Budd Schulberg, author of novels such as WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN?, THE HARDER THEY FALL, THE DISENCHANTED, and screenwriter of ON THE WATERFRONT for which he won an Oscar, died last week at age 95.
Schulberg is also known for his 1951 appearance before the House Committee of Un-American Activities Committee, where he informed on 17 people he said had been members of the Communist party.
I’d like to focus on one of my favorite screenplays of all time, ON THE WATERFRONT. An eulogy of sorts.
Political history aside, here is a screenplay that has withstood the test of time through sheer intensity of drama and character.
And the story behind the story is something else.
To a screenwriter such as myself, it serves as a kind of fairy tale. One of those rare occasions in Hollywood history when the writer, with unfailing support from his director, managed to get his work as is, onto the screen, despite rejection from all the major studios.
“What you’ve written is exactly what the American people don’t want to see.” was Daryl Zanuck’s response to the script.
That must have hurt. Especially since having completed ON THE WATERFRONT, all Schulberg got from Kazan was unabashed praise – “It’s one of the three best I ever had! And the other two were DEATH OF A SALESMAN and A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE!”
Well if that ain’t enough to feed a writer’s ego…
Any reservations Schulberg held about the somber tone or tough subject matter, Kazan dispersed with further flattery and reassurance that 20th Century Fox’s Darryl Zanuck was not your average “happy family pictures” kinda guy. After all, he did make THE GRAPES OF WRATH, HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY? and the risky GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT. “He’ll love it.”
But when they arrived in Beverly Hills with no limo, no flowers, no lovey-dovey welcome note to greet them, Schulberg – being of Hollywood stock, the son of Paramount head, B.P Schulberg, and well-acquainted with how things worked in this town – smelt trouble.
Though even Schulberg couldn’t contain his shock when finally face-to-face with Zanuck, the producer declared, “I didn’t like a single thing about it.” And “Who’s going to care about a lot of sweaty longshoremen?”
After 20th Century slammed its doors, the rest followed. Warner Brothers, then Paramount and MGM. And finally, Columbia.
To make matters worse, The Hollywood Reporter announced that the studios were snubbing the project as it dealt with “waterfront radicals” and was pretty communistic.
ON THE WATERFRONT was, as the expression goes, dead in the water.
Couple of years back, Schulberg, was writing novels in the tranquility of his farm in Pennsylvania, thinking how content he was never to touch another screenplay, to stay away from Hollywood where screenwriters were at the bottom of the food chain, when Kazan knocked at his door.
Wanted to know if Schulberg would be interested in “not a Hollywood movie, but a film to be conceived, written, and shot in the East.” Kazan promised he would protect Schulberg’s work, respect him as the Writer, just as he had respected Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.
They discussed subjects that interested them at the time and found they had both been bitten by “the waterfront bug”.
Schulberg had been approached by a nephew of Columbia’s Harry Cohn to adapt Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Crime On The Waterfront, but ironically Cohn wouldn’t have a bar of it. Kazan had planned to direct a screenplay by Arthur Miller about the Brooklyn waterfront – THE HOOK. But their political differences had ripped them apart – Kazan had named names, Miller had not and been penalized for it.
Interesting to note at this point, that while Miller went on to condemn the insanity of the McCarthy era in his play THE CRUCIBILE, Kazan and Schulberg sought to justify the role of Informer in ON THE WATERFRONT.
So. Schulberg and Kazan decided they would make a film about the waterfront.
And Schulberg had his work cut out for him.
The first step – research, meant not only getting Johnson’s material down pat, but going down to the docks, which as Schulberg explains, was easier said than done.
“What I actually had to do was work my way into what I soon discovered was a self-contained city-state: 750 miles of shorelines, with 1800 piers, handling 10,000 oceangoing ships a year, carrying over a million passengers a year and over 35 million tons of foreign cargo with a value of around 8 billion dollars.”
Through Johnson’s leads, Schulberg discovered these areas belonged to the mob. Not just one mob. But various mobs, killing each other for control over the seagoing treasury that was the waterfront.
Schulberg went undercover.
At first, he befriended an “insoigent” called Brownie who led Schulberg into the pubs and told his pals he’d met Schulberg at the local gym, where they had struck up a conversation about fighters and decided to drift over to the West Side to quench their “thoist”. Schulberg had co-managed a fighter and knew about boxing, so it wasn’t a hard act to pull. And it worked.
Whilst Brownie got the guys talking, Schulberg downed boilermakers and made mental character notes and how he would work their lines into his script.
Schulberg’s protagonist, Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando, was said to have been based on the whistle-blowing longshoreman Anthony DiVincenzo, who testified before the Waterfront Commission on the activities of the Hoboken docks. Like Malloy, DiVincenzo was punished in many ways for his actions.
Following the film’s release, DiVincenzo sued and settled with Columbia Pictures over the appropriation of ‘his story’. Though sessions whereby DiVincenzo recounted his story to Schulberg supposedly never occurred, Shulberg was present at every one of Di Vincenzo’s commission testimony hearings.
In any case, Schulberg’s research stretched over the course of a year, in which he noted, “it seemed as if everybody I talked to on the waterfront said something usable. I had left Hollywood because there were too many collaborators. Here I was surrounded by them – and welcomed every one of them.”
Schulberg shared his research with Kazan every step of the way and over a year later, when their project lay seemingly dead, Schulberg credits Kazan for standing by the script and swearing, “God damn it, I’m going to stick with this thing if I have to get a 16mm. Eyemo and shoot it myself on the docks.”
As luck would have it, a certain producer called S.P. Eagle (Sam Spiegel) – of THE STRANGER and THE AFRICAN QUEEN fame – was staying in the hotel room across the corridor, riding out the recent flop that was MELBA, with champagne and girls. Spiegel would later enter the halls of fame for SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.
Upon hearing Schulberg’s and Kazan’s horror story, Spiegel invited the writer to pitch him at 7.30 the next morning as Schulberg had an early plane to catch.
Schulberg arrived to find Spiegel in bed, eyes closed, but there was no time to waste. He pitched, occasionally calling Spiegel’s name, only to be greeted with grunts and such sounds ordinarily associated with sleep.
Like a true writer with a story to tell, Schulberg pressed on. And when he finished, waited a while. Then, as he described it, “The head managed to rise a few inches. “I’ll do it’, a murmur rose from the pillow. ‘We’ll make the picture.’”
Kazan attributed four reasons to the success of ON THE WATERFRONT. Schulberg, Brando, himself, and Spiegel.
“I still can’t say how or why Sam knew so much about screenplay construction. But he did have an instinctive story sense; he knew it had to be unrelenting as it unfolded, that it should never let up tension and always aim for the end,” wrote Kazan in his essay, “Making On The Waterfront”
Spiegel had a saying that reportedly drove Schulberg mad – “Let’s open it up again.”
To make matters worse, the day before shooting was to finally begin, Kazan’s wife, Molly, out of concern for her husband’s welfare, made a call to Spiegel, begging him not to start filming. The script wasn’t ready.
Understandably, it took Schulberg a while to forgive Molly. And while Kazan saw where his wife was coming from, he empathized with Schulberg who had spent the past several years doing nothing but research and rewrites. “I had no more patience than Budd had for hearing what was wrong with our script. We’d both had enough of ‘Let’s open it up again.’ Let’s shoot!”
Once shooting began in Hoboken, more gripes and setbacks ensued. For starters, there was the mob who made their presence known during the early days of shooting. So much so that Kazan got himself a bodyguard.
Then there was what Kazan refers to as Spiegel’s “chiseling” throughout production. Though in the end, when the film came in under $1 million – it could easily have cost twice that – Kazan was grateful.
There was also the crew which Kazan describes as “haphazardly gathered” as well as “shorthanded and perhaps the least bit timorous.” And not to mention, the icy conditions of the Hudson, which Kazan is convinced he wouldn’t have survived were it not for the rage he contained over the other hardships. “I believe my anger kept me warm… It was a once-in-a-lifetime anger, and I’ve never felt it that hot again.”
Though Schulberg was rarely in Hoboken, he was on call every day of shoot. While Kazan had promised not to change a line, Schulberg had made a counter-promise to either be on set or on call every day, to make the necessary changes.
And of course, there were those moments of pure magic that happen when you cast the right actors. The scene between Edie (Eva Marie Saint) and Terry (Brando), when Edie drops her glove and Terry picks it up, for instance. Edie reaches for it but instead of returning the glove, Terry draws it on his hand.
Schulberg didn’t write it. Kazan doesn’t recall directing it. All Brando.
When ON THE WATERFRONT went on to collect 8 Academy Awards, 3 Golden Globes and a BAFTA amongst numerous other accolades, Schulberg recalled with sweet vengeance Zanuck’s words – “What you’ve written is exactly what the American people don’t want to see.”
Word spread about how Darryl Zanuck let an Academy Award picture slip through his fingers like water. Though Kazan later admitted, “I’m afraid Darryl was right. If he had done the film it would have been a dud.” Which, if nothing else, drives home the utter need for collaboration and mutual respect between writer, director and producer during the entire screenwriting and filmmaking process – if not regarding each other, then at least where story is concerned.
Understanding the spirit in which the film had been written, translating that spirit onto the screen and protecting story and character above all else, is what I believe makes ON THE WATERFRONT the classic that it is.
As Schulberg said, “Find me a director who respects the play… and the auteur theory will float away from the hollow, gaseous thing it is. What will remain will be solid screenplays and solid directors who will not only embellish but vivify them.”
A family shrine of Josef Cruikshank at his home.
Associated Press Photo/New Zealand Herald, Brett Phibbs
