Free What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

couple of good scripts. I’ll let you read mine. Then you can compare it with the finished product. It’s being cut and scored now. They’ll be previewing in two or three weeks.”
    “You mean Girl Steals Boy ?” I said. “All finished already?”
    “Already?” Sammy said. “They’ll be shooting my next one in a couple of weeks. When they really make you start writing out here they don’t fool. I had to do my last one in three and a half weeks. One day I even dictated twenty-seven pages of screenplay. What I always say is, writing either comes easy to you or it doesn’t.”
    “That reminds me,” I said, “what ever became of Julian Blumberg?”
    “Oh, he’s around,” Sammy said casually. “Drove out in an old heap four or five months ago. I’ve been trying to get him a job. But it’s pretty tough because the studios aren’t hiring junior writers in mass lots the way they did a year ago.”
    “What are junior writers?” I wanted to know.
    “Well,” Sammy said, “nobody’s exactly sure, but I’d say they’re writers who aren’t given anything to write, and if they do write something of their own they can’t find anybody to read it.”
    By this time we had reached his studio. “I would drive you back to Monarch,” he said, “but I’m working on a football story and I’m running a couple of college pictures in the projection room this afternoon. Just to make sure it isn’t too similar.”
    “Which I suppose is a polite way of saying you’re looking for something you can lift,” I said.
    He seemed actually pleased that I saw through his feeble euphemism. He grinned. “You’ll be all right out here,” he said. “You learn fast.”
    That was one thing you had to give Sammy. He made no bones about it. At least with me. He was glorifying the American rat.
    He put his arm around my neck intimately as we got out of the car. “Here’s a hot one Lombard told me,” he said, and he giggled it into my ear.
    “I heard that three weeks ago at Bleeck’s,” I told him.
    But he was impregnable. He took it with his own peculiar brand of joie de vivre . I found myself realizing that he had cut a lot of warts off his personality since I had seen him last. He was in the first grade of the charm school. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a great many people out here who actually thought he had it already. People who didn’t know him very well. That is, people he hadn’t got around to using yet.
    “Well, keep in touch with me, Al,” he said. “Call me and we’ll make a night of it sometime.”
    Being a timid soul unless I’m cornered, which is what I was most of the time with Sammy, I didn’t bother to point out that it might be his place to call me. I just said, “Thanks for the lunch, Sammy,” or something equally useless and then I watched himhurry across the street and up the studio steps. His form was smoother and his stride wasn’t as jerky as it was in the old days on the Record , but he was still running all right. And from the way he was hugging the rail it looked as if Hollywood was the perfect track for him. I was always a man of simple ambitions, but one of them was to be around when Sammy crossed the finish line, wherever that would be.
    When I got back to my cubbyhole of an office, I shoved down the window to keep out the sound of the machine shop across the way, plunked my feet on the desk and pondered what kind of a world it was which could give Sammy a reputation on the basis of one story he hadn’t written, while its real author couldn’t even get himself hired as a junior writer.
    I was still pondering two hours later when the secretary of the producer I was still trying to see called to say that I might as well not wait any longer this afternoon as he was tied up in a story conference. Out of sheer desperation I asked her if there wasn’t anything else a person could be in a story conference besides tied up, but she didn’t even chuckle. So then I sat down and