Cutting Room Floor

In 1955, a year after winning the Academy Award for his script of the movie "On the Waterfront," Budd Schulberg '36 adapted the film as a novel, "Waterfront." A new paperback edition has just been released, along with an edition of his 1950 novel "The Disenchanted" (Primus). In the introduction to "Waterfront," Schulberg explains how he originally researched the film.

Truth was, I had taken a rather unorthodox approach to the writing of the screenplay, applying not a month or two, but years of my life to absorbing everything I could about the New York waterfront, becoming an habituee of the westside Manhattan and Jersey bars that were unofficial headquarters, or homes away from home, for waterfront racketeers and Irish and Italian "insoigents" alike, drinking beer and talking into the night with longshore families in the cluttered kitchens of their $26.50 per month railroad flats, interviewing longshore-union leaders and getting to know the fearless and outspoken labor priests from St. Xavier's in New York's Hell's Kitchen who gave me an insight into Catholic social action I had never had before.