Dalton Trumbo: The Screenwriter Behind Hollywood Classics
- Andria Pasco
- Apr 27
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 30
Ever wondered how those blockbuster movies come to life? It all starts with pages and pages of dialogue, scene design, and camera directions, crafted by a screenwriter. One of the most prolific screenwriters of the Golden Age of cinema (the ’40s and ’50s) was Dalton Trumbo. He penned award-winning films like Roman Holiday, Spartacus, and Exodus—though he didn’t always use his own name.
Born and raised in Colorado, Trumbo showed promise as a writer early on. He worked as a cub reporter for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel while still in high school. He then attended the University of Colorado in Boulder for two years, where he continued to impress with his writing skills. He worked as a reporter for the Boulder Daily Camera and contributed to campus publications like the humor magazine, the yearbook, and the campus newspaper.
In 1930, Trumbo started working professionally as a writer. He wrote articles for mainstream magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Vanity Fair, and the Hollywood Spectator, where he was later hired as managing editor. After leaving the Hollywood Spectator, Trumbo worked as a reader in Warner Bros. Studios’ story department.
Before diving into screenplays, Trumbo was a novelist. His first published work, Eclipse, came out in 1935 during the Great Depression. The novel was a fictional representation of his childhood in Grand Junction and stirred up quite a bit of controversy there. His next novel, Johnny Got His Gun, won a National Book Award for Most Original Book in 1939.
Trumbo entered the world of movies in 1937, and by the early 1940s, he was one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood. Some of his early screen works included Kitty Foyle (1940), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945). He even snagged an Academy Award nomination for Adapted Screenplay for Kitty Foyle.
Things took a turn in the mid-1940s when Trumbo and other film industry workers were investigated for allegedly planting Communist propaganda in US films. He was sentenced to eleven months in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1950 and was barred from working in the film industry unless he disavowed Communism under oath.
After serving his sentence, Trumbo moved with his family to Mexico City. He wrote 30 screenplays under various pseudonyms, selling them to B-level movie studios. In 1950, he adapted Gun Crazy, a short story by McKinlay Kantor, with Kantor agreeing to be the front for Trumbo’s screenplay. He also wrote The Brave One (1956), credited to “Robert Rich,” the name of a producer’s nephew. The film later won the Academy Award for Best Story.
By the late ’50s, the blacklist’s enforcement weakened, and Trumbo was credited for the 1960 film Exodus, adapted from the novel by Leon Uris. Actor Kirk Douglas later revealed that Trumbo wrote the screenplay for Spartacus, which Douglas starred in. Spartacus was an epic historical drama based on a novel by Howard Fast and became one of the biggest box office hits of all time. This move helped end the blacklist. Trumbo was reinstated into the Writers Guild of America, and gradually, his films were credited back to him. The last to be credited was Roman Holiday, finally credited to Trumbo in 2011. Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, tells the story of a young princess exploring Rome on her own. By its release, Roman Holiday was both a box office and critical hit, and by 2011, it was already considered a classic in American film.
In 1971, Trumbo adapted his own novel, Johnny Got His Gun. In 1975, he was officially recognized by the Academy and presented with an Oscar statuette for Best Story for The Brave One. In 1993, he was awarded a posthumous Academy Award for Roman Holiday, previously credited to Ian Hunter, one of Trumbo’s fronts.
Trumbo passed away in 1976 due to a heart attack, donating his body to scientific research. In 2015, a film based on Trumbo’s life was released, starring Bryan Cranston and directed by Jay Roach. The film, titled Trumbo, received critical acclaim. A collection of his work is also available in the Academy Film Archive. He is honored in his hometown of Grand Junction with a statue of his likeness writing screenplays in a bathtub.
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