30 Facts About Dalton Trumbo

James Dalton Trumbo was an American screenwriter who scripted many award-winning films, including Roman Holiday, Exodus, Spartacus, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

Dalton Trumbo continued working clandestinely on major films, writing under pseudonyms or other authors' names.

Dalton Trumbo finally was given full credit by the Writers' Guild for Roman Holiday in 2011, nearly 60 years after the fact.

Orus Dalton Trumbo worked variously as a shoe clerk and collection agent, never earning enough to keep the family far from poverty.

Dalton Trumbo attended the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1924 and 1925, working as a reporter for the Boulder Daily Camera and contributing to the campus humor magazine, the yearbook, and the campus newspaper.

Dalton Trumbo was a member of Delta Tau Delta International Fraternity.

For nine years after his father died, Dalton Trumbo worked the night shift wrapping bread at a Los Angeles bakery, and attended the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California.

Dalton Trumbo began his professional writing career in the early 1930s, when several of his articles and stories were published in mainstream magazines, including McCall's, Vanity Fair, the Hollywood Spectator and The Saturday Evening Post.

Dalton Trumbo was hired as managing editor of the Hollywood Spectator in 1934.

Dalton Trumbo's first published novel, Eclipse, was released during the Great Depression.

Dalton Trumbo started working in movies in 1937 but continued writing prose.

Dalton Trumbo joined the Communist Party in 1943, and remained active until 1947.

Dalton Trumbo argued that Russians were likely fearful of the mass of US military power that surrounded them, at a time when any sympathetic view toward Communist countries was viewed with suspicion.

Dalton Trumbo argued that the US was a "menace" to Russia, rather than the more popular American view of Russia as the "red menace".

Dalton Trumbo served eleven months in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1950.

In Mexico, Dalton Trumbo wrote 30 scripts for B-movie studios such as King Brothers Productions.

Dalton Trumbo recalled earning an average fee of $1,750 per film for 18 screenplays written in two years and said, "None was very good".

Dalton Trumbo published The Devil in the Book, an analysis of the conviction of 14 California Smith Act defendants, in 1956.

Shortly thereafter, actor Kirk Douglas announced Dalton Trumbo had written the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's film Spartacus, adapted from the novel by Howard Fast.

Dalton Trumbo was reinstated into the Writers Guild of America, West and was credited on all subsequent scripts.

Dalton Trumbo directed the 1971 film adaptation of his novel Johnny Got His Gun, starring Timothy Bottoms, Diane Varsi, Jason Robards and Donald Sutherland.

One of the last films Dalton Trumbo wrote, Executive Action, was based on the Kennedy assassination.

In 1938, Dalton Trumbo married Cleo Fincher, who was born in Fresno, California, on July 17,1916, and had moved with her divorced mother and her brother and sister to Los Angeles.

Mitzi Dalton Trumbo dated comedian Steve Martin when they were both in their early 20s, which is recounted in Martin's 2007 book Born Standing Up.

Cleo Dalton Trumbo died of natural causes at the age of 93 on October 9,2009, at the home she shared with Mitzi Dalton Trumbo in Los Altos, California.

Dalton Trumbo died in Los Angeles of a heart attack at the age of 70.

In 1993, Dalton Trumbo was posthumously awarded the Academy Award for writing Roman Holiday.

In 2003, Christopher Dalton Trumbo mounted an Off-Broadway play based on his father's letters, called Dalton Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted, in which a wide variety of actors played his father during the run, including Nathan Lane, Tim Robbins, Brian Dennehy, Ed Harris, Chris Cooper and Gore Vidal.

Dalton Trumbo adapted it as the documentary Trumbo, which added archival footage and new interviews.

Dalton Trumbo was depicted writing a screenplay in a bathtub.