WHAT MADE SAMMY RUN: Budd Schulberg, author of What Makes Sammy Run?, which Defamer calls the "only classic movie business story never to be adapted to the screen," died Wednesday. As is probably fitting, we missed it while we were buried under a tide of 80s movie nostalgia and I fixated on how much underbutt you could show at 8:00.
Let's be clear about something: What Makes Sammy Run is my second-favorite book about Hollywood, and the first (The Grove Book of Hollywood) is cheating because it's an anthology. I've read a bit about the controversy over whether Sammy Glick was the product of anti-semitism or just a garden-variety monster, but to me that fight misses the point. I loved Sammy Glick. He had a view of who he wanted to be and the world he wanted to inhabit, and he made it happen. If he wasn't that great a guy, so what? He was both more realistic and less troubling than the controversy made him seem, a close approximation of virtually every titan of industry who built, rather than inherited, his role. It is a literary injustice that "Sammy Glick" is an epithet and "[Roy] Hobbsian" a compliment.
As for why the movie could never get made, I think it gets made all the time. There are more-or-less faithful Sammy Glick reproductions all over the place. Ari Gold on Entourage is the most obvious, but you could find more than a little Sammy Glick in guys as different as Tony Montana and both Don Draper and Pete Campbell, for example. So What Makes Sammy Run doesn't really need to be made -- and let's all take a deep breath and thank our lucky stars that it never got made by Ben Stiller, who I believe once optioned it. No movie means that Sammy remains a perfect novel unsullied in our memories by an imperfect adaptation.
ETA: I guess I'm supposed to mention that he was a communist, then a HUAC testifying informant, and that he wrote On the Waterfront.
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