Dalton Trumbo by Larry Ceplair

Author:Larry Ceplair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2014-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Trumbo doing his knee dance with Pauline Finn, 1957. Photograph by Cleo Trumbo.

Trumbo was certain that an aboveground, frontal assault on the studios, similar to that promoted by the “die-hard elements of the left,” would surely fail and would “frighten off the center forces which are actually doing the job [of ending the blacklist] without anybody’s assistance.” He feared that the slightest appearance of any organized or organizational effort by the Left would give “the old right an opportunity to reactivate itself and bring to the forefront issues and arguments” from twelve years earlier that had no relation to the current situation and would only muddy it. “No greater service to the idiot right could be rendered,” Trumbo declared, “than to give them the opportunity to revive the argument as it was.”73

Ned Young and Hal Smith fully agreed with Trumbo, and when they won their Academy Awards and the WGAw award for The Defiant Ones in March 1959, they made no public statements about the blacklist. None were needed. One by one, just as Trumbo had predicted, the industry’s blacklist mechanisms were ceasing to function. An industry spokesperson announced that its blacklist oversight group, the Motion Picture Industry Council, would suspend operations in July,74 and the WGAw announced that it was renewing its fight against the clause in the Minimum Basic Agreement that allowed producers to deny screen credit to unfriendly witnesses.75

Still hoping to arrange some sort of compromise that would settle all the issues that had emerged since 1947, Trumbo accepted an invitation to meet with Mendel Silberberg, known as the “rabbi” of the movie industry, in July 1959. (Silberberg was the attorney for the producers’ association, had helped craft the Waldorf statement, and was Louis B. Mayer’s personal attorney. In addition, his firm Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp represented Columbia and RKO.) At that meeting, Trumbo told Silberberg: “The crumbling blacklist, which no one wants, can be eliminated altogether” if management “quietly and with dignity asserts its rights and responsibility and duty to employ personnel on the basis of skill alone.” Silberberg did not disagree, but he told Trumbo that he would have to take the first step in this “compromise” and write a letter revealing his membership in the Communist Party. Trumbo refused. He explained why to his attorney: “(1) to deliver now a statement one has for twelve years refused on principle to write savors more of surrender (as when virginity is compromised) than of true compromise; and (2) compromise involves reciprocity which I find altogether missing from the current discussions, in that Mr. Silberberg would get specifically what he wants for the defense of his producer-clients, while he offers nothing tangible in return for my spiritual clients—the blacklisted personnel of Hollywood.” From Trumbo’s perspective, Silberberg failed to understand that now, as in 1947, the producers’ interests (in strengthening the movie industry) coincided with the interests of those they had blacklisted. Trumbo authorized his attorney to arrange another meeting with Silberberg that would, Trumbo hoped, “put a

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