solidarity forever

In honor of the writer’s strike, excerpts from WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN (1941) by Schulberg:

--I’ve always been afraid of people who can be agile without grace [4]

----“But as long as you’re going in for it there’s plenty of good, dead authors that’ll hand you terrific plots on a silver platter. Why, I knew a guy who made a nice little pile out of one of DeMaupassant’s stories just the other day. And all he had to do was switch the hooker from a French carriage to a Western stagecoach. If you were smart you’d try to hit on something like that and write yourself an original.” [69]

--“Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.” [69]

--“Work hard, and, if you can’t work hard, be smart; and, if you can’t be smart, be loud.” [89]

--“If you turn in one treatment with both your names on it and that fat swish lets the producer know he did all the writing, you’re dead. If you want to play it cozy, write a treatment of your own without letting Pancake know and then get to your producer alone and tell him you thought Pancake was so far off the line it seemed faster to straighten it out yourself. That way you’ve got a chance of scaring him into bouncing Pancake off the picture an grabbing yourself a solo screen-play credit” [93]

--“I’ve always like [sex] because it’s just about the most fun you get out of life and because … it’s always seemed like the friendliest thing two people can do in the whole world. That’s why I’ve never wanted to turn pro.” [95]

--The producer encourages as many as a dozen aspiring writers to work on his idea. They knock themselves out over his story for two or three weeks in return for nothing but the vaguest of promises. Then the producer comes out of it with enough free ideas to nourish the one writer he finally hires. [123]

--“Every time a man discovers that a woman thinks, the only way he can explain it is that she happens to have a male mind.” [143]

--“Don’t be serious honey,” she said. “Love is much nicer when it isn’t serious.” [146]

--“Talent can get you just so far. Then you got to start using your head [151]

--…under the bonnet or organized morality lurks a very filthy mind .” [169]

--The program began with Dan Young, the barrel-bodied, red-faced, profanely earnest studio manager, who seemed to feel that the story of how he had risen from truck driver right here at this studio to his present importance was a devastating argument for writers giving up the Guild foolishness and making the studio one big happy family. He even hinted that those who refused to participate in his family life (on his terms) would find themselves led by the hand to the studio gate and told never to darken this payroll again…. Sammy Glick [then] informed us that we would get further by voting the way the studio was asking us. If he had used the first person singular instead of the plural he would have been right. [191-2]

---“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 kinds … “ And then it came blurting out of nowhere—“patriotic” [285]