When Writers Really Were Nobodies

The Oscars have become the movie industry’s version of the Super Bowl. For months leading up to awards night, the media airwaves are clogged with such an onslaught of hype, horse-race analysis and million-dollar ad campaigns that the Big Event has begun to feel dismayingly anticlimactic.

With all this media overload, by the time award night rolls around, there are few surprises left. So imagine the unthinkable--what if someone won an Oscar who was an impostor?

Let me take you back to the night of March 27, 1957, when an unknown screenwriter named Robert Rich failed to show up to claim his statuette for best motion picture story (a category long since abandoned) for the 1956 film “The Brave One.”

At the time, his absence seemed innocent enough. After actress Deborah Kerr called out Rich’s name from the podium at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre, Writers Guild of America executive Jesse Lasky Jr. hurried onstage and accepted the award on his behalf, saying that his “good friend” was at a maternity hospital where his wife was giving birth.

As it turned out, Rich wasn’t anywhere near a hospital; in fact, Lasky had never even met Rich. But looking back nearly half a century later, you could say that giving birth was almost the right metaphor. For what became known as the Robert Rich affair was no Oscar gag, like Jack Palance doing one-armed push-ups. It turned out to be the beginning of the end of the notorious Hollywood blacklist, which had destroyed the careers of hundreds of talented writers, directors and actors who were labeled as Communists or left-wing sympathizers.

In reality, Robert Rich was a screenwriter’s invention--a pseudonym for Dalton Trumbo, a gifted, irascible writer who, as a member of the Hollywood Ten, had gone to prison in 1947 and had been unable to work under his own name for a decade before his unlikely Oscar win.

When Kerr called out Rich’s name, Trumbo was sitting at his Los Angeles home with his family, watching the Oscars like millions of other movie fans. “We obviously knew he’d been nominated, but no one expected him to win,” recalls his son, writer Christopher Trumbo. “It was a total surprise. I remember my father staring at the TV screen, saying, ‘Well, I’ll be . . .’ ”

What followed was half Marx Brothers farce, half Kafkaesque drama. For a decade, the Hollywood Ten had been professional dead men, as Trumbo once put it. They’d been fired from their studio jobs. They were unable to work under their own names. Most moved to Europe or Mexico to find work. Trumbo, who’d been making $3,000 a week before the blacklist, scrambled for jobs that paid him $3,500 for an entire script.

Taking home an Oscar was out of the question. The same year Rich won, Michael Wilson, another blacklisted writer, was an almost certain adapted screenplay nominee for “Friendly Persuasion,” which, in keeping with the bizarre nonperson tenets of the time, had been released without a screenwriter credit. Not wanting to be embarrassed, the motion picture academy secretly passed a new bylaw banning blacklisted writers from being eligible for prizes. When Wilson earned a nomination, the academy immediately disqualified him.

However, the academy had overlooked the possibility that someone could win an Oscar using a pseudonym. They also didn’t count on Trumbo’s indomitable spirit and public-relations savvy. Knowing it was too early for him to step forward and take credit for the script, which would only cause trouble for the King brothers, the movie’s producers, Trumbo instead staged a guerrilla-style media blitz, staging interviews and events that would be the envy of any of today’s multimillion-dollar Oscar marketing campaigns. For Trumbo saw the Rich affair as a golden opportunity to embarrass the academy and embolden others to push harder to crack the blacklist.

The uproar began the day after the Oscars, when the WGA discovered there was no guild member named Robert Rich. Hedda Hopper called every obstetrics ward in town but came up empty. A day later, a real Robert Rich--a nephew of the King brothers who worked in their offices and was the inspiration for the pseudonym--visited the academy, eager to confess that he had not written the movie. Flush with victory, the academy rushed out a press release saying the writer of “The Brave One” had denied authorship of the film.

The move backfired. Seeing an Oscar there for the taking, all sorts of Robert Riches surfaced. One, saying he was the nephew of a deceased Robert Rich, told Variety he was flying down from San Francisco to claim the statue. Before long, the Oscar was subject to a bewildering array of claims, lawsuits and counterclaims by everyone from Orson Welles to documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty.

Soon Hollywood was in a tizzy, with Variety reporting that “for the first time in the 29-year history of the academy, the identity of a winner is clouded by such doubt and mystery that the Board of Governors will have to meet to decide what to do about it.”

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The fun was just beginning. The New York Times had tracked down one of the three King brothers, a trio of colorful B-movie producers who’d quietly been running a great racket, hiring talented but unemployable blacklisted writers like Trumbo to pen quickie films for a fraction of what they got in their pre-blacklist heyday.

Frank King quickly invented a cover story, saying Rich was “a brilliant young writer” he’d met in Munich a few years earlier when he was making a film there. Figuring a few details might make the farfetched story more believable, King said Rich was “33 or 34 years old” and had been stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army.

Later King added more details, telling Variety that Rich was a “photographer and writer and is goateed.” Trying to buy some time, he said he hoped to bring him to Hollywood later in the month. He called speculation that Rich was a Hollywood Ten member “ridiculous--if this weren’t my birthday, I’d be angry,” he said.

Frank King dismissed his nephew Robert’s visit to the academy as a publicity stunt, saying his nephew was unhappy because the Kings hadn’t given him any Oscar tickets. Actually, Frank King was upset--he’d just discovered that he was being sued for stealing “The Brave One’s” script by the Nassours, an even lower-budget producer team who’d cannily deduced that if the Kings couldn’t produce a real writer, they couldn’t prove that someone else hadn’t written the script. (The Kings later settled out of court.)

As rumors spread that a blacklisted writer might have authored the script, reporters began calling Trumbo. He was at his slyly subversive best. Asked if he was the elusive Rich, he bellowed: “Hell, no, I’m Dalton Trumbo.” He said Rich was Michael Wilson, who couldn’t win an Oscar for “Friendly Persuasion” and had written “The Brave One” so he’d “have something to show for his year’s work.”

Trumbo praised “The Brave One,” saying, “It has no murder, dope addiction, no gunfights and no seduction of innocent girls. In fact, I don’t know how it got on the screen.”

On April 10, Trumbo did a TV interview with local CBS reporter Bill Stout. It caused such a sensation that the following night CBS broadcast Stout’s interview on its national news. Trumbo pummeled the academy as a “policeman” that only beat up on weak victims and said the purchase of blacklisted writers’ scripts was “an open practice which has received the blessings of the industry.”

He added, quite eloquently, that despite the blacklist, it was impossible to make a writer stop writing: “They murdered Thucydides, and beheaded Sir Thomas More, but all of the other writers who were thrown in jail continued to write, and so have I.”

A few weeks later, Trumbo wrote a piece for the Nation expressing optimism that film studios were “praying each night for a court decision, just one decision, that will give them an excuse to regain control of the organizations they head.”

Trumbo’s timing proved to be auspicious. A year later, the academy suffered another embarrassment: The best screenplay adaptation award went to Pierre Boulle for “The Bridge Over the River Kwai;” Boulle had written the novel on which it was based. The script was actually written by two blacklisted writers, Wilson and Carl Foreman. Boulle, as many Hollywood insiders knew, didn’t speak English and had never written a film in his life.

The following year, yet another blacklisted writer, Ned Young--using the alias Nathan Douglas--won the original screenplay Oscar for co-writing “The Defiant Ones.” After Young agreed not to embarrass the academy by revealing his true identity, the academy board rescinded its bylaw banning blacklisted writers from being eligible for Oscars.

The string of Oscar victories for blacklisted writers attracted the attention of the mainstream press. In March 1958, Los Angeles Times film critic Philip Scheuer described it as a “strange and ironical commentary on Hollywood . . . that our best screenplays are being ghost-written by our best self-exiled writers.”

Trumbo’s one-man struggle finally bore fruit. In May 1959, Kirk Douglas hired Sam Jackson--a.k.a. Dalton Trumbo--to write “Spartacus.” And finally, on Jan. 19, 1960, Otto Preminger gave a front-page exclusive to the New York Times: He’d hired Trumbo to write “Exodus.” No subterfuge, no pseudonyms. The blacklist was broken. The true sign of victory: Trumbo’s fee was back up to $50,000 a movie.

As Trumbo wrote to a friend after reading a newspaper account of his breakthrough: “It does not call me a ‘Commie.’ It does not attack me nor the people who employed me. . . . This is the new atmosphere in which we’re living.”

In 1975, Robert Rich was finally put to rest. An academy officer came to see Trumbo at his home, where he was dying of cancer, and gave him an Oscar for “The Brave One.” This one had his real name on it.

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.