The Writer in the Bathtub
On our recent vacation, my wife and I stopped to visit Grand Junction, the largest city (65,000+) on the western slope of Colorado, named for the joining of the Gunnison and Colorado rivers nearby. One attractive feature of the city is a pedestrian mall located in the historical downtown. Among the mall’s features are a set of sculptures commissioned by the city which you encounter as you stroll past shops and restaurants. One of these is the statue shown above—a man sitting in a bathtub, with a pencil, paper and makeshift desk. It’s a tribute to one of Grand Junction’s most famous sons—the screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo.
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Trumbo was one of the most successful and well-paid Hollywood screenwriters of the 1930s and 40s but was blacklisted from working in Hollywood after appearing before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 and refusing to name names of Communist sympathizers in the movie business. He spent a year in prison for contempt of Congress.
After his release from prison, he moved his family to Mexico, but continued writing scripts under various pseudonyms or fronted by other writers whose names went on the credits instead. Some of the scripts he wrote in that time included Roman Holiday as well as two noir classics, Gun Crazy and The Prowler. In 1960, the blacklist was officially broken when Kirk Douglas chose to list Trumbo’s name in the credits for Spartacus. Producer-Director Otto Preminger did the same for Trumbo’s screenwriting work on Exodus.
Trumbo was reinstated by the Writer’s Guild of America shortly after the release of those two movies. He continued to work in Hollywood, writing screenplays for Lonely are the Brave, Hawaii, Johnny Got His Gun (from his own anti-war novel) and Papillon, among others. He died in 1976 at the age of 70.
Now back to the statue. Trumbo’s family moved to Grand Junction in 1908, when he was 3 years old. He attended Grand Junction High School. While there, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for the local newspaper, The Daily Sentinel, which is still published today.
The Trumbo family’s original home still stands today, located on a tree-lined street in a quiet neighborhood of Grand Junction (there are many quiet neighborhoods in Grand Junction).
Trumbo wasn’t always appreciated in his hometown, though. His first published novel, Eclipse, was a thinly-veiled social critique of Grand Junction society, called Shale City. The central character was based on Trumbo’s father and the financial struggles he endured during the family’s time there. A new edition published by the Mesa County Public Library Foundation in 2005 included an addendum that matched Grand Junction residents of the time to characters in the book. With the passage of time, the novel’s harsh portrayal of the town lost some of its sting. Citizens began to appreciate the contributions to literature and cinema by one of their own. The Trumbo bathtub statue was installed and dedicated in 2007.
Why the bathtub?
In his later years, Trumbo developed back problems and other physical ailments which could be alleviated by a long hot bath. Unable and unwilling to do nothing for any length of time, he decided to make the bathtub his work space as well. The 2017 biopic, Trumbo, starring Bryan Cranston, features several scenes with Trumbo (Cranston) writing in his bathtub.
In 1993, Trumbo was posthumously awarded an Oscar for his screenplay of Roman Holiday, originally credited to fellow screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter to evade the blacklist (Hunter himself was later blacklisted).
A play based on Trumbo’s letters was produced Off-Broadway by his son, Christopher in 2003. Actors Nathan Lane, Tim Robbins, Brian Dennehy, Ed Harris, Chris Cooper and Gore Vidal(!) filled the role at various times.
A fountain at the University of Colorado (where Trumbo attended college for two years) was named in his honor.
Dalton Trumbo is celebrated today as much for his uncompromising defense of free speech as for his notable screenwriting career.
And it all started here, in Grand Junction, CO.
Location research by Maria Carrera