Hollywood Mythmaking



  
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo died in 1976, but Hollywood still hasn’t gotten over its high regard for him. He is the subject of a new movie, Trumbo, that lionizes him as a passionate supporter of the First Amendment and free speech, a true patriot. But that defines Trumbo only in terms congenial to the political culture of the Hollywood left.

Trumbo was, in fact, a member of the Communist party during the years when it was under the tight control of the Soviet Union. He followed the party line faithfully. He was pro-Stalin, even during the 22 months of the Hitler-Stalin pact. He looked favorably on North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung, notably after Kim’s invasion of South Korea.

But you won’t pick up any of this from the movie. Instead, Trumbo is presented as a brave and principled member of the Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters who refused to say if they were members of the Communist party when asked at a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947. They went to jail for contempt of Congress—Trumbo for 10 months—and were blacklisted from writing screenplays for Hollywood studios.

This made Trumbo a hero to the leftists who dominate the movie industry. And when he broke the blacklist in 1960 with his name in the credits for the screenplay in Spartacus, he became a deity. He’d earlier written screenplays under pen names, even winning an Oscar as “Robert Rich.”

We now know the Hollywood Ten were all Communists—capital “C”—and disciplined ones at that. When the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed in 1939, Trumbo instantly switched from attacking the Nazis to demonizing Hitler’s enemies, chiefly Franklin Roosevelt and the British. When Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, the Soviet line changed, and Trumbo changed with it, overnight.

Anyone who doubts Trumbo’s allegiance to the Soviet Union should tap into Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters, Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler. Its author, Allan Ryskind, devoted more than a decade to investigating the Hollywood Ten and the battle in Hollywood in the 1940s between Communists and anti-Communists, which the Reds came close to winning. Morrie Ryskind, the screenwriter and father of Allan, was a leading anti-Communist. The book is impressively researched. Every assertion is documented.

Ryskind (the son) refers to the Hollywood Ten as the “Stalinist Ten.” But could these now-sainted dissenters really have been Stalin groupies? Ryskind isn’t alone on this point. In their book The Inquisition in Hollywood, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund agree. “Communist screenwriters defended the Stalinist regime .  .  . with an infuriating self-righteousness, superiority, and selective memory which eventually alienated all but the staunchest fellow travelers, Ceplair and Englund write. And they did so “unflinchingly, uncritically, inflexibly—leaving themselves open to the justifiable suspicion that they not only approved of everything they were defending but would themselves act in the same way if they were in the same position.”

Only one of the Hollywood Ten has recanted. It wasn’t Trumbo. It was Edward Dmytryk, a respected director, who repudiated the Communist party. He was “shocked” by the HUAC testimony of John Howard Lawson, the Communist boss in Hollywood, and Trumbo. “It was clear to those who listened that the unfriendly witnesses were behaving as Communists could be expected to behave,” Dmytryk wrote in a memoir.

Trumbo also behaved that way as editor of the Screen Writer, the publication of the Screen Writers Guild, from 1945 to 1947. It “championed Moscow’s war aims, hailed Red screenwriters and their movies celebrating Stalin, lavished praise on Hollywood’s Red guilds and unions and launched scathing attacks against the anti-Communist community,” Ryskind says. The Screen Writer also notified readers of lectures from “a Marxist or Soviet point of view.”

Part of Ryskind’s research involved a trip to Madison, Wisconsin, where the Wisconsin Historical Society houses the papers of screenwriters. He found fresh evidence of Trumbo’s total commitment to the Soviet Union and its allies. “Nothing so underscores his love for Leninism, Stalinism, and Communism in general as an unpublished movie script discovered in his papers,” Ryskind writes in Hollywood Traitors.

The script was titled An American Story. The heroine is a mother about to lose her children in a custody case because of her political views. She wants to take them to North Korea, which she believes is in “a fight for independence, just as we had to fight for our own independence in 1776.” The script was “Soviet Communist ideology in its rawest form,” Ryskind writes. The movie was never made.

Among Trumbo’s papers, Ryskind found a poem entitled “Korean Christmas” that blames America and Christianity for killing Korean children:

Have we hurt you, little boy? Ah … we have We’ve hurt you terribly We’ve killed you Hear, then, little corpse … it had to be Poor consolation, yet it had to be The Christian ethic was at stake And western culture and the American way And so, in the midst of pure and holy strife We had to take your little eastern life.

 All that Ryskind reveals in his groundbreaking book about Trumbo and the Hollywood Ten is lost on most of Hollywood today. The blacklist is reviled as if it still existed, though it vanished more than a half-century ago. It blinds many in the film industry to what motivated Trumbo and his fellow screenwriters. It was their adherence to communism and loyalty to the Soviet Union. Jack Valenti, when he was Hollywood’s lobbyist in Washington, said a few flirted with communism. But real Communists in Hollywood? No. 

In 1997, a gala called “Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist” was held at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills. Its sponsors were listed as the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Directors Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America, West. About 1,000 people attended, including Carl Reiner, Kevin Spacey, Billy Crystal, and John Lithgow. Trumbo’s son Christopher, who produced a documentary in 2007 and a play about his father, was a speaker.

Having been blacklisted, Trumbo is treated as a hero, a liberal in a hurry. In Trumbo, he’s courageous and witty. His anti-Communist enemies are villains. Bryan Cranston, the actor who plays him, says Trumbo was jailed for being a “socialist.” Only in Hollywood could someone believe that.

Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard .