Hotly tipped for an Oscar at the next ceremony, Bryan Cranston looks to have seized the role of Dalton Trumbo in Jay Roach's Hollywood communist witch-hunt drama with considerabe gusto. Following the recent poster, here's a new trailer to give you a sense of what's to come. Elle Fanning, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren, John Goodman and Louis C.K. co-star.
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.
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.