What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

Author:Budd Schulberg [Schulberg, Budd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79073-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

Julian hadn’t changed. He looked a little healthier, he was wearing a new suit which was just like the old one and his handshake didn’t seem so frightened, but you would never have taken him for a hit writer and that’s what he was becoming. Studio environment seemed to have no more effect on him than his tenement neighborhood had. He and Blanche had never been so happy, he said. They had rented a little cottage overlooking the ocean near Topanga Canyon and they had a baby coming along in the fall. He was even getting his novel finished.

I said I couldn’t believe it. Everybody said it was absolutely impossible out here to do any writing of your own.

“I know,” he said. “That’s what everybody says. But I don’t understand it. Every Saturday, unless I’m doing a rush job, I leave here at noon. Blanche and I go for a long walk along the beach, I take a quick dip—I’ve been doing it since the first of March—and then I write until I go to bed. You couldn’t want a better place to work than right there over the ocean.”

Sammy hadn’t even sat down with us yet. He was all over the place like a headwaiter. We could hear him yelling to somebody across the room.

“He spends two hours here every day,” Julian said. “This is where he really goes to work. He’s the commissary genius. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed our screen credits or not but they always say—Story by Sammy Glick—Screenplay by Sammy Glick and Julian Blumberg. You know where he got all those story credits? Right here in the commissary.”

The story of how he did it was so intriguing that we both forgot to order. Sammy would walk up to a director and say, “Spencer Tracy and Marlene Dietrich in Titanic. Do I have to say any more?”

Then he would just walk away from the guy, significantly, and leave it in his lap. The director has been desperate for a socko story all year. Tracy and Dietrich in Titanic. Jesus, it sounds like something. Natural suspense. And two great characters. Maybe Spence is a good two-fisted minister who tries to straighten Marlene out. Marlene is a tramp, of course. He’s real. She’s anything for a laugh. Then, even though the boat is going down you bring the audience up with a hell of a lift because Marlene suddenly sees the light.

Meanwhile Sammy bumps into a supervisor. “I was just telling Chick Tyler my new story,” he says. “He went off his nut about it. Spencer Tracy and Marlene Dietrich in Titanic. Do I have to say any more?”

And he drops the hot potato in the supervisor’s lap and runs again. The supervisor knows Sammy hasn’t missed yet. And he’s been trying to get a cast like that ever since he’s been made a supervisor. So he drops by Tyler’s table.

“Sammy Glick tells me you’re hot for his Titanic story,” he says.

“Yeah,” Tyler says, “I think the kid’s got something.

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