By Shanee Edwards
Many people, not just screenwriters, have been inspired by the work of Dalton Trumbo. Whether it’s for the film Roman Holiday, Sparticus, Exodus or They Way We Were, Trumbo’s screenplays clearly made a huge contribution to Hollywood’s canon of great films. Now, there’s a new film called Trumbo that details the writer’s persecution by the American government for being a communist and really explores the depths of this complicated man.
Screenwriter John McNamera is known for such television shows as Aquarius, The Fugative, Jericho and the upcoming one-hour drama The Magicians, set to debut in 2016. McNamera claims he’s had a lifelong fascination with Hollywood’s infamous Blacklist and particularly, the journey of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, the subject of his first feature film. But McNamera admits that while Trumbo’s life was inspiring to him, it took him a while to warm up to the idea that a story about a communist writer could be an actual movie. It was only when he told Trumbo’s story to friend and producer Kevin Brown that he began to change his mind.
“I told Kevin the ten-minute version of Trumbo’s life story and he said, ‘That’s a movie.’ I said, ‘How is that a movie?’ and he said, ‘Fascinating hero, great antagonist, high stakes, happy ending.’”
McNamera still wasn’t convinced, since the story didn’t have any of Hollywood’s normal conventions. “I thought, well, he was a communist, there’s no superheroes, no special effects, no violence, no sex. It’s certainly a movie that’s hard to get made.”
Ultimately, McNamera decided he was up for the challenge of making a nonconventional movie and was willing to give it a go. “Kevin optioned the book by Bruce Cook with his own money and I wrote the screenplay on spec.”
One of the fascinating things about Dalton Trumbo was that while he was a communist, he thrived in Hollywood, a very capitalist environment. He found great success writing movies and had no trouble earning lots and lots of money. When asked about Trumbo’s dichotomy of living a lavish lifestyle versus his communist ideology, McNamera said there really isn’t a way to understand how Trumbo reconciled those two things. “You just have to accept it. Trumbo had no inner struggle about it. He really felt that as a capitalist making a lot of money, he could employ a lot of proletariats.”
The biggest challenge for McNamera wasn’t trying to understand Trumbo’s often dual-natured protagonist, it was mastering the politics of the time period. For him, dramatizing that era felt a lot like writing a science fiction movie. “You have to set up the rules of the universe, follow the rules and make them really clear, but not make it seem as if you’re teaching the audience a bunch of rules. It’s sort of like Star Wars. The HUAC [The House on Un-American Activities Committee] is the Empire. Trumbo is Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, combined. The third act is the Death Star blowing up – that’s Helen Mirren.” Mirren plays conservative gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who rises in popularity as she roasts suspected Communists in the media.
Comparing Trumbo to Star Wars does make an intriguing analogy, but when it comes to the government’s fear of communism, it seems tougher to make that understandable to today’s audience, given that the Cold War is over. But McNamera isn’t worried. “I think everyone will say, ‘Oh, it’s like Congress today. It’s like Benghazi. It’s like being a Muslim.’ I think people will just relate to the fact that politicians will always create fear for their own benefits. An eight-year-old can understand that. In fact, I have an eight-year-old and he understands it.”
As for communism losing popularity in most of the world, McNamera thinks Americans are actually still enamored with it – we just don’t like to acknowledge it. “If we were to check the labels on our clothes, we’d realize that we were wearing communist clothes. I have a communist watch and a communist iPhone because our greatest trade partner is China, and they are a communist country. In fact, China is Dalton Trumbo – they are communist capitalists. They are the future. Who knew?”
McNamera had this advice for screenwriters: “It’s important to make your spec script as undeniably good as you can from page one. Use every resource you can to get it made and never stop believing in it.”
He claims that for seven long years, no one believed in Trumbo. His own wife was skeptical, but McNamera didn’t give up. “My agents were like, ‘Dude, write The Avengers.’ But, bit by bit, people came around.”
Trumbo was written on Final Draft. The film releases in theaters Nov. 6.