Indeed, the character's very lack of the things we usually use to judge personality - a posture, a facial expression, body language - tends to draw us down into the almost exclusively mental world where he's imprisoned. His wounded soldier is little more than a mask and a tent of blankets in the hospital room. So what Trumbo did was to stay close to the events, real and imagined, of his novel, and let the ideology emerge by implication. If he'd immediately hit on some sort of political conclusion, it would have been obscene." But in the movie you see him, and his despair is visual. Joe, the soldier, has time to think through to an angry manifesto. But that wouldn't have worked in a movie. "Of course, I've gotten a little heat from the Left on that, because I didn't put in a revolutionary addendum. I've tended more to center on the young man, the soldier, and let you draw your own conclusions about the system that put him where he was. I imagine his approach would have been more shocking than my own. I think he would have savagely attacked democracy. "I've always been interested in how Bunuel would have made it. And then I came back to California and went to work, and by the time I had the screenplay completed, the producer was out of money and Bunuel was back in Spain, broke. Mexico and spent some time with Bunuel, of which I best remember the four-hour lunches which averaged out to about a bottle of wine an hour. "Hell, I said I'd do a screenplay, and be his secretary, and carry his briefcase and do his laundry. "They wanted to know if I'd do a screenplay for Bunuel," Trumbo said. It was from a producer representing Luis Bunuel, the great Spanish director. So if I can't, I don't see how you can.'"īut an offer came in 1964 that he couldn't resist. It's obviously the best thing I've ever done maybe the one good thing I've done - and I told them, 'I can't see any way to make it into a film, and I'm a fair pro at turning books into movies. "There were many times during the first 20 years of the novel's existence when I received offers for it," Trumbo recalls, "but I'd never let go of it, not even when I could have used the money. This was material for a novel or even a radio play (Arch Oboler produced it for radio in 1940, with James Cagney as the soldier). Trumbo's novel, published in 1939, was made from the soldier's stream-of-consciousness, which drifts back and forth between the present and the past, and occasionally lingers in fantasies (as when he discusses his fate with Jesus Christ).
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