Career
Being the son of a successful Hollywood producer, Schulberg had an insider's viewpoint on the true happenings of Hollywood, and his literature and film reflected this.
His most famed writing What Makes Sammy Run? allowed the public to see the harshness of Hollywood stardom via Sammy Glick's Cinderella story that does not end happily ever after. This novel was criticized by some as being self-directed antisemitism.
In 1950, Schulberg published 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 was then assumed by reviewers to be a thinly disguised portrait of Fitzgerald, who had died ten years earlier) is portrayed as a tragic and flawed figure, with whom the young screenwriter becomes disillusioned. The novel was the 10th bestselling novel in the United States in 1950 and was adapted as a Broadway play in 1958, starring Jason Robards (who won a Tony Award for his performance) and George Grizzard as the character loosely based on Schulberg. In 1958, Schulberg wrote and co-produced (with his younger brother, Stuart) the film Wind Across the Everglades, directed by Nicholas Ray.
Schulberg wrote the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd starring newcomer Andy Griffith in which an obscure country singer rises to fame, and becomes extraordinarily manipulative to preserve his success and power.
Schulberg 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. Schulberg testified as a friendly witness that Party members had sought to influence the content of What Makes Sammy Run and "named names" of other Hollywood communists.
Schulberg was also a sports writer and former chief boxing correspondent for Sports Illustrated. He was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in 2002 in recognition of his contributions to the sport.
In 1965, after a devastating riot had ripped apart the fabric of the Watts section of Los Angeles, Schulberg formed the Watts Writers Workshop in an attempt to ease frustrations and bring artistic training to the economically impoverished district.
Read more about this topic: Budd Schulberg
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)