cbr17bingo Arts
Schulberg, the son of a successful Hollywood producer, is probably best known for his screenplays (On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd), but he started as a novelist with What Makes Sammy Run?, about a Hollywood publicist.
This book follows about ten years later, and is the thinly fictionalized story of an ill-fated trip Schulberg made with F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Dartmouth. Fitzgerald was nearing the end of his life and was trying to scrape together cash by working on screenplays for Hollywood. Schulberg had been assigned to him as a collaborator/babysitter to make the trip to gather source material for the script for musical featuring a collegiate winter carnival. But although Fitzgerald had been sober a good part of a year before this trip, the pressure and uncertainty he felt about it caused him to fall off the wagon with disastrous results.
I only found out that this was pretty much a true story after I had read it and was looking up the author for a bit of info on his background. It was obviously written by an insider with knowledge of the entire process, and is equally a madcap adventure and horribly sad, as the young companion, Shep (Schulberg’s persona), goes from hero worship to impatience, to pity. Old school Factory Hollywood was not only brutal to the actors, but the rest of the machinery as well, and fame was no shield for anyone.
A compelling read, and no wonder he did so well in screenplays. The dialogue was absolutely on point.
