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On and Off The Waterfront With Budd Schulberg

August 11, 2009 at 3:49 PM | by | Comments (0)

Budd Schulberg, a screenwriter and novelist who died last week at age 95, will see his work far outlive him. The Academy Award winner for the screenplay "On the Waterfront" captured the pains and pulses of ambition whether his characters were on the docks of the Atlantic or overlooking the Pacific from a beach house.

Schulberg grew up in Hollywood where his dad eventually helped run Paramount Studios in the silent era, but he's best known for showing the hardscrabble union world on the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles in the New York Sun. Schulberg met with dockworkers in shady bars and sat in on deliberations at the Waterfront Commission's courtrooms to write the screenplay, which won him an Oscar; the film also picked up Best Director, Best Actor (for Marlon Brando) and Best Picture in 1955.

Hoboken has changed enormously since "On The Waterfront" filmed in the 1950s, but Stevens Park—where Brando and Eva Marie Saint walked together—is just five blocks up from the Hoboken PATH station and has great views of New York City.

Schulberg couldn't be constrained to Jersey, though: During his long career, Schulberg filmed Nazis in Nuremberg, tracked down F. Scott Fitzgerald on a bender in New Hampshire and gave Christopher Plummer his first leading role in "Wind Across the Everglades," shot on location on Florida's greatest national park.

His most famous novel, What Makes Sammy Run, is set on the Hollywood backlots where he grew up, but later in life Schulberg founded a writing center in Los Angeles' unglamorous Watts neighborhood. According to his New York Times obituary, last year he made a special trip to Edinburgh to oversee the Scottish production of a stage version of "On the Waterfront"; he was doing the same back in Hoboken two weeks ago.

To put yourself in the shoes of What Makes Sammy Run's ruthless striver, check out the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York at 91 Orchard Street and see why he was so desperate to write his way out.

Related Stories:
· Budd Schulberg, Screenwriter, Dies at 95 [NY Times]
· Filming Locations for "On the Waterfront" [Movie-Locations.com]
· Budd Schulberg, just in Hoboken last week, died today [NJ.com]

[Photo of Manhattan from what's left of the Hoboken docks: joiseyshowaa]

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