Between covers.

Before Bruce Wagner, before Julia Phillips, there was Budd Schulberg. In City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, Otto Friedrich describes the impact on that one-industry town of Schulberg's 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, the tale of a quintessentially American social Darwinist who stabs each and every back necessary to claw his way to the top. Friedrich first quotes a moment when the narrator, visiting Sammy's conspicuously ostentatious spread in Beverly Hills, confronts him:

"'Sammy,' I said quietly, 'how does it feel? How does it feel to have everything?' He began to smile. It became a smirk, a leer. 'It makes me feel kinda...' And then it came blurting out of nowhere - 'patriotic.'"

Hollywood was accustomed to such barbs from visiting English novelists, but what made Sammy so wounding was that Schulberg had grown up in Hollywood and had known it from the inside all his life.... The young Schulberg had been petted and kissed by Mary Pickford and Clara Bow.... So Schulberg was intensely pleased when Dorothy Parker praised him by saying, "I never thought anyone could put Hollywood - the true shittiness of it - between covers." For that was indeed what he had done.

As Joseph Berger reports in a very fine piece for the New York Times (for which he also spoke with Schulberg, now 91), despite stops and starts over the years, the novel never been adapted for a film. But in 1959, NBC presented a performance in two episodes as part of its Sunday Showcase anthology - a performance that was long thought lost until it was recently discovered, filed away and mislabeled, at the Library of Congress. Tonight, it'll be screened at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York.

"Will the rediscovered teleplay of Sammy ever run outside the museum?" asks Berger. "'In the perfect universe there would be a television counterpart of Turner Classic Movies,' [curator Allen] Glover said." Knock, knock.

Posted by dwhudson at April 6, 2005 6:16 AM