It’s Cocktail hour at Raleigh Studios where I’m meeting with John McNamara. There’s plenty of reason to celebrate. McNamara wrote the screenplay for Trumbo, and the film has earned three SAG Award nominations and three Golden Globes Nominations. I managed to sit down with John to talk about Trumbo and working with Jay Roach.
Awards Daily: I actually met with Jay last Monday, and then the SAG nominations happened, and then the Golden Globe nominations. Congratulations.
John McNamara: I know. It’s very nice and we’re very happy to be here.
AD: Tell me how you came across the blacklist.
JN: It actually starts 33 years ago and I was a participant at the Young Playwrights Festival, a contest hosted by Stephen Sondheim. I was 18 years old, and Stephen had hired amazing theatre directors to work with us and one was Arthur Laurents who wrote the libretto for West Side Story and Gypsy. It turns out his most famous movie is The Way We Were which is a blacklist movie. Arthur told me it was autobiographical because he told me he himself had been blacklisted. So, I was fascinated and learned what I could from him.
Two years later, by coincidence, I was in New York University and was offered the opportunity to audit a graduate level screenwriting class taught by Waldo Salt, Ian McLellan Hunter, and Ring Lardner Jr , all Academy Awards winners and all blacklisted in the ’50s.
It was Ian who first told me that he in fact did not write Roman Holiday, Dalton Trumbo did, so that’s when I first heard that and it was such a key moment in the movie.
Ian also suggested I buy the Bruce Cook biography which I did. It sat on various bookshelves for 20 years until my friend Kevin Brown saw it, and wanted to know the story, and when he heard it, he said it was a movie. At first I didn’t really believe him and wondered how it could even be a movie. It’s politics, it’s Hollywood, it’s period, there’s no sex, action and violence, but Kevin had this very strong vision that it was a movie, because it was the true and it had a happy ending.
So, I told Kevin if he could get the option to the book I would do the screenplay for free, and that took a year and a half. We went out with it and there was a resounding nothing. No one wanted`to touch it until Michael London in 2012.
He was the first person to say, “Let’s get a director and make a movie.” The first director we went to was Jay Roach, and we moved fast.
AD: It’s interesting you say how you found out about the blacklist, because when I was speaking to Jay, he said his dad was working for Defense, but also he learned more about it through one of his teachers at USC. It’s interesting and Dalton’s story has now been told. What research did you have to do?
JM: My research before Jay was all reading; books, biographies, memoirs, articles and I spent a lot of time at the Academy library. The wing I was in was the Kirk Douglas wing. Then it was Jay who really lit a fire in me to go and talk to the surviving members of those who were blacklisted, but also to speak to his two daughters, Niki and Mitzy.
I spent a lot of time with Niki in Seattle and really her character only came to life when I met her. Before that her character was indistinct. Niki really provided all the necessary details to make the character come alive, but also all the details to make the character attract someone like Elle Fanning. Idiosyncratic and heartfelt, that’s all Niki, those are all her qualities.
AD: So, when you’re reading all these articles and books, what element of Dalton Trumbo surprised you?
JM: I was most surprised at how completely comfortable he was with his own contradictions.He did not make a huge effort in his life to explain himself to anyone. He was who he was. He was a Communist, he was incredibly smart, occasionally didactic, and a fighter for freedom of speech. I loved the things about him that didn’t fit.
I have to credit his daughters for really making that come to life for me. It was very much in Bruce’s book, but there’s nothing quite like getting an anecdote from someone who knew him. That was amazing, and I’m still amazed by how much I got from them.
AD: Did you go out and watch those films?
JM: I’m a movie buff so I’d pretty much seen all of his movies that he wrote before I started the movie. I didn’t realize he’d written Gun Crazy or Cowboy. I didn’t realize he’d doctored Heaven Knows Mr Allison, which I love. So, it was more about discovering stuff that I didn’t know that he wrote because he wrote so many films under a pseudonym, or going back and looking at a movie like Spartacus with fresh eyes. I’m looking at it, reading about the production, to hear Douglas’ impression of what Trumbo was like to work with.
I met Kirk when we were prepping. I got notes on him on the Kirk Douglas character, when I was prepping.
AD: Talk to me what it was like seeing your work come to life through Jay and you have an amazing cast from Bryan, Diane, Helen and Michael, and John.
JM: It was surreal. I had met Bryan socially at a party. I thought he was great. Helen was the one who bowled me over. She’s so funny and so down to earth. I had a moment when I thought I was dreaming this. We sat down at the rehearsal table and every actor just wanted to be really good. Every one has a different process and Jay is great at managing the different processes of each actor. Rehearsal was enormously fun, we had ten days of rehearsal, eight hours day and it was really fun.
It was the most boring set in the whole of moviedom because everybody was really nice and everybody got along. There was no drama — on a movie with that powerhouse cast.
AD: How did you condense that period of thirteen years into a two-hour movie and get your message across?
JM: It was actually twenty-three years. The two biggest decisions I made to help condense it was to make the character played by Louis C.K into a composite, and Arlen Hird, his character is a composite of five different people, and the character, Buddy Ross is a composite of two different people, so compositing helps.
It also helps that Trumbo had a very eventful life, so the hardest thing was not inventing drama or comedy, it was culling and stitching events that were five years apart and have them next to each other, that was interesting. It was challenging and fun.We did it right through post-production, we moved things around and shifted things. It’s a discovery process, it’s a narrative line. It’s not a biopic, it’s the story of a guy fighting an enemy.
The enemy is the government, his workplace, and his own demons, and as long as every scene was about one of those, then it would work.
AD: Some of my favorite scenes include the bathtub scene when it’s his daughter’s birthday, and the scene with John Goodman and a baseball bat.
JM: That was the first scene I wrote.
AD: Really?
JM: Yes, because I had a feel for how that scene could be played. Early on, I struggled with Trumbo, so I wrote the John Wayne stuff. I was a little afraid of him the first few weeks. He’s a daunting character. He’s a great writer but he’s daunting, but I got him there after a couple of weeks.
AD: What were your favorite scenes to write?
JM: I loved the speech at the end. That’s all Trumbo at the end. I also liked the fight with Cleo in the bedroom, I liked writing it. It was an early scene and I felt like I had a handle on both of them. Her character was intentionally at times opaque. I loved writing the scene with John Wayne and Hedda Hopper and Trumbo, actually that was one of the first Trumbo scenes I wrote. I also liked the scene with Wayne and Hopper where they talk about whether to forgive Edward G. Robinson. I really liked the scenes in prison with Virgil Brooks. I had a lot of fun with John Wayne scenes that aren’t in the movie.
AD: You were scared of writing Trumbo scenes?
JM: I was nervous and I was trepidatious and eventually you work through your fears. I refused to give up and kept at it.
AD: Were there other challenges?
JM: I’m not that politically astute. I’d never written a political movie before so I had a lot of learning to do about Congress, the law and about contempt of Congress, the Supreme Court, I learned a little bit about Communism, but I could never pass a test on Marxism.
AD: How involved were you in the making?
JM: Thanks to Jay I was very involved in pre-production, production and post. So, there was no moment when I saw the movie and thought, “Oh my God.”
The closest I came to a somewhat revelatory relief was when we screened it in Pasadena for an audience of people we had pulled off the streets and we got a really good reaction. People really liked it and I was amazed by that. Jay and I were shocked at how funny it played, we really had no idea.
AD: Also, to think that Hedda wasn’t even in one of your earlier drafts.
JM: It was not. It was all Jay, prodding me. He said think beyond John Wayne. He said there were two things that were challenging in this early draft, “Your hero is a Communist and your antagonist is the greatest America cinema icon. Pick one.” I couldn’t change Trumbo being a Communist. I came across an encounter Hedda had with John Wayne at the American Legion, and she took him to task, and he apologized to her in front of 2000 legionnaires. I think he was clearly afraid of her, and I said to myself, “That’s your antagonist, the person that John Wayne is afraid of.”
AD: Thank you for the film. I love history, and it also made me want to watch Roman Holiday, and I want to read his letters.
JM: Additional dialogue? It’s amazing, it’s so good. My copy is underlined and dog eared.