He was born in the small town of Montrose in Colorado in 1905, but his family soon moved to the much larger town of Grand Junction, so named because it was at the confluence, or meeting point, of two major rivers, but with the coming of the railways in the second half of the 19 th century it soon became a meeting-point of railway lines, too. James Dalton Trumbo, to give him his full name, was virtually the embodiment of what was often called “The American Century” (i.e.
He, more than any screenwriter who has ever lived, knew exactly where his own profession ranked in the film industry – somewhere between the role of first assistant director and that of the on-set cleaner – and so he would probably have enjoyed the fact that the film about his life was hardly a box-office smash. And the fact that the film barely broke even at the box office, thus confirming the suspicion of many in Hollywood that films about writers never make money, would not have been lost on Trumbo, had he lived to see it. That is a testament to both his extraordinarily eventful existence and his phenomenal success as a screenwriter. There have been so many films about fictional screenwriters, from Sunset Boulevard (1950) to Adaptation (2002), that they virtually constitute a sub-genre of the “movies about movies” genre, but Trumbo is the only real-life screenwriter ever to have a film made about his life. Dalton Trumbo is unique among screenwriters in having a biopic made of his life, Trumbo (2015), which starred Bryan Cranston in his first leading role after the end of his phenomenally successful TV series, Breaking Bad.
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