Free What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg Page A

wrote a very businesslike letter to Miss Rosalie Goldbaum advising her to forget Sammy Glick but not to forget to write me whether she got that fifteen hundred or not. I told her to find herself a good clean hardworking boy and not to pine for Sammy, for he was one of those geniuses who could only be married to his work. I just marked that down under the heading of kindness, then. That was because I didn’t know as much about Sammy Glick then as I do now, or about the world either. It was funny as time went on how the more I learned about one the more I understood about the other.
    Those first few months in Hollywood were the loneliest I’ve ever known. You’d think a writer on contract to one of the biggest studios in Hollywood would be thrown into that merry-go-round of social life the fan magazines and the columns like to tell you about. Unless you have an unusual talent for knowing everybody, it isn’t so. It seemed as if the few friends I knew in Hollywood from the theater crowd had all gone back to the land, to BucksCounty or Cape Cod or one of those places. After a couple of weeks I moved out of the Hollywood Plaza into a big, pink, reasonably priced apartment house called the Villa Espana. I spent desperate and lonely hours in my office at the studio mulling over the story they had finally given me to read, an action melodrama about smugglers, come-on girls and the coast of Florida. I knew that Sammy Glick would have thrown it back in their faces and demanded something more in keeping with his artistic temperament, but I supposed the producers knew their business and, as it turned out, this story did have the makings of a fair C picture. But it was dismal, ditch-digging work, and I felt more alone than ever because the producer didn’t even seem to care how I was doing. The only word I had for weeks and weeks was the producer’s request, via interoffice communication, to keep turning in pages.
    At night I usually had supper at the Vine Street Derby, always hoping to run into someone I knew, and then I’d stroll down Hollywood Boulevard, stopping in at one of the joints for a drink, or browsing around in Stanley Rose’s bookstore listening to the conversation, or maybe dropping in at a movie. After a while I felt as if I were wandering around a small town, because there never seemed to be anything to do and I began to notice the same faces drifting by night after night.
    The only friend I made in those early days was an unknown playwright who had the office two doors down from mine. He told me he had come out to Hollywood about a year ago because the doctor had told him his four-year-old daughter’s sinus trouble was going to get serious if he didn’t get her out to a warm, dry climate. When I met him he was just beginning to get jittery because his option was coming up in a couple of weeks and he didn’t seem to think he could get a job anywhere else if they let him out. He said the reason he was scared was because he hadn’t any credits. Anybody who goes a year in Hollywood without getting a single screen credit, he said, might just as well shop around for another profession.
    I asked him how it happened that none of his pictures hadreached the screen, and he explained that the first script he wrote had been shelved because at the last minute they couldn’t get the actor it had been written for, and the second one never reached first base because it was a topical subject and one of the other studios beat them to it, and the third one was stymied because it couldn’t get by the Hays Office. I didn’t see why that should hurt him if the producers had liked his scripts, but he took a more pessimistic view of it. He said by the time a year had gone by, all they would probably remember is that he had worked twelve months without getting anything on the screen and that would be the pay-off.
    I tried to cheer him up, even took him and his young wife out to dinner one night, but when I came to my office the