It’s an infamous tale of broken lives, strangled creative dreams and tunnel-visioned cowardice on the part of Hollywood’s major studio system at the height of the anti-communist McCarthy era. So it comes as something as a shock that the first trailer for Jay Roach’s Trumbo, starring Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston as the real-life blacklisted Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, hints at a rousing and upbeat tale of rebellious film-making spirits with lively comedy notes.
Cranston is a freewheeling, cocksure force of nature as the writer, who found himself persona non grata in Hollywood as a result of the purge on supposed communist sympathisers that ran from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. Helen Mirren is the notorious anti-red Los Angeles Times Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who’s out to make his life a misery, with John Goodman in full Walter Sobchak mode as the desk-smashing Hollywood producer Frank King, whose King Brothers Productions hired Trumbo, despite the fact that he’d been blacklisted.
We even get to see Kirk Douglas – as played by The Hobbit’s Dean O’Gorman, who appears to have a mouth full of cotton wool. It was Douglas, along with director Otto Preminger, who helped extract Trumbo from movie-making purgatory by naming him as the true screenwriter of Spartacus (1960). Hopper did her best to convince her readers not to go and see the film because it was “written by a commie”, but the swords-and-sandals epic went on to win four Oscars and become the most profitable film in Universal Studio’s history.
A look at Roach’s CV, which includes political farce The Campaign and the Austin Powers movies, perhaps explains why the trailer takes such a light-hearted approach to the subject matter. Trumbo is hitting US cinemas on 6 November, timing which suggests a run for the 2016 Oscars. Cranston, who has four Emmys to his name, could well be part of the awards season conversation for best actor if early reviews from next month’s Toronto film festival are positive.
