Bryan Cranston to play blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/19/bryan-cranston-dalton-trumbo-biopic

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Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston's first role following the conclusion of the hugely popular US TV series will be as Dalton Trumbo in a biopic about the blacklisted Oscar-winning screenwriter.

Austin Powers and Bruno director Jay Roach's independently funded drama aims to shoot in 2014 with a screenplay by John McNamara. Titled Trumbo, the film is based on the 1977 book Dalton Trumbo by Bruce Cook.

Cranston, whose star has risen dramatically in Hollywood following the success of Breaking Bad, is also tipped to play Lex Luthor in the upcoming sequel to this year's Superman reboot Man of Steel 2. That casting has not been confirmed, and Cranston said earlier this month he knew nothing about it.

Trumbo is a hugely significant figure in Hollywood history. It was his naming in 1960 as the true screenwriter of Spartacus and Exodus (by actor Kirk Douglas and director Otto Preminger) that effectively broke the blacklist on supposed Hollywood communist sympathisers that ran from the late 1940s to the late 1950s during a period of heightened fear over Soviet influence in the US.

Trumbo was recognised by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the true screenwriter of 1953's Oscar-winning Roman Holiday in 1993. He also won an Oscar for the 1956 film The Brave One, which he wrote while blacklisted under the pseudonym Robert Rich. Trumbo, who spent 11 months in jail for refusing to testify before the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 and later fled to Mexico, had previously been nominated for 1940's Kitty Foyle: The Natural History of a Woman.

The writer's career, like that of many of the blacklisted "Hollywood 10", never truly recovered despite the effective end of ill-treatment towards leftwing figures within the US film industry from the 1960s onwards. He died in 1976 of a heart attack in Los Angeles, aged 70.

A documentary about the screenwriter and novelist's life, also titled Trumbo, was released in 2007. It was adapted by Trumbo's son Christopher from his own 2003 play, Red, White and Blacklisted, based on letters his father wrote during the period.

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