Budd Schulberg '36

On starring in a long and fruitful life

"I grew up in the shadow of myfather and the enormous power he had at Paramount. I don't think you'll ever again see Hollywood moguls like that; men who really controlled the destinies of the people under them."

"My parents were very literarypeople. Every Sunday morning my father would read aloud to us from about 10 o'clock to lunchtime. Now people would be watching Meet thePress but this was before television. We were listening to Melville and Dickens and the Russians."

"Very early I started writing stories. My career was set when I was 10 or 11. My parents treated me as a writer, and I thought of myself that way. It never occurred to me that I would ever do anything else." "I edited the daily newspaper inhigh school then worked on The

Dartmouth. Our Dartmouth was more outrageous than todays; we were more challenging. What drove the professors crazy was that we'd quote directly from their lectures and make news stories out of them. I remember Bill Eddy, the English professor, was a World War I veteran and very bitter about another war coming. He said he'd kill any congressman who voted for another war. We published that. I here was hell to pay.Some of what we did was pretty irresponsible but it was lively journalism.'

"It was an odd feeling to be Jewish when I wasat Dartmouth. There was a kind of very courteous anti-Semitism. I lived with a nice Catholic from Portland, Oregon. The fraternity people would come by our room two by two and say, 'We want to talk to him alone.' There was a dichotomy between the anti-Semitism and an acceptance of people on their own merits that ran through the whole College. I was rather surprised when the editor of TheDartmouth, who was much more conservative than I, chose me to be his successor."

"When Maury Rapf '35 and I went to Russia in 1934 we came back convinced the Soviets had the answers to the future. We didn't know from Stalin. We were caught up in what I realized later was the propaganda of the time."

"When I got into trouble with the Communist Party later, and found it was didactic and learned about the suppression of Western writers, I turned 180 degrees. I realized it was another tyranny like the Nazi tyranny. People who got upset about my testifying [before the House Committee on Un-American Activities] didn't understand that the party told you to do it their way or else, that there was a black list within the black list. It's much more complicated than the people who kept saying, 'You ratted out your friends.' "

"I've always envied John O'Hara. He remembered everything and just the way people said it. He had a four-star ear; I have about a three-star. To write dialogue you've got to listen and listen. Many of the lines people remember from On the Waterfront I just heard people say and wrote down."

"I don't really believe in writer's block. If you sit down to write about why you're blocked, you might find out what to write about next. The hardest part of writing for me right now is getting around to the second volume of my autobiography."

"I hate Schwarzenegger-type movies. I worry that kids love them so much, that parents let kids see so much violence. It's like a national bloodlust."

"You have to be true to what youthink and be aware of the onslaughtof the media. You have to be discerning because there's so much manipulation now—whether it's the portrayal of people running for president or the need for Viagra."

"You never think people aregoing to repeat what youwrite. I'm sort of conflicted about it. At a boxing match recently everyone came up to me and said, 'I coulda been a contender.' I didn't know what to say back."

CAREER: Books include WhatMakes Sammy Run (1941), TheDisenchanted (1950), The Harder They Fall (1956), Moving Pictures (1981); author of many television screenplays and movie scripts such as On die Waterfront (i9s4), A Face in the Crowd (1957); covers boxing for Newsday, has written screenplay about Joe Louis; writing autobiography NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS: 1954 Oscar for On the Waterfront, founder, Watts Writers Workshop in Los Angeles and Frederick Douglas Creative Arts Center in New York; inducted into Boxing Hall of Fame, 2003 PERSONAL: Member (briefly), Communist Party; member, John Ford's documentary unit, U.S. Navy, 1942-1946 (in charge of collecting photographic evidence for the Nuremberg Trials); resides in Quoque, New York FAMILY: Wife Betsy, daughter Jessica and son Benn