18. On the Waterfront
Screen Story and Screenplay by Budd Schulberg
Based on "Crime on the Waterfront" articles by Malcolm Johnson
About the writing of the film:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The film was inspired by "Crime on the Waterfront," a series of articles in the New York Sun, written
by Malcolm Johnson. Johnson won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for these stories.
Producer Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox initially turned down the script on the grounds that the
gritty drama didn't fit well with the policy at the time of creating lavish productions for the studio's
Cinemascope format. —IMDB
Zanuck’s comments to Schulberg and director Elia Kazan: “Boys, I read it.” Pause. “I don’t like a
single thing about it. All you’ve got is a lot of sweaty longshoremen.” —Budd Schulberg
Kazan was so taken with Schulberg’s early drafts (he compared the script to the masterworks Death
of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire) that when it looked as if the film would never get
made, he pleaded with Schulberg: “Budd, believe me, before I take another picture out of here, I give
you my word I’m going to do your script. If I have to get a hand-held camera and shoot it myself on
the docks, with our longshoremen and actors from the [Actors] Studio, I’ll make it on a shoestring, but
I’ll make it.” —Variety, January 1999
In 1955, a year after the movie was released, Random House published Schulberg’s novel
Waterfront, which further explored the subject matter and themes depicted in the film. The New York
Times Book Review described the novel as “white-hot fiction with all the menace, suspense, narrative
flow, fresh characterization and social message anyone could reasonably expect in a novel. It’s the
best of Schulberg, a full-fledged performance by a gifted American writer.” —The New York Times,
4/26/87
Schulberg spent years researching the New York waterfront. He interviewed dozens of
longshoremen, union leaders and their families and became close with Father John Corridan, a
“chain-smoking, tough-minded” priest well versed in the politics and corruption of the waterfront.
Corridan counseled dozens of longshoremen in the basement of St. Francis Xavier Church,
encouraging them to testify to the Waterfront Commission, investigating the mob’s control of the
docks. Corridan became the basis for Karl Malden’s character in the film. Long before the book and
the movie, Schulberg wrote a piece for the Saturday Evening Post about the rebel priest, called
“Father John Knows The Score.” —The New York Times, 4/26/87
Schulberg wrote eight drafts of the script, and every major company, including Columbia, which finally
released the film, turned down the project. “When my film script was thrown back in my face (and Elia
Kazan’s) by Hollywood’s leading moguls, I took refuge in the thought that I had such an
overabundance of material that I could develop the same material into a novel.” —Schulberg, The
New York Times, 4/26/87
The film’s ending is based on Schulberg’s experience of attending approximately 40 hearings on the
waterfront. —The New York Times, 9/14/94
In early drafts of the script, the Terry Malloy character was not an ex-pug dockworker but a cynical
investigative reporter, and was an older, divorced man. —IMDB
On the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
About the writer:
•
•
Birthdate: March 27, 1914. Born into Hollywood royalty; Schulberg is the son of B.P. Schulberg, who
ran Paramount Pictures in the 1930s.
Schulberg, who once trained as a boxer and often wrote about them, was inducted into the
International Boxing Hall of Fame as a writer in 2003, when he was 89 years old. Schulberg’s writings
•
•
•
•
•
•
about boxing included The Harder They Fall and Sparring with Hemingway: And Other Legends of
the Fight Game —IMDB
During the Writers Guild of America strike in 1988, Schulberg spoke at a WGA meeting, beginning his
remarks by saying he was probably the only person present at a 1937 Guild meeting who was still
active in the union today.
Schulberg’s book What Makes Sammy Run? is a scathing look at Hollywood. It was twice adapted for
television; a Broadway musical version based on the book ran for 540 performances in the 1964-65
season. Dreamworks acquired the rights to the novel from Warner Bros. for $2.6 million for a
proposed version starring Ben Stiller, but that movie has yet to be made. —IMDB
Schulberg attended Los Angeles High School, where many of his classmates were impoverished
Mexican immigrants. "Their families could barely feed them," he remembers. "I begged the limo driver
to drop me a couple of blocks away from the school. I felt a tremendous sense of guilt about my
family's advantages." —Walrus Magazine, April 1994
Schulberg attended Dartmouth studying sociology with dreams of becoming a writer—not a
screenwriter, but a novelist.
After graduation Schulberg’s first job was as a reader in Hollywood: $50 a week to read the
equivalent of a novel a day and provide a plot synopsis. He also did some script work as a junior
writer. One assignment, working with a ruined F. Scott Fitzgerald, would inspire Schulberg's 1950
novel, The Disenchanted. —Walrus Magazine, April 1994
Screenwriting awards/nominations for Budd Shulberg: 1 Writers Guild Award win, for On the
Waterfront; 1 Academy Award win, for On the Waterfront.