(1) Budd Schulberg, telegram to House of Un-American Activities Committee (12th April, 1951)

I have noted the public statement of your committee inviting those named in recent testimony to appear before your committee. My recollection of my communist affiliation is that it was approximately from 1937 to 1940. My opposition to communists and Soviet dictatorship is a matter of record. I will co-operate with you in any way I can.

 

(2) In his testimony before the House of Un-American Activities Committee Budd Schulberg claimed that the Communist Party had tried to influence the content of his novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (April, 1951)

The feeling was that it was too individualistic; that it didn't begin to show what were called the progressive forces in Hollywood; and that it was something they thought should be either abandoned or discussed with some higher authority before I began to work on it.

Richard Collins and John Howard Lawson suggested I submit an outline and discuss the whole matter further. I decided I would have to get away from this if I was ever to be a writer. I decided to leave the group, cut myself off, pay no more dues, listen to no more advice, indulge in no more literary discussions, and to go away from the Party, from Hollywood, and try to write a book, which is what I did.

 

(3) Budd Schulberg was interviewed by Victor Navasky when he was writing his book, Naming Names (1982)

These people (those he named), if they had it in them, could have written books and plays. There was not a blacklist in publishing. There was not a blacklist in the theatre. They could have written about the forces that drove them into the Communist Party. They were practically nothing written. Nor have I seen these people interested in social problems in the decades since. They're interested in their own problems and in the protection of the Party.

 

(4) Tim Weiner, New York Times (5th August, 2009)

The son of a movie mogul, Mr. Schulberg was twice ostracized by Hollywood and twice fought back with his typewriter. The first time came in 1941, with his first novel, “What Makes Sammy Run?,” a depiction of back-lot back stabbing. The story’s antihero, Sammy Glick, a product of the Lower East Side, is a young man on the make who will lie, cheat and steal to achieve success, rising from newspaper copy boy to Hollywood boss on the strength of his cutthroat ambition. “The spirit of Horatio Alger gone mad,” Mr. Schulberg said.

The book cut so close to the bone that Mr. Schulberg was warned that he would never work in the film industry again.

The second time Mr. Schulberg faced professional ruin was when he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 during its relentless investigation of the Communist Party’s influence on the movie industry.

Mr. Schulberg had gone to the Soviet Union in 1934 and joined the Communist Party of the United States after he returned to Hollywood. “It didn’t take a genius to tell you that something was vitally wrong with the country,” he said in the 2006 interview, recalling his decision to join the party.

“The unemployment was all around us,” he said. “The bread lines and the apple sellers. I couldn’t help comparing that with my own family’s status, with my father; at one point he was making $11,000 a week. And I felt a shameful contrast between the haves and the have-nots very early.”

His romance with Communism ended six years later, when he quit the party after feeling pressure to bend his writing to fit its doctrines.

Mr. Schulberg had been identified as a party member in testimony before the House committee. Called to testify, he publicly named eight other Hollywood figures as members, including the screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. and the director Herbert Biberman.

They were two among the Hollywood 10 — witnesses who said the First Amendment gave them the right to think as they pleased and keep their silence before the committee. All were blacklisted and convicted of contempt of Congress. Losing their livelihoods, Lardner served a year in prison and Biberman six months.

In the turmoil of the Red Scare, Mr. Schulberg’s testimony was seen as a betrayal by many, an act of principle by others. The liberal consensus in Hollywood was that Lardner had acquitted himself more gracefully before the committee when asked if he had been a Communist: “I could answer it, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.”

In the 2006 interview, Mr. Schulberg said that in hindsight he believed that the attacks against real and imagined Communists in the United States were a greater threat to the country than the Communist Party itself. But he said he had named names because the party represented a real threat to freedom of speech.

“They say that you testified against your friends, but once they supported the party against me, even though I did have some personal attachments, they were really no longer my friends,” he said. “And I felt that if they cared about real freedom of speech, they should have stood up for me when I was fighting the party.”

 

(5) The Daily Telegraph (5th August, 2009)

Budd Wilson Schulberg was born in New York on March 27 1914. His Jewish forebears had fled the Russian pogroms in the 19th century, but by the time of Budd's birth his parents were comfortably-off middle-class New Yorkers. His father was just getting started in the infant film business, while his mother drilled into her son the wisdom of education and self-improvement. Budd said later: "She was determined I was going to be a combination of Stephen Crane and John Galsworthy."

When Budd was five the family moved to Hollywood, where his father became a producer. An observant child, Budd knew by the time he was in Los Angeles High School that film-making could be anything but glamorous, with its background of feuds and backbiting, and the drudgery of scenes shot over and over again by "temperamental directors overborne by demoniac producers and conniving stars".

He later observed: "For the most part the industry looked like an overpowering giant who, when he opens his mouth, talks baby talk." He was particularly appalled by the lives of child stars, whom he called victims of child labour. In their teens, he said, most of them rebelled, turning to drink and drugs, unloving sex and careless marriages.

While all this was his kindergarten, Schulberg said, the city also offered an advanced course in psychodrama, neurasthenia and pathological insecurity. "The star system," he wrote, "demanded intelligence and/or strength of character to cope with the pressures of excessive celebrity, but they came up too fast to learn along the way. They floundered and fluttered like wounded birds in the blinding and confusing light of their stardom."

 

(6) Dennis McLellan, The Los Angeles Times (6th August, 2009)

The son of B.P. Schulberg, the powerful production chief of Paramount Pictures in the 1920s and early '30s, Budd Schulberg burst onto the literary scene in 1941 at 27 with his first novel, "What Makes Sammy Run?"

A vivid portrait of a brash and amoral young hustler from New York's Lower East Side who connives his way from newspaper copy boy to Hollywood producer, the novel is considered one of the best about Hollywood, and the name of Schulberg's back-stabbing anti-hero, Sammy Glick, has become synonymous with ruthless ambition.

Viewed as a savage indictment of the movie business, the novel drew the immediate ire of the Hollywood establishment. As Schulberg once put it: "Overnight, I found myself famous -- and hated."

Movie columnist Hedda Hopper, encountering Schulberg in a Hollywood restaurant, huffed, "How dare you?"

A furious Samuel Goldwyn, for whom Schulberg was then working as a screenwriter, fired him because of "that horrible book."

MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer not only denounced the book at a meeting of the Motion Picture Producers Assn. but also suggested that Schulberg be deported. To which B.P. Schulberg laughed and said, "Louie, he's the only novelist who ever came from Hollywood. Where the hell are you going to deport him, Catalina Island?"