On the occasion of the death, at age ninety-five, of the novelist, producer, and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, David Hudson at The Auteurs Daily links to a post of his own, from 2005, about Schulberg’s novel “What Makes Sammy Run?” David cites a sharp reference found in Otto Friedrich’s book, “City of Nets”:

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.”

Here’s Schulberg, cited from a 1972 interview in the magazine Cineaste:

I was raised in Hollywood, in the middle of the film capital, and had an early education in the vicissitudes of success and failure. I became convinced, before I was out of high school, that the dynamics of success and failure were of earthquake proportions in America, and that Hollywood was only an exaggerated version of the American success drive.

The interesting word is “only”; of course it was, and is, much, much more, as proven by the movies themselves. It’s fascinating that when “On the Waterfront” was a contender for the Oscar for Best Picture in 1954, two of the movies not nominated that year were among the best inside-Hollywood movies ever—George Cukor’s remake of “A Star Is Born” (starring Judy Garland and James Mason) and Joseph Mankiewicz’s “The Barefoot Contessa” (starring Humphrey Bogart as a director).

Bogart owes his last, and one of his greatest, roles to Schulberg: “The Harder They Fall,” based on a Schulberg novel (which, in turn, was based on the life of the heavyweight boxer Primo Carnera). It’s one of the toughest boxing movies ever, and Bogart is superb as a down-at-heels journalist who gets mixed up with a shady promoter until his conscience can take no more.

Schulberg was also in local news last week, when Film Forum screened Nicholas Ray’s “Wind Across the Everglades,” a bitter and bilious historical film noir in a dramatic natural setting; Bernard Eisenschitz’s superb biography of Ray (“Nicholas Ray: An American Journey”) depicts the director’s conflicts with Schulberg, who produced the movie, in tandem with his brother Stuart. At the very least, Schulberg knew where writers stood in the Hollywood power structure, and was determined to do something about it.