The big events happening in my life were all on the home front. The world was in turmoil-a hot war in Korea, a cold war with the Soviets, suspicion and division in America-yet I was lucky. I was untouched by the blacklist and, frankly, I wasn’t thinking a lot about it. But, looking back on it with some distance-and I’m almost ashamed to admit it-my own life couldn’t have been much better. Another round of congressional hearings aimed at Hollywood was already being planned.

The fear that caused their imprisonment was still on the rise. Each man had to be wondering what the future had in store for him. IN THE SUMMER OF 1950, both Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast were languishing in dank prison cells, thousands of miles from their homes and families. “Good luck, and may fortune smile upon…most of you.” Though it was written 52 years after the making of the film, it’s clear that Douglas’s memory-and master storytelling skills-were as sharp as ever. But Kirk Douglas believed in the film, saying that “the story of Spartacus is as important today as it was fifty years ago-and two thousand years ago.” Luckily for Douglas, it was all worth it-the film was a tremendous critical and financial success, and cemented his place in Hollywood stardom.īelow, in tribute to Kirk Douglas’s death, is an excerpt from I Am Spartacus!. It was a risky decision to hire Trumbo, but it was also a fitting one-the source novel Spartacus, about a slave who leads a rebellion against his owners, had been written by another HUAC defier, Howard Fast, during his jail sentence.įrom heated moments with then-unknown director Stanley Kubrick to struggles with his leading lady and negotiations with the film’s other stars (Sir Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov), creating Spartacus was never easy. Trumbo was one of the “Unfriendly Ten” who had gone to jail rather than testify to HUAC, and spent a year in jail and a decade on the blacklist for it.

On top of being a masterful achievement of cinema that would become a cultural touchstone, Spartacus effectively ended the notorious Hollywood blacklist that was a byproduct of the infamous HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) trials.ĭouglas, who believed the ‘50s were a time of fear and paranoia and saw how the blacklist was ruining the lives of innocent Americans, went ahead and hired Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay for Spartacus. As he wrote in its introduction, he had lived through “sixteen presidents, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and a score of political crises from Teapot Dome to Watergate to Bill Clinton’s impeachment for being publicly serviced in the White House.” Kirk Douglas had been witness to many historic moments-and in 1959, when he was producing and starring in Spartacus, he created some of them, too. In 2012, when Kirk Douglas was 95 years old, he penned a memoir called I Am Spartacus!.

I am spartacus by kirk douglas