On the Waterfront Scribe Budd Schulberg Dead at 95

Budd Schulberg, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of On the Waterfront and author of the novel and musical book for What Makes Sammy Run?, died on August 5 of natural causes at his home in Westhampton Beach, NY. He was 95.

As a writer, Schulberg excelled in almost every medium: plays, novels, short stories, screenplays and nonfiction. The onetime Communist Party member’s later career was marked by his decision to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s.

Born in New York on March 27, 1914, Seymour Wilson Schulberg was the son of B. P. Schulberg, who became the head of Paramount Pictures after the family moved to Los Angeles in 1922. His mother was the sister of agent and film producer Sam Jaffe. Schulberg attended Deerfield Academy and Dartmouth College and served in the documentary unit of the OSS during World War II, becoming one of the first Americans to liberate and document conditions in Nazi concentration camps at the end of the war.

The precocious writer published his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run? at age 27. The story of a back-stabbing young hustler named Sammy Glick who shoves his way from Lower East Side copy boy to success as a movie producer, the novel angered the Hollywood establishment. More than 20 years later, Schulberg co-wrote the book to a musical version of the novel. The show opened on Broadway on February 27, 1964, starring Steve Lawrence as Sammy, and ran for 540 performances. (Schulberg later lamented that the novel had become “a handbook for yuppies.”)

Schulberg received a 1959 Best Play Tony nomination for co-writing The Disenchanted, based on his best-selling novel about his experience collaborating on a film script with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Jason Robards won a Tony for playing the Fitzgerald character, and George Grizzard drew a Tony nomination for playing the character based on Schulberg.