SUE OF A FLY: BUDD SCHULBERG CROSSES OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE...

Budd Schulberg, Screenwriter, Dies at 95

Budd Schulberg, who wrote the award-winning screenplay for “On the Waterfront” and created a classic American archetype of naked ambition, Sammy Glick, in his novel “What Makes Sammy Run?,” died on Wednesday.

He was 95 and lived in the Brookside section of Westhampton Beach, N.Y.

... Mr. Schulberg also wrote journalism, short stories, novels and biographies. He collaborated with F. Scott Fitzgerald, arrested the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and named names before a Communist-hunting Congressional committee. But he was best known for writing some of the most famous lines in the history of the movies.
Some were delivered by Marlon Brando playing the longshoreman Terry Malloy in the 1954 film “On the Waterfront.” Malloy had lost a shot at a prizefighting title by taking a fall for easy money.
“I coulda been a contender,” Malloy tells his brother, Charley (Rod Steiger). “I coulda been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am.”
The script, which won one of eight Oscars awarded to the film, bears echoes of Mr. Schulberg’s own political struggle: the film’s director, Elia Kazan, had also chosen to name names.
At one point Father Barry encourages the dockworkers to testify against the mob. In America, he says, there are “ways of fighting back.”
“Getting the facts to the public,” the priest continues. “Testifying for what is right against what is wrong. What’s ratting to them is telling the truth for you. Can’t you see that?”
Mr. Schulberg ... joined the Communist Party of the United States after he returned to Hollywood. “It didn’t take a genius to tell you that something was vitally wrong with the country,” he said in the 2006 interview, recalling his decision to join the party.
“The unemployment was all around us,” he said. “The bread lines and the apple sellers. I couldn’t help comparing that with my own family’s status, with my father; at one point he was making $11,000 a week. And I felt a shameful contrast between the haves and the have-nots very early.”
His romance with Communism ended six years later, when he quit the party after feeling pressure to bend his writing to fit its doctrines.
Mr. Schulberg had been identified as a party member in testimony before the House committee. Called to testify, he publicly named eight other Hollywood figures as members, including the screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. and the director Herbert Biberman.
They were two among the Hollywood 10 — witnesses who said the First Amendment gave them the right to think as they pleased and keep their silence before the committee. All were blacklisted and convicted of contempt of Congress. Losing their livelihoods, Lardner served a year in prison and Biberman six months.
In the turmoil of the Red Scare, Mr. Schulberg’s testimony was seen as a betrayal by many, an act of principle by others. The liberal consensus in Hollywood was that Lardner had acquitted himself more gracefully before the committee when asked if he had been a Communist: “I could answer it, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.”
In the 2006 interview... he said he had named names because the party represented a real threat to freedom of speech.
“They say that you testified against your friends, but once they supported the party against me, even though I did have some personal attachments, they were really no longer my friends,” he said. “And I felt that if they cared about real freedom of speech, they should have stood up for me when I was fighting the party.”
... After their joint success with “On the Waterfront,” Mr. Schulberg wrote and Mr. Kazan directed “A Face in the Crowd” (1957), one of the first films to weigh the political clout of television. Based on a Schulberg short story, the film depicts the transformation of a country singer, played by Andy Griffith, from power-drunk star into populist demagogue.
... “I’d like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society” while being “as entertaining as possible,” he said in the 2006 interview.
“Because if you don’t” entertain, he said, “nobody’s listening.”