“I thought it was just a joke, like saying ‘Leo Tolstoy.’ And I said, ‘Scott Fitzgerald — isn’t he dead?’ And he [producer Walter Wanger] said, ‘No, he’s not dead, he’s right in the next room reading your script.’ ”—Screenwriter/novelist Budd Schulberg, recalling when he was assigned The Great Gatsby author as his co-screenwriter, quoted in Tim Weiner, “Budd Schulberg, Screenwriter, Dies at 95,” The New York Times, August 6, 2009Budd Schulberg, the On the Waterfront screenwriter who died two days ago, rattled off by the cartful fascinating stories similar to this when I saw him at a lecture and book signing at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) in Teaneck, N.J., more than a decade ago.
Unfortunately, for all the years he spent around actors (he was not only a screenwriter, but also the son of a Paramount studio production head), Schulberg never learned to pitch his voice for dramatic effect. Seldom have I heard so much intrinsically interesting material delivered in such a monotone as that night in Teaneck.
To get back to the above quote:
The studio brass sent the 24-year-old screenwriter and Fitzgerald to Dartmouth to soak up local atmosphere for their next assignment, a forgettable college film, Winter Carnival. Maybe they thought that the author of the Ivy League-set This Side of Paradise might have special insights into Hanover, N.H., that might help his younger partner. But the move turned out to be a fiasco after Fitzgerald went on a bender that got him fired.
A dozen years later, Schulberg used Fitzgerald as the model for Manley Halliday, his washed-up writer protagonist, in the novel The Disenchanted. I haven’t read it, but at some point I might, because online reviews indicate that it’s one of the most compassionate views of Fitzgerald ever written (certainly more so than the one by frenemy Ernest Hemingway in A Movable Feast).
The night I saw him, Schulberg was appearing at FDU to sign copies of his 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run? His satire about a Hollywood heel made the name Sammy Glick as much a synonym for shameless opportunism as that of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp a century before. For awhile, it appeared that the screenwriter would be permanently persona non grata in the town where he grew up.
A half century later, Schulberg told the FDU audience, he was astonished to find young men coming up to thank him for writing a how-to manual on success in Hollywood!
Schulberg wrote several fine screenplays, including one far ahead of its time in depicting the meteoric rise and equally rapid fall of a TV demagogue, A Face in the Crowd. But he is probably best known for his Oscar-winning work for On the Waterfront.
The script was originally sent to Marlon Brando, Schulberg recalled, but the actor didn’t even respond. (This might have had something to do with the Brando’s disdain for Schulberg’s appearance as a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee.) The script then found its way to Frank Sinatra, who was dying to play introspective street tough Terry Malloy. The Hoboken native felt the role in his bones. It could have been his life he was reading.
Suddenly Brando changed his mind about making the film, and Sinatra lost his opportunity. “I think he was pretty sore,” Schulberg said. “And you know what? I think he could have done pretty well with the role, if he’d had the chance.”
After the lecture, Schulberg autographed copies of his books. While he was signing my copy of What Makes Sammy Run?, I asked if he knew another novelist who’d spent some time in Hollywood in the 1930s, one of my favorites, John O’Hara. Yes, he answered, he had. They had started out as friends, but eventually O’Hara quarreled with him and they stopped speaking.
“What was the fight about?” I asked.
“I forget,” he began. He wrinkled his forehead, dredging up the distant memory, then continued, “I think he lent me his car once, and I forgot to put gas in it.” He shook his head. “He could be crazy!”
Far more than is usually the case for Hollywood scribes, Schulberg’s passing has garnered much attention. It’s a tribute, I think, to movies like On the Waterfront that spring organically from ordinary people’s lives rather than from high-concept sessions among studio heads. Hollywood, take note and return to what you do best.
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