Last week marked the centenary of the birth of Budd Schulberg ’36, a prolific and lauded writer known for novels such as “What Makes Sammy Run?” and screenplays, including the Academy Award winner for best screenplay, “On the Waterfront” (1954). Schulberg died in 2009 at age 95.
Schulberg, the son of Hollywood film producer B.P. Schulberg and Adeline Jaffe Schulberg, attended Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Mass. He later studied sociology and English at the College, where he graduated cum laude.
He wrote for The Dartmouth and the Jack-O-Lantern humor magazine, participated in theater projects and was a member of Pi Lambda Phi fraternity.
Film and media studies professor Joanna Rapf recounted how her father, Maurice Rapf ’35, and Schulberg would “create all kinds of mischief” on the Hollywood backlots where their fathers worked before the two ended up at Dartmouth together.
Both Schulberg and Maurice Rapf studied abroad in the Soviet Union in 1934, and soon after their return, they joined The Communist Party USA. Schulberg left the Party after only a few years, though he remained a lifelong liberal.
Upon graduation, Schulberg returned to Hollywood to pursue a screenwriting career. Film producer Walter Wanger, a member of the Class of 1915, hired Schulberg to write the screenplay for a comedy about college life set at Dartmouth and assigned writer F. Scott Fitzgerald to co-script it. Upon receiving this assignment, Schulberg famously remarked, “I thought he was dead,” referring to Fitzgerald, whose career was on the decline.
The pair visited Dartmouth’s 1939 Winter Carnival with a film crew to work on the project, but the trip was so disastrous that they were both fired before the weekend was over. Very little writing or filming took place. Fitzgerald was highly inebriated the entire visit and fell down the steps of the Hanover Inn.
The trip to Hanover became the basis for Schulberg’s 1950 novel, “The Disenchanted.” Schulberg was eventually re-hired to work on the Winter Carnival film, and he finished the project with the help of Maurice Rapf. Although the film enjoyed little commercial success, it is shown on campus during Winter Carnival weekend.
While living in Norwich a few years later, Schulberg completed his best-known novel, “What Makes Sammy Run?” Published in 1941, the piece satirizes Hollywood’s cut throat environment and tells the story of its protagonist’s rise from office boy to studio executive. The novel was controversial in Hollywood because some considered it anti-Semitic and based off experiences with specific executives.
During World War II, Schulberg served in the Office of Strategic Services, overseen by Hollywood film director John Ford. In 1945, Schulberg and director Ray Kellogg supervised the creation of “The Nazi Plan,” a documentary that used German propaganda films and photographs as source material. The film was admitted for use as visual evidence at the Nuremberg trials later that year, supporting the prosecution’s cases against Nazi military and political leaders being tried for war crimes.
In 1951, Schulberg was called to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committee, having been named as a communist sympathizer. In his testimony, Schulberg listed names of Hollywood communists who were subsequently added to the committee’s blacklist, which barred specific actors and writers from employment.
His actions were greatly criticized by friends in Hollywood at the time and ended his friendship with Maurice Rapf, Joanna Rapf said.
“They went for years without speaking to each other, which was really sad,” Joanna Rapf said. “The friendship was actually renewed at Dartmouth when both their sons were freshmen, and they met on the street corner at the Hanover Inn with their wives.”
After this reconciliation, their friendship continued for the rest of their lives.
A few years after his HUAC testimony, Schulberg wrote the screenplay for “On the Waterfront” (1954), a film about corruption among longshoremen in New York City starring Marlon Brando as an informant. The film won eight Oscars, including best picture and best screenplay.
Although based on true events, namely a series of 1949 articles detailing corruption organized by mob-connected union boss Johnny Friendly on the Manhattan and Brooklyn waterfronts, some viewed “On the Waterfront” as Schulberg and director Elia Kazan’s attempts to justify their HUAC testimony, as Kazan had also named names before the committee.
While perhaps true for Kazan, Joanna Rapf, who wrote a book about the film and its surrounding controversy, has argued that this was not Schulberg’s intention. Rather, Schulberg’s interest in writing the screenplay had to do with historical content and a strong vein of social conscience, she said.
Film and media professor Bill Phillips ’71 described the film as his favorite, a masterful work that stands up to multiple viewings.
Schulberg and Kazan followed up their successful partnership with another project a few years later, “A Face in the Crowd” (1957), a film about the power of television based on one of Schulberg’s short stories. The film starred Andy Griffith as a drifter character who rises to fame with success as a radio host, but whose arrogance later undoes his gains.
Following riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, Schulberg founded the Watts Writers workshops to encourage teenagers in the predominately black neighborhood to promote social justice through writing. Schulberg also co-founded the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in New York in 1971.
“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,” Schulberg said in a 2006 interview with The New York Times. He emphasized the importance of entertainment, too: “Because if you don’t [entertain], nobody’s listening.”
In 2004, the Dartmouth Film Society presented Schulberg with the Dartmouth Film Award, and the College purchased Schulberg’s collected papers, which total 234 linear feet, in 2006. Housed in Rauner Speical Collections Library, the papers include correspondences with Kazan, Robert F. Kennedy, Fitzgerald and numerous other Hollywood celebrities.
Film and media studies professor Mary Desjardins, who met Schulberg on a couple of occasions, recalled positive interactions with him.
“He was very gentlemanly and a great storyteller, with a phenomenal ability to recall details about both his time at Dartmouth and old Hollywood,” Desjardins said in an email.
Desjardins and film and media studies professor Mark Williams are organizing a symposium on about Schulberg for November. It will feature film screenings, scholarly commentary and a showcase of some of Rauner’s materials.
