(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.) I don’t want to jinx the man, but the fact that Kirk Douglas still lives is an unmitigated source of joy for me. If you believe, as I do, that movie stars become movie stars because of some internal life-force, whose aura is palpable even when projected onto a silver screen, then Kirk Douglas seems like the best proof of this theory.
At 101, Douglas is a living bridge to Hollywood’s second Golden Age—the 1940s to late 1950s. A bone fide movie start by 1949, Douglas was, along with other mavericks like Burt Lancaster, one of the first major actors to become a power-player in his own right. In an era when the Hollywood studio system traded actors like cattle, he formed his own studio and made his own films. He fostered young writers and directors—most notably, a brilliant, aloof young filmmaker named Stanley Kubrick.
But perhaps his most admirable achievement as a producer was the making of a classic movie, Spartacus. Not only did Douglas tap Kubrick to direct the film (after the first director washed out), but he arranged to have the script written—in secret—by the best screenwriter in Hollywood, the great Dalton Trumbo, who had been imprisoned and blacklisted by the anti-Communist terror that convulsed America in the late 1940s.
Douglas relates the making of this landmark film in his 2012 memoir, I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s worth a watch. Though dated, it’s still head-and-shoulders above the typical sword-and-sandal epic that Hollywood was churning out at the time (and still is). Spartacus, a Roman gladiator who began one of the most successful and bloody slave rebellions in history, was an obvious symbol of a man fighting oppression. And a timely one. In the 1940s, American was itself flirting with fascism under the rule of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and so the story of Spartacus had particular resonance (as it does now, alas, under the rule of Donald Trump).
Douglas had read Howard Fast’s bestselling novel, Spartacus, and decided it would make a great project for his production company Bryna (named for his mother). Of course, in true Hollywood fashion, everything went instantly haywire. Fast refused to sell the rights to his book unless he was allowed to write the screenplay. Then Douglas discovered that another studio already had a film in the works based on the Spartacus story.
Ultimately, the story of how Spartacus got made is worthy of a movie itself. After firing his original director, Douglas reached out to Stanley Kubrick, the wunderkind with whom Douglas had already made one movie (the excellent but largely forgotten Paths of Glory). And Fast, having written the original screenplay, turned out to be such an inept dramatist that Douglas had to hire an obscure screenwriter named Sam Jackson…
Bryna had another writer, Sam Jackson, who we had just put under contract. He was working on adapting a novel that I really liked, The Brave Cowboy, by Edward Abbey. I hadn’t met this Jackson fellow yet, but I knew his reputation. He was the quickest writer in Hollywood. I knew something else about him too. Although we had hired him under the name of “Sam Jackson,” that was not his real name.
It was Dalton Trumbo. And I didn’t give a damn about his politics.
One of the best screenwriters in Hollywood, Trumbo had been imprisoned for refusing to cooperate with HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and was subsequently blacklisted by all the major studios. Living in self-imposed exile in Mexico, Trumbo managed to work in secret, using the names of friends. Amazingly, Trumbo even won an Oscar for one of his ghostwritten screenplays.
Being a bit of a rebel himself, Douglas found the opportunity to secure such a great literary talent as Trumbo—and give the one-fingered salute to the blacklist—was irresistible.
After this crucial moment, Kirk’s narrative becomes a straightforward—if very amusing—tale of Hollywood insanity. Kubrick is depicted as humorless troll who immediately bristles at Douglas’s suggestions. The “Romans”—all played by famous Brits like Lawrence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, and Charles Laughton—begin their own on-set intrigues. (Laughton threatened to sue Douglas in mid-production.) The leading lady has to be sacked when Kubrick realizes that she has all the emotional range of a hat-rack. And fellow slave Tony Curtis (Douglas’s real-life friend) is humping the blond bombshell from the next lot over.
But then, in the book’s 3rd act, as it were, the story becomes historically significant, again.
When initial screenings of the film’s rough-cut turned out to be disappointing, it took Trumbo’s sharp literary instincts to figure out why. The movie, he explains to Douglas, has essentially been watered down by the studio heads, fearful of the story’s subversive message. Spartacus was too much like a modern-day pinko radical, the suits feared.
Fortunately, Douglas takes Trumbo’s advice and reshoots parts of the picture, transforming it from a cautionary tale about a doomed martyr to a full-throated adventure about resisting tyranny. It was Douglas himself who came up with the idea for the movie’s climactic last scene, in which thousands of Spartacus’s fellow rebels declare “I am Spartacus!” when Roman executioners come looking for him.
Douglas also finagled another two million dollars from Universal Studios to shoot additional battle scenes that elevated the film from ho-hum period piece to great historical epic.
But the real climax of Douglas’s book comes when he makes his ultimate bargain with Trumbo. At one point late in the movie’s production, the writer had finally had enough of the sturm und drang surrounding the film, and he rage-quit. Douglas desperately needed him back on the picture, and so he made Trumbo an offer he couldn’t refuse: if Trumbo agreed to return to his writing duties, Douglas promised to give him—Trumbo, not his pseudonym or secret identity—full credit on the picture.
This was, of course, a huge gamble for Douglas. At that point, the blacklist was eroding, but it had never been broken in such a blatant way. By giving Trumbo formal credit, Douglas essentially put the first nail in the coffin of the blacklist.
One of the coolest moments in the book comes when Douglas describes the day he took Trumbo back onto the Universal Lot for lunch:
The next day Eddie Lewis, Stanley Kubrick, and I entered the studio commissary. Walking right beside us was Dalton Trumbo. Heads were turning. People were whispering, “Is that Dalton Trumbo?” Heads were turning. People were whispering, “Is that Dalton Trumbo?” I even noticed a few people pointing as we were shown to our table.
The waiter came over to us immediately. “Good afternoon, Mr. Douglas. What will you gentlemen be having today?”
I said, “Let’s start with my friend. What would you like, Mr. Trumbo?”
Holding the menu unsteadily in his hand, Dalton said, “You’ll have to give me a minute.” Then, looking down, he softly murmured, “I haven’t been here in a long time.”
Ash Clifton, Writer 