budd schulberg

the best.selling novelist, boxing correspondent and Oscar-winning screenwriter of On the Waterfront. has died. He was 95.Schulberg was a complicated man . IMHO, responsible as a screenwriter for a couple of the greatest achievments of American cinema. On The Waterfront, a collaboration with his friend Elia Kazan, is most often noted as a masterpiece with good reason but I'm a bigger fan of their A Face in the Crowd. Check it out if you haven't seen it. It's the most prescient film about our political and media culture ever made - years before Paddy Cheyevsky and Sydney Lumet created Network.

Schulberg alienated many old friends and liberals when he, unfortunately, testified before the House UnAmerican Activites Committee. But there was much more to Schulberg's life than that episode, shoddy as it no doubt was. (As a footnote, Schulberg served in the OSS with John Ford and was responsible for arresting Hitler's propagandist, the admittedly brilliant filmmaker Len Reifenstahl, when the Allies occupied Germany.) But foremost, Budd Schulberg was a great writer who brought some indelible characters and stories to the screen. This day, at least, I'll remember him for that.Mr. Schulberg, the son of a movie executive born in New York, rose to fame in the 40’s and 50’s with a succession of award winning books and screenplays, most notably his novels What Makes Sammy Run (1941) and The Harder They Fall (1947), and the film A Face in the Crowd (1957). But it was On the Waterfront that Mr.

Schulberg was best known for. The film, starring a young Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint, nearly swept the 1954 Academy Awards, earning eight Oscars, including one for Best Picture and another for Best Actor, which went to Mr. Brando. The film was so influential that it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.Schulberg's influence over Hollywood was strong.

The Sammy Glick character from What Makes Sammy Run is the paradigm of power-driven, amoral studio executives.Although What Makes Sammy Run was never made into a film it reached Broadway as a musical in the 1960s, and Schulberg himself directed a 1959 TV adaptation works as varied as The Player and Sweet Smell of Success owe a debt to Schulberg's tale. His novel "The Disenchanted, another bitter tale of Hollywood, also cast a long shadow over the public's perception of the fate of such literary figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner and the time they spent in Los Angeles as screenwriters.