The Hollywood Ten

THE HOLLYWOOD TEN

Dalton Trumbo

In 1957, when Robert Rich was announced as the winner of the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, few realized that the name was a pseudonym. Robert Rich was the pen name of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the so called Hollywood Ten, who had been cited in 1947 for contempt of Congress and sentenced to varying terms in prison. He had also been a victim of the Hollywood blacklist that prohibited real or suspected Communist party members from working openly in the movie industry.

HUAC and Hollywood

The Hollywood Ten case began in postwar America during the first rustlings of the cold war. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had been permanently established in 1938, decided in 1947 to conduct hearings on communist influence in Hollywood. In November HUAC subpoenaed forty-one people involved in making Hollywood movies. Nineteen of those subpoenaed protested loudly that they would under no circumstances cooperate with HUAC.

Hearings

During the hearings, which ran from 28 October to 30 October 1947, ten witnesses refused to answer the committee's famous question: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?" All ten were cited for contempt of Congress and were sentenced to between six months and one year in federal prison and fines of one thousand dollars. In addition to Trumbo the ten included Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, and Adrian Scott.

Blacklist

After the hearings, in November, Holly-wood executives met at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York to devise some way to avoid looking like harborers of communists. The blacklist was the result. All members of the Hollywood Ten and other real or perceived communist sympathizers would be fired and refused further work in the movie industry. The ten remained free from prison while appeals progressed. On 10 April 1950 the Supreme Court refused to review their case.

Underground Work

The Hollywood Ten found during their prison terms and after their releases that the blacklist was not airtight. But it remained humiliating and personally costly. The victims of the public blacklist still wrote movie screenplays, and the screenplays were still bought. But during the time of the blacklist, the blacklisted writers had to resort to subterfuge, selling their scripts under false names for reduced prices. They also had to bear with absurdly short deadlines and slow payments. For example, during the time of the blacklist Trumbo completed eighteen screenplays for an average fee of $1,750 each.

Breaking the Blacklist

Trumbo's 1957 Academy Award was the beginning of the breakdown of the black-list. In 1958 the award for best adapted screenplay went to Pierre Boulle for the script from his novel Bridge on the River Kwai. In fact, the screenplay was written by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, two writers on the black-list. In 1960 the blacklist was formally breached when producer Otto Preminger publicly announced that Trumbo was the screenwriter for his upcoming film of Leon Uris's novel Exodus. The economic and social suffering of the Hollywood Ten and the other victims of the blacklist ultimately served no purpose except to show the futility of censorship and blacklisting.

Sources:

Bruce Cook, Dation Trumbo (New York: Scribners, 1977);

"Dalton Trumbo, Film Writer, Dies; Oscar Winner Had Been Black-listed," New York Times, 11 September 1976, p. 22;

Bernard F. Dick, Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989);

Stefan Kanfer, A Journal of the Plague Years (New York: Atheneum, 1973);

Dalton Trumbo, Additional Dialogue: Letters ofDalton Trumbo, 1942-1962, edited by Helen Manfull (New York: M. Evans, 1970).