Hollywood work highlights work of namesake of CU-Boulder's Dalton Trumbo Fountain Court, a hub of free speech named for the First Amendment hero
Trumbo the man is highlighted in "Trumbo," the movie, which is being featured in a free screening on the CU-Boulder campus Wednesday, Feb. 3, at 7:30 p.m. at Meunzinger Auditorium. Poet, author and film historian Bruce Kawin will speak prior to the film. For more information about the screening, click here.
By Eric Gershon
The man from hollywood minced no words.
“Your job is to ask questions and mine is to answer them,” screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (A&S ex’28) lectured a congressional interrogator from the witness table. “I shall answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ if I please to answer. I shall answer in my own words.”
It was Oct. 28, 1947. The Cold War was heating up and the U.S. Congress had summoned Trumbo and nine other film industry workers, mostly screenwriters, to testify in Washington about their political affiliations.
Above all, the House Un-American Activities Committee wanted to know if they were Communists.
Trumbo, the most prominent of the group, the Hollywood Ten, refused to say.
“I believe I have the right to be confronted with any evidence which supports this question,” he said. “I’d like to see what you have.”
Dismissed as uncooperative, Trumbo scoffed: “This is the beginning of an American concentration camp.”
That prophesy did not come to pass, but Trumbo, a married father of three young children, paid for his act of conscience.
It derailed a flourishing, prosperous career, led to prison, prompted a two-year exile in Mexico and forced him into a black-market livelihood for more than a decade.
It also helped make him a civil liberties icon and secured him an exalted place in the history of Hollywood and of Cold War America.
Read more of this story in the Coloradan.
Trumbo the man is highlighted in "Trumbo," the movie, which is being featured in a free screening on the CU-Boulder campus Wednesday, Feb. 3, at 7:30 p.m. at Meunzinger Auditorium.
Poet, author and film historian Bruce Kawin will speak prior to the film.
For more information about the screening, which is sponsored by the CU-Boulder Film Studies Program, click here.
Jan. 29, 2016