Book Circle Reads 82Rating: 4.5* of fiveThe Publisher Says: Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symptoms of our times—from the little man who shoves you out of the way on the street to the go-getter who shoves you out of a job in the office to the Fuehrer who shoves you out of the world. And all of us have stopped to wonder, at some time or another, what it is that makes these people tick. What makes them run?This is the question Schulberg has asked himself, and the answer is the first novel written with the indignation that only a young writer with talent and ideals could concentrate into a manuscript. It is the story of Sammy Glick, the man with a positive genius for being a heel, who runs through New York’s East Side, through newspaper ranks and finally through Hollywood, leaving in his wake the wrecked careers of his associates; for this is his tragedy and his chief characteristic—his congenital incapacity for friendship.An older and more experienced novelist might have tempered his story and, in so doing, destroyed one of its outstanding qualities. Compromise would mar the portrait of Sammy Glick. Schulberg has etched it in pure vitriol, and dissected his victim with a precision that is almost frightening.When a fragment of this book appeared as a short story in a national magazine, Schulberg was surprised at the number of letters he received from people convinced they knew Sammy Glick’s real name. But speculation as to his real identity would be utterly fruitless, for Sammy is a composite picture of a loud and spectacular minority bitterly resented by the many decent and sincere artists who are trying honestly to realize the measureless potentialities of motion pictures. To this group belongs Schulberg himself, who has not only worked as a screen writer since his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1936, but has spent his life, literally, in the heart of the motion-picture colony. In the course of finding out what makes Sammy run (an operation in which the reader is spared none of the grue-some details) Schulberg has poured out everything he has felt about that place. The result is a book which the publishers not only believe to be the most honest ever written about Hollywood, but a penetrating study of one kind of twentieth-century success that is peculiar to no single race of people or walk of life.My Review: Budd Schulberg got a lot of grief for writing this "anti-Semitic" shriek of outrage at the backstabbing, grasping, greedy, hollow culture of Hollywood. Well, how else could he tell the story? The moguls of the time were almost all Jewish, and they weren't nice little yeshiva boys but street toughs with chips on their shoulders hell bent for leather to make it to the top.Today it is a lot less true of Hollywood's power elite. Not the behavior, the Jewishness. The behavior is intact! Of this I assure you from personal experience. And people of both genders and all religious and cultural affiliations enact it there. Awful place. As one would expect from any place where there is that much money floating around. *Breathtaking* amounts of money. The greed of these people is utterly beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. "Enough" is what you say to the chauffeur you're firing who complains it's unjust.Reading this book was a bitter and painful reliving of my education in how "no good deed goes unpunished" and I will never re-read it for that reason. But dayum! What a glorious excoriation of the moral midgets who make our movies, TV shows, and music! I am in *awe* that Schulberg got away with writing it and stayed in Hollywood! Steven Spielberg, that maker of iconically positive movies, said the book should never be made into a movie because it's too anti-movie-biz.Guess what: It never has been. Even Ben Stiller, who wanted to star and direct, couldn't get it done when he was at his peak of fame and power.Shows you just how true it was, is, and will remain. *shudder*
"You think more like a man than any woman I've ever known -- and most men.""If you think that's a compliment, you're crazy," she said. "Every time a man discovers that a woman thinks, the only way he can explain it is that she happens to have a male mind. You just don't know me, Al. I'm feminine as all hell."Budd Schulberg. What Makes Sammy Run? Vintage Book. (1990). p. 131.Schulberg earned critical success and notoriety with his first novel,What Makes Sammy Run? at the tender age of 24. Sammy is a searing exposé on writers in Hollywood and of the 'American Dream.' Schulberg spares no details in revealing the costs of ambition and achieving commercial success in the City of Angels. Behind the rhetorical question of what makes us run, Schulberg illustrates the rise and decline of one Sammy Glick, from a cocky copy boy to sociopath mogul. The effortless writing, while lacking at times in character development, showcases excellent editing, where not a word is wasted. Glick is not unlike Lonesome Rhodes in his chameleon morals and manipulation, another character in the Schulberg short story 'Your Arkansas Traveler', which provided the basis for the 1957 Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal film A Face in the Crowd. At the time Glick appeared, everyone knew that Schulberg had modeled his main character on the infamous Jerry Wald. For those readers who adore F. Scott Fitzgerald, Schulberg wrote The Disenchanted which chronicled, in loose terms, Budd's relationship with the great writer in his decline. Readers may find Schulberg's role during the McCarthy-era interesting. What Makes Sammy Run? remains a compelling and relevant read.
What do You think about What Makes Sammy Run? (2002)?
Excellent work of true-to-life fiction by first-time novelist Bud Schulberg. Schulberg knew his stuff, having grown up in Hollywood, with his father running Paramount Pictures, and having worked for the likes of David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn.Schulberg's iconic, scheming, tenacious, ambitious and morally reprehensible "Sammy Glick" is only a fictional character in theory. In truth Sammy Glick is as real as you and I in 2013, just as he was real in 1941, when "What Makes Sam
—Paul Lyons
I did not expect much when I started reading Budd Schulberg's best known novel, What Makes Sammy Run?. Years ago, I had met Schulberg at Dartmouth College (he is an alumnus); but I had never read any of his works. I did see On the Waterfront, however, with Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, and Lee J. Cobb. He wrote the script.Years ago, I read F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, which was a far far cry from The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald knew a thing or two about the film business, but Budd Schulberg was born into its royalty: His father, B. P. Schulberg, was a producer for Paramount and Columbia; his brother and sister were producer Stuart Schulberg and writer Sonya Schulberg O'Sullivan. Budd had celluloid in his veins -- and he knew how to write. I can never forget the picture of his anti-hero Sammy Glick at the end of the book:As I drove off I saw him standing there outside his palatial stone steps, under his giant eucalyptus trees, looking out over his hundred yards of landscaping that terraced down to the wall that surrounded his property. He was a lonely little figure in the shadows of Glickfair, the terrible little conqueror, the poor little guy, staring after my car as it drove out through the main gates, waiting for Sheikh to bring the girls and the laughter.Perhaps Schulberg will never get credit for the great American novel, but so what? It is hard as hell to write anything about the crazy-quilt history of Hollywood that makes any sense. Most works come out as arid as those New Yorker bios of film producers, bios that resonate with a condescending aura of tin ear.
—Jim
Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? is a devastating portrait of ambition and success, set against the glimmering backdrop of 1930s Hollywood. Sammy Glick is a screenwriter and then producer who has no artistic talent whatsoever, and yet becomes a great success due to both his own relentless, remorseless drive and the town's warped values. Though he has no artistic talent, he wantonly steals from and exploits those who do, and turns their creative work into his own personal success through his greatest strength - that of self-promotion. He tirelessly sells himself, hogging the spotlight wherever he goes, taking full credit when he deserves none.And yet, Hollywood rewards his bad behavior (which also includes a complete lack of conscience) and by the end of the novel, having stomped on everyone in his path on his way up the ladder, he has reached the pinnacle of success - he is production head of a major studio, is married to the gorgeous daughter of the multimillionaire financier who backs the studio, and owns a vast estate in Bel Air. He has everything, for the moment at least.Sammy is an infuriating character, and as act after appalling act piled up, I found myself hungering for his ultimate comeuppance, the karmic retribution he so fully deserved. Which made me smile when I read the narrator thinking along the same lines, on the second-to-last page:I thought how, unconsciously, I had been waiting for justice to suddenly rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him; only I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process...As the novel ends, Sammy is on top, a blustery and superficial fake in a town that celebrates and rewards bluster, superficiality and fakery. But his retribution - and there will be retribution - won't be immediate. Instead, Hollywood will slowly tire of him as he ages and becomes overly familiar, and he will gradually be nudged aside for someone fresh and new, and he will find himself working his way, quite unwillingly, back down the career ladder - working with steadily smaller budgets, middling scripts and then B and C actors until one day he will likely be without any work at all. The same qualities which fueled his Hollywood success will ensure his downfall. But Schulberg neatly leaves Sammy's downfall offscreen, as it were, showing the protagonist on top but with the seeds of his eventual demise already sown.What Makes Sammy Run? is a terrific, entertaining and thought-provoking read, one which I highly recommend.
—Peter
