Bryan Cranston cuts a pretty elegant figure for a besieged screenwriter in this new poster showcasing his Oscar-tipped role as Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo sees him in the dock as a suspected communist sympathiser in the early days of the Cold War – Walter Red? - and here he's surrounded by two key figures in his battle for justice. On the left is his wife Cleo Fincher Trumbo (Diane Lane); on the right, Sid Hudgens-alike Hollywood gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren).
There’s a rich – and no doubt, deliberate – irony that Hollywood's database of exciting unmade scripts is called the Black List. Back in the late ‘40s, the blacklist was exactly where a screenwriter* didn’t *want to be. One, Spartacus and **Roman Holiday **writer Trumbo (Cranston), found himself cast into movie prison when he fell foul of the communist witch hunts of the time.
Jay Roach's film will show how his career was nearly snuffed out by those spurious charges and innuendo. It’s set against a rich Hollywood backdrop haunted by famous figures from Hopper to Kirk Douglas (Dean O’Gorman), Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Otto Preminger (Christian Berkel). Lane is the woman who stands by him as he's haunted by the Red Scare sweeping through the US government and his own film studios.
With Roach directing John McNamara’s script (itself adapted from Bruce Cook’s book on the man), Trumbo will land on these shores in January 2016.