FANTASIA OBSCURA: How the Real-Life ‘Trumbo’ Influenced… Metallica?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, when you look for the line between “living” and “existing”, you get a surprise to see who’s on that side of the line next to you…
Johnny Got His Gun (1971)
(World Entertainment; Dir: Dalton Trumbo)
Admittedly, this one puts the “obscure” in “Obscura” considering the work’s history. Its theatrical distribution was spotty on release, and it didn’t get any television exposure until out of period when PBS premiered it in 1983. It might have disappeared entirely from consideration here had tracking Donald Sutherland’s “rebel” films not served as a reminder of its existence.
But it’s a striking story, a picture adapting a difficult novel by the man who wrote it, a man who’s own life made for an interesting story in its own right that’s currently getting the big screen treatment. And what happened to the movie years after its premiere is a twist even a writer like Dalton Trumbo could never have written…
In 1939, a few years after Trumbo became a highly paid writer at Warner Bros., Trumbo finished a novel about the futility of war and the horrors it inflicts on combatants. It follows Joe Bonham, who survived a direct shot with an artillery shell during World War I, losing all his limbs and a good portion of his face but still fully cognizant. Trapped in his own body, Bonham tries to communicate with his doctors and superiors by banging his head on his pillow in Morse code, letting them know he wants to end this existence. His messages are received but not heeded, frustrating Joe as he drifts in and out of pain reliever-induced fantasies.
The book was published in September of 1939, just as the next horrific European war got underway; this is the start of the story’s timing with events throughout the 20th Century that bedevils the work whether it wanted such connections or not. In fact, the novel’s publication was suspended in 1941 after the war moved east; plans to put the work back out on the shelves were complicated after the war as the Red Scare moved swiftly to impose itself with the Blacklist, resulting in Trumbo’s conviction for contempt of Congress and having to go behind a “front” to write, while winning two Academy Awards then.
Following the collapse of the Blacklist’s hold, Trumbo returned to openly writing for Hollywood, with credits in 1960 for Exodus and Spartacus, and reestablished his career. By 1971, Trumbo decided to try his hand at directing, believing that his 1939 novel would find an audience in modern times; with the passages of heavy drug use being relayed while an unpopular war in Vietnam was being waged, he may have assumed there was a ready demand for the work.
Trumbo’s production cast Timothy Bottoms as Joe Bonham, Jason Robards as Joe’s dad, Kathy Fields as the girl he left behind (whose last film this was before she went into camerawork and production), and as mentioned earlier, Sutherland as Christ. Dalton shot his film with clear delineations as to where the action was taking place, with reality shot in black and white, memories in color, and drug-induced fantasies with a hyper-injected pallet, with a continuous stream of consciousness narration offered by Bonham throughout.
We’re asked to watch Joe, who’s a helpless victim with no limbs and unable for most of the story to escape his head, react to his fate throughout the film. While this makes for an interesting read, it really doesn’t work all that well in cinema; it’s a tough sell that requires a deft hand, which first-timer Trumbo doesn’t readily demonstrate.
Whatever your feelings about the message in Trumbo’s work, the fact that the message was delivered in a very heavy-handed manner at a time when “message movies” had been rather overdone didn’t do the picture any favors. Reviews like Roger Greenspun’s in the New York Times were abysmal, which for small independent productions like this in those days were deadly, condemning the film to near-anonymity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNf9N0Cz25E
The film ended up struggling to find an audience, although it did ultimately show up here and there, picking up a few fans along the way.
Two of whom were James Hetfield and Lars Urlich…
Two of the founders of Metallica, the guitarist and drummer worked together on the song “One” for their 1988 album …And Justice for All. Urlich mentioned in interviews a year later that he was influenced to write the piece, about a soldier who loses all his limbs and cannot relay his pain, directly by the film Johnny Got His Gun. And when it was time for the video to support the single, clips from the film were incorporated into the work:
The performance of the song live incorporating scenes and sound clips from the film also became a crowd pleaser, and Metallica embraced the film. Which in the normal course of business entitled the rights holders to the movie, when the band’s license for the use of the film came to the end of its term, to charge a higher fee for continued use of the film. Much like an artist who secures synchronization rights from a songwriter when doing a cover, if you license a work for your performance and want to continue to use it, the songwriter has the right to charge more for continued usage; it’s entirely expected in cases like this.
Metallica, however, did the unexpected and put together an offer to buy out the ownership of all rights to the film. When the deal was concluded, all rights to Douglas Trumbo’s film were in the hands of the band; in fact, not only did they continue to have the right to use the film in their video and on stage, they were responsible for the movie finally getting a DVD release.
Joe Bonham may have lost the ability to tell his doctors what he wanted, but he now owes the chance to get his story out to Hetfield and Urlich.
NEXT TIME: Stop me if you heard this joke before, the one about the alien invasion novel adapted by a comedy troupe…
