Quote of the Day (Budd Schulberg, on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Oscar Speech Omission)

“I watch the Awards shows year after year and I have noticed a trend. When Gwyneth Paltrow won for Shakespeare in Love, she thanked the producer and her agents. She thanked her hairdresser and every member of her family. She must have thanked 50 people. But she never mentioned the writer. She didn’t even mention Shakespeare. They don’t want to thank the people who created their characters and who put the words in their mouth. There can’t be anything without the writer.”— Oscar-winning screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg (1914-2009), quoted in “The Real Contender: A Conversation with ‘On the Waterfront’ Screenwriter Budd Schulberg,” Hudson Reporter, July 29, 2000

Budd Schulberg, with more than 80 years of experience in the film community as the son of a studio executive, screenwriter, and observer of the industry, was venting about the lack of respect so long accorded to scribes in Hollywood.

Their indignities have been legion—they have watched in frustration as:

*their terrific script goes into “turnaround,” or development hell; or as

*their script is given to one or more other writers for polishing (Turner and Hooch, the early Tom Hanks film that teamed him with an ugly dog, went through eight different writers!); or as

*their script gets turned by some combination of other writers, directors and producers into something radically different (or, in the words of William Holden’s hack in Sunset Boulevard about his last project, it “was about Okies in the Dust Bowl. You'd never know because when it reached the screen, the whole thing played on a torpedo boat”); or as

*they are banished from the set so they can’t object to the director's damage to their work; or as

*the angrier ones try to use whatever meager leverage they’ve accumulated to protect their scripts by becoming directors themselves, as with Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder; or finally, as Schulberg noted,

*actors forget to say thanks for writing the lines that helped them win the biggest professional honor of their careers.

But, if Schulberg had lived almost a decade longer, his outrage might have been, if anything, even more intense than what he conveyed in this interview.

After all, that producer that Gwyneth Paltrow thanked in her weepy speech on Oscar night almost a quarter century ago? It was Harvey Weinstein, a figure she later described as a “bully”—and now, of course, not just the poster boy of the #MeToo movement but also a felon convicted of rape and assault.

By the way, “the writer” Paltrow neglected to mention? It was actually two: Marc Norman and Sir Tom Stoppard—and that year they shared the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Shakespeare in Love.

So let’s see tomorrow night who thanks the writers—and who, like Paltrow, for whatever reason, never gets around to it.

Quote of the Day (Budd Schulberg, on Hollywood’s 3 Products)

“Sometimes I think the three chief products this town turns out are moving pictures, ambition, and fear." –Novelist-screenwriter-memoirist Budd Schulberg (1914-2009), What Makes Sammy Run? (1941)

Quote of the Day (Budd Schulberg, on 1920s Hollywood)

“For me, it was Home Sweet Home, a lovely place to play with lions and alligators, to ride my bike down lanes of pine and pepper trees, and to make lemonade from my own lemon tree. But by the time I was in the third grade I had learned the hard lesson that filmmaking was anything but glamorous. Not only was it hard, tedious work, with the same scene shot over and over again until a temperamental director had decided it had achieved perfection, it was also a place inhabited by demoniac film producers and conniving movie stars.”—Budd Schulberg (1914-2009), on his childhood as a son of a Hollywood production head in the silent-film era, in Moving Pictures: Memoirs of a Hollywood Prince (1981)

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on a Disastrous Boxing Match)

“Knew I would be asleep by 5—so went around with Scott [Fitzgerald] to get Morley [Callaghan] to box right away—I couldnt [sic] see him hardly—had a couple of whiskey’s enroute—Scott was to keep time and we were to box 1 minute rounds with 2 minute rests on acct. of my condition…Morley commenced to pop me and cut my mouth, mushed up my face in general—I was pooped as could be…Can still feel with my tongue the big scar on my lower lip…I slipped and went down once and lit on my arm and put my left shoulder out in the first round and it pulled a tendon so that it was pretty sore afterwards.”—Ernest Hemingway, letter to his Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins, August 28, 1929, in The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins: Correspondence 1925-1947, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, with the assistance of Robert W. Trogdon (1996)

A good deal more was injured than Ernest Hemingway’s left shoulder and lip in this incident, one of the most famous non-professional boxing matches of all time, at the American Club in Paris, a month before the account to Perkins. His pride also suffered a blow. The macho writer, a pugilist far more enthusiastic than skilled, hated the idea of losing, let alone losing badly, let alone losing badly to another amateur with a somewhat pudgy physique.

Instead of blaming his insufficient skills, or even his stupidity in drinking when he needed his reflexes, Papa blamed F. Scott Fitzgerald for not keeping proper time.

I’m not sure about the data of the photo accompanying this post, but my guess is that it was some years later than Hemingway’s now-legendary bout with 26-year-old Canadian expatriate writer Morley Callaghan. Hemingway himself had just turned 30. Gray would not have seeped into his beard at this point, nor would his weight have become so problematic. (By the time he liberated the Ritz Bar 15 years later, Hemingway weighed 250 pounds on his six-foot frame.)

The future Nobel laureate was always testing himself against somebody else. If he was writing a war novel, it was against Tolstoy. If it involved boxing, it would be whoever was at hand. He almost come to blows with Budd Schulberg a decade later after challenging him with, “What makes you think you know so much about prizefighting?”

Underlying tensions among Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Callaghan were brought to the surface by this match. Their friendships would never be the same.

Hemingway and Callaghan had become pals when they were correspondents for the Toronto Daily Star. This wasn’t the first time they’d fought, nor even the first time Callaghan had made him bleed—which should have taught Hemingway to be careful. Hemingway had become internationally known with his novels and short stories a mere three years before, but now the younger Callaghan was receiving attention. In other words, Hemingway had a rival.

The relationship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald was, by this time, even more fraught than that between Hemingway and Callaghan. When they first met, Fitzgerald was the older, more successful writer, and he lent Hemingway money and some excellent advice on The Sun Also Rises.

But Hemingway was surpassing Fitzgerald and had begun to view his friend cynically. Zelda Fitzgerald and Hemingway formed a mutual hatred society. Nor did it help that another in their expatriate circle, gay author Robert McAlpon, had spread a false rumor that the two men were lovers.

Fitzgerald made the mistake of agreeing to become the timekeeper in the match. He became so enthralled by the action that he forgot the prescribed limit, letting the round in which Hemingway was KAO’d go longer. “Oh my God!’ he cried out after Hemingway went down. “I let the round go four minutes!’

“Alright Scott,” Ernest said. ‘If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake.”

It’s almost comical, this notion of a literary version of the Dempsey-Tunney “long count” fight, isn’t it? Only the results for the friendships turned out not so funny. The grievous blow to Hemingway’s pride was worsened when somehow the incident made it into the newspapers. Fitzgerald quarreled with Callaghan and, worst of all, Hemingway now had it in for Fitzgerald.

Really, that’s the only thing you can conclude after reading Papa’s A Moveable Feast. I didn’t think it possible that the highly effective malice on display in the originally published version of the memoir could be exceeded, but it appears to be now in the new version of the book.

Yes, yes—Hemingway allowed that Fitzgerald was a fine writer. But he also included an anecdote that 99 people out of 100 who’ve read the book will remember—i.e., Fitzgerald’s fear (pushed by Zelda) that he wasn’t—well, well-equipped.

The new account of the Hemingway-Fitzgerald friendship includes this conversation between Papa and son John, or “Bumby”:

“Monsieur Fitzgerald is sick Papa?”

“He is sick because he drinks too much and he cannot work.”

“Does he not respect his métier?”

“Madame his wife does not respect it or she is envious of it.”

“He should scold her.”

“It is not so simple.”

The beauty of this conversation is that Bumby, at only about five or six years old, would probably be too young to remember it years later—or, more important, dispute its truthfulness.

Hemingway did not write about the Callaghan bout in A Moveable Feast. The Canadian did, however, in his memoir, That Summer in Paris (1963). In old age, he was annoyed at the amount of attention this incident received at the expense of his work. “I want to be remembered for some story I wrote, not for this nonsense,” Callaghan said, in a clip included in the CBC documentary, The Life and Times of Morley Callaghan.

Hemingway should have kept away from boxing and literary assassination and stuck to fiction. There he really was a champ, as he was about to prove again with the novel he was proofreading at the time of his encounter with Callaghan: A Farewell to Arms.

Quote of the Day (Budd Schulberg, on Hearing Of His Co-Screenwriter: F. Scott Fitzgerald)

“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, 2009

Budd 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.