KIRK DOUGLAS bares Hollywood’s darkest secret in tell- all tome!
While “The Ragman’s Son” is no stranger to penning memoirs – two thus far – Douglas after suffering a stroke has blown the lid off some of Tinsel Town’s darkest days – the blacklist.
Kirk’s e-memoir "I Am Spartacus! Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist" revealed the tawdry truth about the making of the gladiatoral saga that shook Rome.
“Spartacus” directed by Stanley Kubrick and produced by Kirk’s production company shattered screen barriers in 1960 and helped bust Hollywood's black list ban against suspected Communists who refused to name names before the House on Un-American Activities (HUAC) during the paranoid cold war era of the 1950s.
Dalton Trumbo who wrote the screenplay was given full screen credit after the blacklisted Trumbo was forced to use assumed names and a “front” to get film work.
Kirk changed all that by putting Trumbo's name upfront.
“Dalton Trumbo was my friend and one of the finest screenwriters of the 20th century. He told me that because he was blacklisted, he couldn’t sell “Roman Holiday” under his own name,” Kirk wrote in a 2011 letter to The New York Times.
And yet, the late Trumbo's family has cast aspersions on Kirk's claim of breaking the blacklist.
"He wanted us to acknowledge him as the breaker of the blacklist," Trumbo's daughter, Melissa, told The Atlantic.
"Kirk Douglas has become so vocal and insistent that this was such an easy thing for him to do and he just did it because it was right. It just makes you a little crazy. I did throw Douglas's book across the room at one point."
Kirk, 97, however, remains fiercely adamant.
POP FYI: Trumbo also wrote screenplay for Kirk's brilliant modern oater "Lonely Are The Brave" and the classic anti-war novel “Johnny Got His Gun”.
