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 Andy Griffith starred in Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd," based on a short story by Budd Schulberg.
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Schulberg could do it all
--and did in his career
of TheColumnists.com
When Budd Schulberg died last week at age 95, I had to face a grim reality: Almost all of the living literary lights of my youth had finally winked out. Yes, Ray Bradbury is still out there, putting words on paper somewhere, but his glow is fading rapidly and I haven't read much from him in his old age.
I suppose I'd better define what I consider to be my youth before I go much further with this line of thought. Let's say my early teens through my late 20s. Or, if you prefer, the period from roughly 1952 through 1968.
I was always a prodigious reader and had actually read quite a few serious adult novelists by my early teens, along with the "boyhood" writers I was expected to read, like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne. I was one of the kids who actually read Classic Comics editions, then read the real books.
For instance, I probably read John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" while I was in junior high school, although I'm pretty sure I didn't yet completely understand why Curly always wore a glove to keep his hand "soft" for his wife.
During my high school and college years, I became deeply interested in writers I considered to be strong influences on me. You see, I knew from a very early age that I'd someday make my living as a writer, although I didn't think it would be primarily as a journalist. I wrote short stories from my early teens on, figuring I'd be a fiction writer and, ultimately, either a novelist or a screenwriter.
That's where I really connected with Budd Schulberg. He was a marvelous writer of short stories, novels and screenplays. He worked in all the areas of writing I wanted to succeed in and had made his mark in each of them.
I believe I first became aware of him when I saw his novel "What Makes Sammy Run" was available in a Modern Library edition. I loved the Modern Library, which reprinted all kinds of great literature in compact hardcover editions that sold for about $1.50 in the early 1950s. Inside the slipcover of each book there was a printed list of all their titles. In 1952-53, I was still in junior high school and there were no English literature classes. If I wanted to learn about the great books, I was on my own. The Modern Library was a great place to start.
I think I got my copy of "What Makes Sammy Run" from a used book store and probably paid about 75 cents for it. I loved it because it was about a young guy working in the film industry and I already was crazy about backstage stories set in Hollywood. Schulberg was writing about an opportunistic young guy named Sammy Glick, who was "on the make" to go places in Hollywood. And he didn't care much who he hurt on the way up.
It was an eye-opener for me. I'd never read anything like it. It peeled away quite a bit of the glossy Hollywood veneer and essentially showed it was not some sacred place where only creative geniuses could prosper. Years later, when I really started working with Hollywood people, I was not surprised to discover there were Sammy Glicks everywhere you turned.
In those days, I wasn't much interested in the sports that most school kids got excited about. I cared only about one sport--prizefighting. That gave me another motive for reading more of Schulberg's work. I'd liked his novel so well that I went looking for more. The only other book I could find by him was "The Disenchanted," which was for sale at a local stationary store that had a little corner where new books were sold. They wanted something like $5 for it, which was out of my league then because the only money I had was from my paper route and mowing lawns in the neighborhood.
But I found a paperback collection of Schulberg's short stories called "Some Faces in the Crowd." Several of them were about boxing and I ate them up. I thought he wrote about boxing with incredible authenticity. But my favorite story in that book was NOT about boxing. I think it was called "Your Arkansas Traveller" and it was about a folksy kind of guy who becomes a big radio star, but is really a scoundrel at heart.
I'd say Schulberg rose close to the top of my list of literary influences during my high school years. In 1954, while I was still a sophomore, I saw a little movie that came to town without much fanfare. It was black and white at a time when most movies were in color and CinemaScope. It was called "On the Waterfront."
I had never seen a movie as powerful as "On the Waterfront," which won the Oscar as Best Picture of 1954, Its star, Marlon Brando, won the Best Actor award and his leading lady, Eva Marie Saint, won Best Supporting Actress. Elia Kazan won the Best Director Oscar and Schulberg won an Oscar for writing the screenplay.
To this day, I consider "On the Waterfront" my all-time favorite movie. It couldn't miss with me because its hero, Terry Malloy (Brando) was a former prizefighter who decides to defy the mob that controls union labor along the waterfront. Schulberg's script contains one of the most iconic scenes in Hollywood history, the one in which the battered ex-prizefighter accuses his racketeer brother (Rod Steiger) of ruining his career by making him take a dive against an opponent he could have beaten easily.
"I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am," the inarticulate Terry tells brother Charlie.
Schulberg's screenplay was based on a series of articles that had exposed waterfront corruption. After the movie was filmed, Schulberg novelized his screenplay, which was published as "Waterfront." It remains a most compelling book that augments and intensifies the powerful screenplay.
I didn't know at the time that both director Kazan and writer Schulberg had testified against former colleagues who were accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee of being involved in communist activities in the past. In the movie, Terry Malloy testifies against the union racketeers and, presumably, helps send them to prison. Many critics now consider "On the Waterfront" to be Kazan's and Schulberg's spirited defense of what they did during the anti-communist "witch hunt" era.
Though I can see where that's a legitimate way to look at the movie, I consider the movie a powerful work of art that transcends any political motives attached to it. My respect for both Kazan and Schulberg as creative artists has never flagged because of that issue, although I certainly can't condone what they did.
The year after "On the Waterfront," Kazan and Warner Bros. turned Schulberg's "Arkansas Traveller" short story into another unforgettable movie--"A Face in the Crowd," which starred folksy comic Andy Griffith as the unsavory hero. I was a junior in high school when that film came out.
In my senior year, Schulberg's earlier novel "The Harder They Fall" reached the screen and I considered it another knockout. The book is even better, but the 1956 movie is especially memorable because it turned out to be the last film made by Humphrey Bogart. In the film, Bogart plays a jaded fellow whose career is on the skids, which causes him to accept a new job helping promote an inempt giant prizefighter into being a heavyweight title contender.
Schulberg's story was rooted in the true story of Italian giant Primo Carnera, who became world heavyweight champ in the early 1930s at a time of heavy mob influence in boxing, but was pounded into mincemeat by Max Baer, who handed Carnera a savage beating and took away his title. Mike Lane played the giant and the real Max Baer played the character Schulberg had fashioned around Baer's image. It's a great movie from a great book.
Over the years, I believe I've read most everything Budd Schulberg wrote, including his novel about the difficult task of working with F. Scott Fitzgerald during that writer's fall from grace. (I finally had the money to buy it!) No matter what you might think of his Oscar-winning screenplay for "On the Waterfront," you would have to be impressed if you sat down with his novels and short stories and discovered what a fabulous fiction writer he was. Schulberg was deeply interested in social issues and the way people behave under the pressures urban living can put upon them. It has been some years since I picked up any of those volumes, but I have them still and am now inspired to pick them up again and re-read them as a final salute to one of the most inspiring literary figures who enriched my youth.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The photo from "A Face in the Crowd" is courtesy of Warner Bros. The photos from "On the Waterfront" and "The Harder They Fall" are courtesy of Columbia Pictures. This column first posted Aug. 17, 2009.
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