other, to compete a bit to see whose name comes out. Preminger gets the jump on him, but Douglas does this incredibly risky and heroic thing: they fired the director who Kubrick replaced. It was a giant bomb waiting to happen if they didn’t figure it out, so he says, “I know: let’s put an ex-communist on the film, and let’s credit him.” The least-commercial choice you could make.

And he was a big-enough movie star to get away with it.

Roach: But Preminger had something similar to the morals clause thing; he had even more freedom than Kirk Douglas. He wasn’t duty-bound to follow a studio-mandated thing. He had an independent contract on “Exodus,” where he could do anything he wanted. He made the choice, but he didn’t risk nearly as much as Kirk Douglas. That’s a movie. 

It’s really different from the HBO films, too, in that those films were really about the political process. “Recount” couldn’t be more about the political process; “Game Change” is about choices one makes backstage in setting up a political thing. To me, Trumbo was just a great character. There happened to be a political thing he got caught up in, but, to me, it’s much more about a man and his family, who are trying to figure out how to survive this sudden persecution — prosecution, too — and turn it into something. So, to me, it’s an underdog story. It’s also a free-speech story, so I don’t see it as a left-right thing, the way those other films could be interpreted. To me, my favorite films are the ones with a local soul at stake, like in a classic-drama sense. 

Roach: John, great writer that he is, did research and came up with someone much more zealous and outspoken in this particular aspect, and was such a big part of the founding of the [Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals] MPA, which even started before the war, but they invited [The House Un-American Activities Committee] HUAC. This group of filmmakers, who were concerned with communist influence, created an organization and they figured out that they couldn’t do it on their own, and invited a congressional investigation. 

They wrote a letter to a congressman and said, “You better come to Hollywood. If you want to figure out how Americans are being affected by these bad ideas, come and investigate us.” So the MPA was a small, but very vocal group. I want to say it was somewhere between 75-125 people, and we figured out that Hedda had been there. John Wayne was president for two or three terms, right around this time. But she was the voice of it, in a lot of ways, and she was so flamboyant.

She was very driven and very zealous. She had a gossip column that she would sometimes spend 80% of making a political rant. She was also very active in helping form the MPA. Along with Ward Bond and Ayn Rand, she wrote the manifesto, and, within the first few years, Walt Disney, Sam Woods, a whole slew of people had decided — partly based on the labor strikes that occurred both for writers but also for set painters. They painted targets on themselves by being so pro-worker, pro-union.

There was an interesting overlap with the rabble-rousers who were helping unions at the time, who mostly became the Hollywood Ten. They subpoenaed nineteen, but the ten they actually called to the hearings almost exclusively were among those guys who either had been involved in those strikes or had been involved in a fight between the WGA and a more studio-friendly writers union; there was a big fight between those two.
Hopper got tangled up with that because she was such close friends with people like Ward Bond and Frank Brewer, the IA guy who we portray being chased around the office by Frank King (John Goodman’s character). They all decided that they, alone, in a way, understood the threat of this infiltration of Hollywood by communist subversives who would use mainstream movies to hypnotize Americans to somehow become less patriotic or more aligned with “The Communist Manifesto.”

Hedda Hopper is a great character because she’s hugely entertaining. You had the job of creating atmosphere without letting it get too heavy.

Roach: Yes. She knew how, in an almost Donald Trump way, to use theatricality, to use larger-than-life appearance — big, theatrical hats and these beautiful clothes; our wardrobe guy had a blast dressing her — but there is an absurdity and almost a campiness to her outward performance. In a way, she knew she could come across as strident, zealous, dogmatic if she didn’t have something else going on. And that’s what I love about the layers of her character: she was very shrewd in picking a kind of quirky, saucy persona that she could project right on the outside while she was cutting right at the heart of the very, very political, sharp-edged — in her case, right-wing — messaging. She, in a way, was a propagandist. She was crafty; she’d been an actress for a long time. So she knew how to make an impression, and that level of seriousness — mixed with a little of the absurdity and the larger-than-lifeness — were also true of Trumbo.

I like how John Wayne isn’t just a stock figure.

Roach: The distinction between Wayne and Hedda is that he wasn’t stupid and also had a heart. He really believed he was helping America. He really believed — as did 60% of the country — that we were already in World War III by 1950. Hedda and John Wayne were tapped into a full-on populist sentiment, and certainly fear had been whipped up to get people to turn on each other, certainly in Hollywood. But it wasn’t an extremist point of view, and Wayne felt that he and his peers were in jeopardy if they allowed themselves to get tarred with this sentiment that lefties had taken over this great American institution of movies. He was actually trying to protect the industry. She thought she was, too; she also believed, “Once a commie, always a commie.” Just two weeks before she died, she fought to not let Charlie Chaplin back in the country — to her deathbed, she was that zealous. John Wayne would go the other way and let somebody, like Eddie Robinson, off the hook if he would just give a kind of pledge of patriotism or try to rehabilitate himself. That’s the difference between the two.

Roach: We think of those protections as carved in stone — the Bill of Rights, the right to freedom of speech, the right to associate politically with whoever you want to. But aren’t they potentially more fragile than we think? Once there is a real, external threat… in this case, there was. The Soviet Union was intent on crushing America; obviously that’s for real. In the same way that, today, terrorism is for real; ISIS is for real. But to spread a bad idea like, “All Muslims are terrorists,” or, “All lefties are communists.” That’s an old chestnut that we go to over and over again. “Obama’s a socialist.”

Cranston: I saw Kirk recently — after he saw the movie. He said, “I just have one complaint.” And I’m bracing myself for Kirk. He said, “Why didn’t you get me to play Kirk Douglas?” [Audience laughs]

McNamara: I have a similar story from two years ago, when we sent him the script. He said to the producer, “I want to give the writer notes.” I’m like, “Oh, my God.” So I go to his house with the director and producers, and he says, “Which one of you is the writer?” He goes, “I love the Kirk Douglas character.” I said, “Thanks.” He said, “Why aren’t I on page one?” I said, “Well, I did my research, and in 1947 you were still on Broadway. You hadn’t come to Hollywood.” He just waved and went on to the next note.

McNamara: As any actor can relate to, he says, “This is my work. I have no one else to be.” It was one of the first scenes I wrote in the movie. When I started writing, I wrote the scenes out-of-order. That scene and the Frank King baseball bat scene were the first two I wrote. Stuhlbarg shows how far the movie can go in terms of pathos and comedy. But I had great, huge empathy for Robinson, not least of which is that I’m a huge fan. He’s a wonderful actor, and what a terrible, terrible choice he had to make. 

Roach: That character is the soul at stake in this story. Trumbo is pretty clear on who he is, and he goes to jail for it. He loses his career over it, and he takes on the whole system without really ever changing all that much. Robinson is a tragic predicament, where he really means well. He’s actually very much in favor of The Ten, he’s pro-Freedom of Speech, he’s a liberal, he helps them. He actually lent money for their legal fight, as we portray.