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What Makes Sammy Run?
by Budd Schulberg
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$10.17 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
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Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN13: 9780679734222
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
What Makes Sammy Run?
Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symp-toms of our times—from the little man who shoves you out of the way on the street to the go-getter who shoves you out of a job in the office to the Fuehrer who shoves you out of the world. And all of us have stopped to wonder, at some time or another, what it is that makes these people tick. What makes them run?
This is the question Schulberg has asked himself, and the answer is the first novel written with the indignation that only a young writer with talent and ideals could concentrate into a manuscript. It is the story of Sammy Glick, the man with a positive genius for being a heel, who runs through New York’s East Side, through newspaper ranks and finally through Hollywood, leaving in his wake the wrecked careers of his associates; for this is his tragedy and his chief characteristic—his congenital incapacity for friendship.
An older and more experienced novelist might have tempered his story and, in so doing, destroyed one of its outstanding qualities. Compromise would mar the portrait of Sammy Glick. Schulberg has etched it in pure vitriol, and dissected his victim with a precision that is almost frightening.
When a fragment of this book appeared as a short story in a national magazine, Schulberg was surprised at the number of letters he received from people convinced they knew Sammy Glick’s real name. But speculation as to his real identity would be utterly fruitless, for Sammy is a composite picture of a loud and spectacular minority bitterly resented by the many decent and sincere artists who are trying honestly to realize the measureless potentialities of motion pictures. To this group belongs Schulberg himself, who has not only worked as a screen writer since his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1936, but has spent his life, literally, in the heart of the motion-picture colony. In the course of finding out what makes Sammy run (an operation in which the reader is spared none of the grue-some details) Schulberg has poured out everything he has felt about that place. The result is a book which the publishers not only believe to be the most honest ever written about Hollywood, but a penetrating study of one kind of twentieth-century success that is peculiar to no single race of people or walk of life.
From the Hardcover edition.
| Customer Reviews: |
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| What Makes Sammy Run? |
| Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 |
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The product was not as advertised, which was a much later edition which included additions by the author. The edition I received was from the 1940's not the 1990's. I feel totally duped!! I will be apprehensive about using Amazon.com in the future.
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| What Makes Sammy Run? |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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USPS is slower than expected. Took two days from Long Beach to Torrance.
Missed the door delivery as a result and had to pick it up at the Main PO.
Irksome but no fault of the vendor.
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| a classic - please buy it |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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The book, What Makes Sammy Run? has such wit - about screenwriters in 1930s Hollywood, which created a controversy back in 1941 when it was published. Every producer, actor, writer was looking over their shoulder wondering if he or she was in the book, albeit fictionalized with another name and so forth. Budd Schulberg, the author, is still alive, at 94.
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| Kind of a one note book. |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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This book is primarily about Sammy Glick as seen through the eyes of his associate/rival/friend Al Manheim. It starts off with Sammy meeting Al at the 1930's New York newspaper office where Al works as a theatre columnist and Sammy is a newly hired office boy. Sammy strikes Al as a hard worker, but a bit too anxious for success, as indicated by the hustle Sammy shows all the time.
The book follows the 2 as they seperately move out to California to become screenwriters.
I found the character of Sammy to be extremely one dimensional. He's an ambitous, shameless, heel and that's about it. Al Manheim is a skeptical but decent counterpoint as the narrator.
Aside from the lack of character development, I would have liked to have seen a little more detail of that time and place. Hollywood and New York in the 30's sounds like a dynamite setting to me. Barney's Beanery and a couple of Hollywood restaraunts and bars was about the extent of it though. There was a little bit about the beginnings of the Writer's Guild, but that too, was mostly a stage for Sammy to be a heel on.
On the plus side, the writing was clear and unpretentious and the pacing was reasonably brisk and at a little under 300 pages it was pleasantly compact.
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| Now this is a classic |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Most "classics" have a bad reputation. They are praised to high heaven in textbooks and literary publications...and force-fed to students in literature classes. But this book is as fresh, hilarious and biting as if it were written this season. It moves at a brisk pace and holds you to the end. What a REAL classic should be.
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