Trumbo

The stories behind these writers are just as fascinating as their most celebrated works.

Awards season is in full swing and now the Screen Actors Guild Awards nominations are in. While the SAG Awards are usually a pretty strong indicator of who’s going to win at the Oscars, this year’s nominees were all over the place. Not in a “Hmm, that’s peculiar” way, but in more of a “What the?!” way. Trumbo took the lead this year with three nominations, leaving award prognosticators and film journalists scratching their chins.

When the first trailer for Jay Roach’s Trumbo dropped this past summer, I thought I was getting a brief peek at what would become one of fall’s most buzzed about biopics and with an Oscar-worthy leading role. After all, it stars Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo, the politically undeterred Hollywood screenwriter blacklisted for his Communist beliefs during the Red Scare. A movie about movies with a great cast, what could go wrong? But that’s just the thing with biopics, especially ones about Hollywood, which face the risk of mistaking homage for pastiche.

Bryan Cranston took a little break from leading roles since the end of Breaking Bad, which might have been a smart move after being so prevalent in our pop culture consciousness for several years. But that’s changing with Trumbo, the new film in which Cranston stars as the famously disgraced screenwriter, and the first trailer is quite fetching.

Now that Bryan Cranston is done shaving his head for 'Breaking Bad,' he can finally lead a motion picture, and it appears that the former Meth King of New Mexico will star in 'Trumbo,' a biopic about Dalton Trumbo -- the most famous of the screenwriters put on the Hollywood Blacklist.