Trumbo Trailer with Bryan Cranston Arrives
Watch Bryan Cranston play Dalton Trumbo, one of the famed Hollywood Ten who was blacklisted for his political beliefs.
Dalton Trumbo is considered by many to be one of the last great screenwriters from Hollywood’s Golden Age. This is in no small part due to his ability to craft beautifully rendered characters and storylines that both paid homage to the classic studio star system while injecting it with the first doses of naturalism and reality during a time of painful growth in the industry—but it’s also largely due to the fact that he was a great screenwriter that got blacklisted by anti-Communist witch hunts and the stupidity of others.
So, it only seems fitting today that the screenwriter of Spartacus and Roman Holiday (both technically biographical in their largely imaginative ways) gets his own biopic. Enter Trumbo, the new film starring Bryan Cranston as the famed scribe.
Directed by Jay Roach (most recently of political fare like HBO’s Recount and Game Change), Trumbo follows the successful career of James Dalton Trumbo and how it was completely devastated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Famously blacklisted as one of the “Hollywood Ten,” Trumbo could not put his name on almost any of his filmed scripts, including Irving Rapper’s The Brave One and William Wyler’s Roman Holiday. In fact, when star Kirk Douglas came out to personally reveal that Trumbo penned his Stanley Kubrick gladiator epic, Spartacus, it brought Trumbo right in the fire—and got President John F. Kennedy to cross the American Legion picket line to see the film.
Trumbo also stars Helen Mirren, Diane Lane, John Goodman, Louis C.K., Elle Fanning, Alan Tudyk, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Michael Stuhlberg.
Trumbo opens Nov. 6, 2015.