Back in the 1940s and 1950s, the word "communist" was as bad a word as any un-PC friendly term today. In fact, it might have been worse. Legendary Hollywood screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo (Johnny Got His Gun, Roman Holiday, Spartacus), knew all too well how being aligned with the communist party both before and after World War II could have a lasting ripple effect on a career as a writer. Still, he didn't care. In 1947, Dalton Trumbo was one of ten screenwriters and directors to be blacklisted from the industry after he refused to give information about the communist presence in Hollywood. Although Trumbo was taken off the blacklist many years later, some were never looked at in Hollywood with the same level of respect prior to the days of the "Red Scare".

Over sixty years after the ten filmmakers were blacklisted by the Hollywood establishment, Dalton Trumbo's son, Chris Trumbo, has just released the documentary Trumbo that covers the life and times of his father. As Chris was making the rounds promoting the film, The Deadbolt had the good fortune to sit in on the press conference as the younger Trumbo talked just that... Trumbo.

Chris Trumbo on what it was like growing up as a child within the setting of the film:

"I wish I could describe what it was like, but it’s difficult because it’s simply the way I grew up. So it seems absolutely normal, but of course it wasn’t. A friend of mine once said, ‘Oh well, you have one of those historical childhoods,' as if it doesn’t count. But as far as I was concerned, my life was consistently interesting. There was always something happening. I actually didn’t think my father had done anything wrong when he went to jail. I was ten at the time and my mother and my younger sister and I went to visit him in jail in Kentucky, which in 1950 was an education in a lot of ways, because suddenly I’m in the south. And when I went to the movies, I couldn’t go up to the balcony because black people sit in the balcony, white people are downstairs, and there are the drinking fountains and the train stations, everything - it’s American apartheid. And if you hadn’t experienced it, it’s a tremendous. It’s like wonderland in a sense. Why are they doing this? There’s always sort of the irony of your father being in jail for contempt of Congress and, well, it’s the laws of the land established by Congress are in fact racially discriminatory so. But it was a great train trip and a good trip back home. Then we go to Mexico - nothing wrong with that. We’d been living on a ranch ninety miles north of Los Angeles, so that wasn’t a bad way to grow up."

Trumbo on reading his father’s letters:

"Well, the first letter I received - actually, he wrote letters from prison and I suppose those were the first letters I received, but they were always like a section of the letter for me. The one particular thing was a poem that he wrote for my birthday, which is in the collected letters and in the film. After that he wrote me a letter when I was in Mexico one summer visiting friends, who were still living there, and this was a letter that was a parody of Lord Chesterton’s advice to his son. So rather than instruct me in the virtues, he instructed me in lying and stealing and borrowing and girls, with appropriate satire under each subject. The next letter was probably when I was in college, and that’s the letter that’s in a much shorter version that Nathan Lane delivers in the documentary. But it was about eight or nine pages single-spaced. So you can see it was a grand story, sort of a combination of Tristram Shandy and Lolita, if I can characterize the style. Consistently he’s writing letters throughout his life and he’s keeping copies because he wants to remember what he said and what he was doing, and this is a great way of being able to do that.

"Some of the letters that were eventually published, he had to get copies from the people he sent them to. But when he donated his papers to the University of Wisconsin he had - most of the letters were there as well as scripts and other material. The woman who was arranging all of them, Helen Manfull, was reading this and said, ‘This should be a book. This would be a great book of letters.’ So he said, ‘Sure, why not?’ And that’s how the letters were eventually gathered and published. But all of these materials were always available to me, so it was kind of nice to have them in one volume. Of course there were things I hadn’t read. There’s nothing in the letters that was surprising. There’s nothing that I’ve actually learned since he died that is particularly surprising in one way or another, because he was very open. When you are willing to give your material to that extent, that openly to a public institution like the University of Wisconsin, and there are more at UCLA, you’ve been pretty open with your life and not many people are willing to do that. When you go look at other collections of historical materials, you’ll see that it’s boiler plate. There may be fifty feet of it, but it’s fifty feet of mimeograph nonsense or just copies of stuff."

Trumbo on the purpose of art:

"Art is really interesting because it serves whatever purpose people choose to give it. The idea that what we do as artists is going to make a difference is - rarely does it happen. Let me put it that way, mostly it doesn’t. Sometimes it will, maybe years later there are things - the question is: how do you express yourself when you see things that you think are monstrous going on? How do you protest a war, for instance, as an artist? What we have to realize is that it is not just one of us, it is all of us, and we each have to do what we can. It begins with your individual effort, whatever it may be. As an artist, maybe I can paint Vodnika - or most people aren’t up to that [laughs] - but whatever it is that motivates you, you have to do it. Whether this is going to change anything, you don’t know. But you are impelled to do something. And you are constantly fighting the idea that the government has, which is you don’t count and you have to adhere to the idea that one person can make a difference. Whether that works out for you and you do make a difference, you don’t know. But you won’t make a difference if you don’t try. And if enough of us try, or enough people will respond to what I did or what he did or what you did, that is how change comes about. But you have to do it, you have to take action.

The other thing is that when you start doing this, you’re involved in a fight because authority doesn’t like you doing this. Authority wants you to obey it, wants you to agree with it, wants you to go along. And consistently throughout history there are people who don’t. More or less, in terms of the way I was educated at least, you start off with the death of Socrates, who has perverted the young, and you go forward. You will find throughout history there are these people who are consistently opposing authority as they see it. From Martin Luther, who upsets the universe, Voltaire, Tom Payne, again and again and again in every country. In every way, progress and change comes about through one person. When Luther gets down there he says, ‘I can do no other except this,' and he tacks those points on the church door because he is impelled to do this. So that’s what political action, or artistic action, or whatever it is comes down to. And since you are involved in this fight, you have to expect to take a punch. You don’t win all of the time. This is the thing. You can’t say that victory is right around the corner - no it’s not, defeat is always around the corner."

On whether seeing his father go to jail made him want to get into politics:

"No. I think it may have prevented me from joining the communist party [laughs], but the idea never even occurred to me. I had about 87 thoughts at the same... Wait a second, the stigmata of communism? It’s interesting. It’s sort of like - rather than be a political association, it becomes a profession in one way or another. Why this has come about is enormously convenient to power, to the power we have that are in charge. It’s very easy, ‘Ah, communist.’ And if you’re not a communist, you may be sympathetic to a communist because you defended his rights, so that makes you suspect. You’re a "consymp", is one of the words we use. And you can go on and on down that line. So what happens to people who have thoughts that are in opposition to the status quo is that in one way or another you associate them or try to associate them with communism, which is never the sort of communism practiced in the United States - it’s Joseph Stalin. You, who are let’s say forming a labor union, are in fact in league with one of the great butchers of the world. And so there’s this guilt by association. And what peoples, whose politics happen to be toward the left rather than the right, are constantly in the position of having to defend themselves against associations they never had in the first place? This is a wonderful tactic. It has worked for the last 50-60 years. If you just take a look at the way things develop, that’s it. So the Democratic party has moved so far to the center that it’s contemplating its own navel, is always defending itself against being what it never was in the first place, and it can’t figure a way out because it capitulated to that in the late '40s."

Chris Trumbo on whether the sense of time has worked against what his father accomplished:

"Yes, and no. It would be sort of nice if history moved like it does in the book. It’s nice and kind of linear and we understand everything. In fact, it’s really messy. It’s something like refrigerator mold, you never know where it will crop up next. Nothing is that simple and people - Yes, there were communists - well, sure everybody knew that, it wasn’t a secret, it wasn’t a secret at the time. What they are building is a castle in wonderland where they speak to each other which, because people tend to agree with them or are actually willing to use them, publicize their views and they become mainstream thought, as it were. It’s a process by which ideas are either denigrated or exalted, and this constantly happens in politics and always will. It’s part of the game in a sense, particularly when accusing people of doing things and believing things they never did, because you put them, if you have the power to do that, if you can manage that, then they’re forced to prove a negative. So you have them in an impossible situation, and that’s more or less what’s happened."