Budd Schulberg

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Budd Schulberg (born March 27, 1914 in New York City, New York) is an American screenwriter and novelist.

He was Hollywood "royalty", the son of B.P. Schulberg, head of Paramount Pictures and Adeline Jafee-Schulberg, sister to agent/film producer Sam Jaffe. Budd Schulberg is best known for his 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run, his 1947 novel The Harder They Fall, his 1954 Academy-award-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront, and his 1957 screenplay A Face in the Crowd.

He encountered political controversy in 1951 when screenwriter Richard Collins, testifying to the House Un-American Activities Committee, named Schulberg as a former member of the Communist Party.^[1] Schulberg immediately volunteered to testify and appeared as a friendly witness. He testified that Party members had sought to influence the content of What Makes Sammy Run and "named names" of other alleged Hollywood communists.^[2] His testimony saw many of his colleagues added to the Hollywood blacklist.

Schulberg attended Deerfield Academy and then went on to Dartmouth College, where he was actively involved in the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern humor magazine. In 1939 he collaborated on the screenplay for Winter Carnival, a light comedy set at Dartmouth. One of his collaborators was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was at the time attempting to pursue a Hollywood career. Dartmouth College awarded him an honorary degree in 1960.

In 1950 Schulberg published a novel, The Disenchanted, about a young screenwriter who collaborates on a screenplay about a college winter festival with a famous novelist at the nadir of his career. The novelist (who at the time was assumed by reviewers to be a thinly disguised portrait of Fitzgerald, dead ten years earlier) is portrayed as a tragic but contemptible figure, with whom the young screenwriter becomes disillusioned. According to the New York Times, it was the tenth bestselling novel in the United States in 1950. The Disenchanted was adapted to an off-Broadway play in the early-1960s and starred Jason Robards Jr..

In 1965, after a devastating riot had ripped apart the fabric of the Watts community in Los Angeles, Schulberg formed the Watts Writers Workshop as an attempt to ameliorate frustrations and bring artistic training to the economically impoverished district.

He is married to his fourth wife, Betsey, and has two children, Benn and Jessica. He resides in Westhampton, Long Island, New York.

[edit] References

^ Joyce, Gare (2004) "Why Budd Schulberg is Unrepentant." Walrus Magazine. [1]
^ Trussell, C. P. (1951) "Schulberg Tells of Red Dictation: Move To Control His Writing Cause Him to Leave Party, Novelist Says in Inquiry," The New York Times, May 24, 1951, p. 16. Schulberg "testified voluntarily before [HUAC] today that he became a Communist during the late Nineteen Thirties but quit the party when it tried to dictate what he should write." He named John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten, as trying to pressure him to write under part guidance, and "named names" of Waldo Salt, Ring Lardner Jr., Lester Cole, John Bright, Paul Jarrico, Gordon Kahn, writers; Herbert Biberman, director; and Meta Reis Rosenberg, agent.