By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
BRYAN CRANSTON TO RECEIVE SPOTLIGHT AWARD, ACTOR AT 27th ANNUAL PALM SPRINGS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL AWARDS GALA
[PR] Palm Springs, CA (December 29, 2015) – The 27th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) will present Bryan Cranston with the Spotlight Award, Actor at its annual Awards Gala. The Gala will also present awards to previously announced honorees Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, Michael Fassbender, Brie Larson, Rooney Mara, Tom McCarthy, Saoirse Ronan and Alicia Vikander. The Awards Gala will be hosted by Mary Hart onSaturday, January 2 at the Palm Springs Convention Center. The Festival runs January 1-11.
“Whether on film, television or Broadway, Bryan Cranston is an outstanding actor who delivers an extraordinary and memorable performance with each character he takes on,” said Film Festival Chairman Harold Matzner. “In Trumbo, Cranston brings his amazing talent to his portrayal of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. For this brilliant performance, worthy of the awards recognition it has been receiving, it is an honor to present Bryan Cranston with the 2016 Spotlight Award, Actor.”
Past recipients of the Spotlight Award include J.K. Simmons, Julia Roberts, Jessica Chastain, Amy Adams and Helen Hunt. All recipients received Academy Award® nominations in the year they were honored, with Simmons receiving the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Rooney Mara will receive the Spotlight Award, Actress at this year’s Awards Gala.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s acclaimed career comes to a crushing halt in the late 1940s when he and other Hollywood figures are blacklisted for their political beliefs. Directed by Jay Roach,Trumbo recounts how Dalton used words and wit to win two Academy Awards and expose the absurdity and injustice under the blacklist, which entangled everyone from gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) to John Wayne, Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger. The film also stars Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Louis C.K., David James Elliott, Elle Fanning, John Goodman, Diane Lane, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alan Tudyk and Mirren.
For his role in Trumbo, Cranston has received a Golden Globe nomination, two SAG Award nominations and two Critics’ Choice Movie Awards nominations. His film credits include Argo, Kung Fu Panda 3, Infiltrator, Godzilla, Total Recall, Rock of Ages, Drive, Contagion, Little Miss Sunshine, Seeing Other People, Saving Private Ryan and That Thing You Do!. Cranston has won four Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and three Screen Actors Guild Awards for his portrayal of Walter White on AMC’s “Breaking Bad.” He will next star as President Lyndon B. Johnson in the HBO film adaptation of All The Way for which he won a 2014 Tony Award. He is currently in production on the independent film Wakefield and will then begin production on John Hamburg’s Why Him opposite James Franco.
About The Palm Springs International Film Festival
The Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) is one of the largest film festivals in North America, welcoming 135,000 attendees last year for its lineup of new and celebrated international features and documentaries. The Festival is also known for its annual Black Tie Awards Gala, honoring the best achievements of the filmic year by a celebrated list of talents who, in recent years, have included Ben Affleck, Javier Bardem, Cate Blanchett, Sandra Bullock, Bradley Cooper, George Clooney, Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks, Matthew McConaughey, Julianne Moore, Brad Pitt, Eddie Redmayne, Julia Roberts, David O. Russell, Meryl Streep, and Reese Witherspoon. The presenting sponsor of the Awards Gala is BIGHORN and major sponsors are Entertainment Tonight and Mercedes-Benz.
Trumbo the film:
I do not judge the fine actors nor their performance in this make-believe film, but I take exception that there is value or a substantive message learned from untold truth, innuendo and the manipulation of facts by the Producers and Director of this film.
Dalton Trumbo the man:
Trumbo lied about many things, but most important to me is that he lied about being the author of the original screenplay which the 1956 Oscar for “Best Original Story” awarded to “The Brave One”. My father wrote the original screenplay and died before film production.
The movie Trumbo misrepresents the avarice conniving man that Trumbo and the King Bros were. Trumbo and the King bros were all about the money and getting attention to that end. Trumbo was not a hero, he was just a grandstander who took credit from other people’s work if he could get away with it, especially my father, Juan Duval, who wrote the original screenplay that was the basis for the 1956 Oscar winning category “Best Original Story”, “The Bravo One”. My father died before film production and the King Bros and Trumbo took advantage of it.
Trumbo was a prodigious writer and during the Blacklist period he was forced to write and rewrite scripts for less money for low-life producers like the King Bros and anyone else who paid him under the table. The King Bros’s nephew Robert Rich, who was one of four listed as the author, was an afterthought and not initially intended to be a front for Trumbo. Per the FBI, Rich was an office errand boy and bag man who picked up scripts and delivered cash to pay Trumbo.
Roman Holiday may be Trumbo’s original story for all I know (and I love the film), but he was not in Italy during the shooting where much of the script was re-written by Director William Wyler and screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter. They wrote script on set day to day and the nights before shooting the film, as was Wyler’s method of film making. After Ian Hunter death, his son would not return the Oscar (and rightly so) when asked by the Academy so the Academy could issue the Oscar to Trumbo decades later. In my opinion, the success of the film was due to Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn’s splendid performance of romance under the keen direction of Willi Wyler juxtaposed subliminal messages in the background of post WWII Italy.
I understand that Trumbo worked on my father’s screenplay, but it was my father’s original story and not Trumbo’s, which was the category the Oscar was awarded. The Academy should issue a posthumous Oscar to my father, as they did for Trumbo for Roman Holiday.
Facts:
Trumbo plagiarized my father’s original screenplay and removed 50 pages from it, some of which, was about the Catholic ritual of blessing the bulls before a bull fight.
If you read the screenplay marked #1 and the redacted letters in Trumbo’s book, “Additional Dialogue, Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962” and compare them to the rewritten scripts and un-redacted letters archived at the University of Wisconsin Library, it’s obvious that Trumbo didn’t write the original screenplay, otherwise, why would he criticize and complain to the King Bros in so many letters about the original screenplay.
“The Brave One” script marked “#1” with 170 pages is archived in the University of Wisconsin Library where Trumbo donated all his work. The “#1” script’s Title page was removed and no author was mentioned.
The “first version” (133 pages) and “second version” (119 pages) of the scripts listed “Screenplay by: Arthur J. Henley”.
The last two scripts listed “Screenplay by Merrill G. White and Harry S Franklin on the early movie posters and “Original Story by Robert L. Rich” was added to scripts later.
When the King Bros listed their nephew Robert Rich as author they had no idea that “The Brave One” would be nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Story. At first, Frank King said that there was no such person as Robert Rich and later he said that they bought a 6-page script from a Robert Rich who was away in Germany or Spain.
Robert Rich (the nephew) did not attend the Oscar awards because he turned informant for the FBI who were watching Trumbo and Rich didn’t want to be publicly humiliated when the truth came out. And Trumbo used the excuse for not being able to produce the original screenplay for The Brave One on his residence being burgled while intimating that it was the FBI who tossed his residence (FBI File Number: 100-1338754; Serial: 1118; Part: 13 of 15). The FBI did in fact toss his residence but had no interest in scripts. And Trumbo was never an informant for the FBI.
White and Franklin were editors and acting as fronts for Trumbo before and after “The Brave One” movie. The King Bros did not initially intend that their nephew Robert Rich be a front for Trumbo as White and Franklin were first listed as the screenwriters on the movie posters of The Brave One. It was only after the media played up the no-show at the Oscars that the King Bros and Trumbo saw an opportunity to play the media and sell tickets (per Trumbo’s letters to the King Bros).
Juan Duval, poet, dancer, choreographer, composer and director of stage and film was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1897. He matriculated from the Monastery at Monserrat and moved to Paris in 1913 where he studied with his uncle M Duval. Juan Duval was renowned as a Classical Spanish and Apache dancer and performed in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain. Juan was fluent in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and English.
In 1915, Juan Duval was conscripted into the French Army and fought in Tunis and Verdun, where he suffered head wounds and was partially gassed. He came to the US in 1918 and joined the US Army and was then stationed with the 50th Infantry in occupied Germany for two years before immigrating to the US where he directed live theater and taught dancing and acting at his Studio of Spanish Dancing on Hollywood Blvd across from the Warner Bros Theatre. Juan produced Cave of Sorrow (Play); Lila (Musical Comedy); Spanish Love (Drama); Café Madrid; Spanish Revue; Night In Paris (Drama) and choreographed “One Mad Kiss” (musical) and at least one sword fighting scene with Rudolf Valentino. He directed movies in Mexico and Cuba including the 1935 highest grossing Spanish speaking film, “El Diablo Del Mar” starring Movita (Marlon Brando’s second wife).
Mizi Trumbo refused to talk to me about The Brave One original screenplay.
Before former Director of the Academy of Arts and Sciences Bruce Davis retired, he told me that because of the documentation that I provided him, he was inclined to believe that my father wrote the original screenplay which the movie, “The Brave One” was based.
The Academy gave Trumbo an Oscar for “The Brave One” 20 years after the Oscars and posthumously gave him another Oscar for the Roman Holiday in 2011.
The Academy of Arts and Sciences should recognize my father’s original story and posthumously awarded him the Oscar for “Best Original Story” for “The Brave One”.