Trumbo • by director Peter Askin

I was first given a copy of Dalton Trumbo's collected letters, Additional Dialogue,
in 1999. I was in London at the time directing the stage version of Hedwig and
the Angry Inch, and there was interest in creating a stage play from these
letters. I knew little of Trumbo's work or his politics. The George Bush-Al Gore
campaign dominated my political landscape, though the Florida re-count hanging
chad events, much less the Patriot Act, and Iraq, still lay beyond the horizon.
Trumbo's Blacklist had occurred a lifetime ago and, surely, in a different
America. Hedwig's post gender politics seemed more relevant. Sadly, we now
know better.
 
Eight years later, Trumbo's words ring prophetic, his fight against the perversion
of American ideals that held sway at the height of the Cold War has new
immediacy, and the cost to personal freedoms feels as threatening as anything
George Orwell could have predicted.
 
Trumbo left a rich legacy beyond his award-winning films. Stifled by the studios
during the Blacklist, he kept his immense literary gifts honed by composing
letters that positively sizzle with wit, intelligence and a bracing moral rectitude.
Self-expression was, for him, armor against the armies of the night. Heroic,
generous, ornery and grandiose, what agony it must have been to have such a
voice—not to mention career—stifled by slamming doors and power politics.
 
A selection of these letters, performed by a brilliant cast including Joan Allen,
Brian Dennehy, Michael Douglas, Paul Giamatti, Nathan Lane, Josh Lucas, Liam
Neeson and David Strathairn form the dramatic spine of the film, Trumbo.