Hollywood has always been a uniquely ferocious yet enormously productive machine. Studio executives, now as in the formative years of the 1920s, have the ultimate authority to push a project to completion or ban it to Siberia. Screenwriters play an absurd game of royal court, hoping to create something that passes muster with their patrons. The particularly dogged writers make sure that their creative vision is in accordance with what goes up on the screen. But more often than not, the director, not the writer, is the screen. And so the pattern of concentrated power continues, seducing its participants in a web of deceit and jockeying for creative input. Because of the tortuous labyrinths of approval through which an artist must travel in order to realize an original vision, it is all the more exciting when a writer’s original idea meshes with the ideas of the director, producer, and the actors to produce a truly remarkable film. The especially astute writer, then, will see in Hollywood not only a land of opportunity, but also a potent warning against the varied forms of monopoly. Where do the young screenwriter’s priorities lie, when, as The Onion puts it, “Film about Little Guy Battling Huge, Morally Bankrupt Organization Made by Huge, Morally Bankrupt Organization?”

For screenwriter and 1936 Dartmouth graduate Budd Schulberg, who passed away in August, growing up as Hollywood royalty attuned him to this dichotomy between the entrepreneurial spirit and the Machiavellian depravity of the film industry. His father B. P. Schulberg, the founder of Paramount Pictures, would hold late-night poker sessions with the Marx Brothers, with large amounts of money on the line. Through the hobnobbing with the stars that came with being a major studio boss’s son, young Budd was aware of the cunning and lack of morals with which many pursued fame. In 1941, he penned a novel entitled What Makes Sammy Run? whose central character, Sammy Glick, embodies the cunning and vicious opportunism that Schulberg saw in Hollywood. The book was so explosive that Schulberg was fired by the producer Samuel Goldwyn. Despite receiving praise as the best novel on Hollywood, What Makes Sammy Run? was not turned into a feature film.

Yet Budd Schulberg, with that novel, strengthened his ethos of critiquing any system which attempted to regulate artistic freedom. Earlier, in the 1930s, there had been the rise of fascism, and Schulberg joined up with the Communist Party, thinking that it could offer an effective antidote. When he came to write Sammy, however, he found the Party officials scrutinizing his work, criticizing it for its lack of “progressiveness” and other vague terms. But Schulberg was a writer, not a Party cog. He eventually severed his affiliation with the Communists, a decision that was reinforced when he discovered that the writers he had met in the Soviet Union during a trip there in 1934 had all been shot in 1937. Schulberg had the good sense to realize that a system that killed a talent like Isaac Babel held no authority at all.

Enter McCarthyism, which for some people both inside and outside the entertainment industry became synonymous with the blacklist, with intimidation, and with demagoguery. That a man of the creativity and conviction of Budd Schulberg testified willingly in 1951 for the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) proves all of those generalizations disastrously wrong. Schulberg had experienced first-hand the power play of the American Communist Party, which had attempted to censor his work, which instructed its members to influence screenwriting in Hollywood, and, in perhaps its greatest failing of all, continued to support the murderous dictator Stalin and even imitated his speaking style. These trends, especially alarming to Schulberg, who had built his career on exposing the corruption of seemingly benevolent organizations, endangered not only the creative community in Hollywood, but the very foundations of American civil society. Schulberg pointed out the unquestioning devotion which many of his colleagues paid to Soviet Communism. He did so with a desire to preserve the creative atmosphere of Hollywood that he had grown up with, and which he found under attack. Others were not so brave, choosing instead to remain hidden behind the Communist veil.

Schulberg’s magnum opus was still to come. Always wanting to make sure that his writing for the screen reflected in-depth research, Schulberg made the struggle of the New York longshoremen against their mob bosses his next cause célèbre. And so he talked with a Catholic priest in New York and frequented the bars which would provide the realistic basis for his script for On the Waterfront, often ranked as one of the ten best American films of all time. Schulberg worked closely with Elia Kazan, another Hollywood figure who had testified before HUAC, and the film (which dominated the Oscars, garnering eight) made stars of Marlon Brando and Eva Marie-Saint.

As the picture was released in 1954, so close on the heels of the so-called “McCarthy Era,” some thought that it was a justification in allegory for the HUAC testimonies of Schulberg and Kazan. But such critics ought to have realized that Schulberg’s concern with exposing corrupt organizations – whether such corruption occurred in Hollywood itself or in Soviet Russia – had been the central ethos of his career. Budd Schulberg showed that the American film industry was not founded on the principle of people falling into line, but rather on the idea of independent creators going in their own different directions. His was a life that one could describe, triumphantly, as Vox Clamantis in Deserto.