Book Review - "What Makes Sammy Run?"

Over the years, Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? has been given a slew of epithets. Most are derisive, such as lewd, trashy, anti-Semitic, and worst of all, anti-Hollywood. Normally, a controversial book (that isn't overly conceptual and unfilmable) makes great material for a movie. Schulberg's tour-de-force about the rise of one Sammy Glick, however, has a reputation no one in the business wants to touch. Steven Spielberg, among others, believes it should never be filmed.

Interesting interpretation with this cover.

The perception around this novel is bound to change. It's not so much anti-Hollywood as it is anti-Studio System.

What Makes Sammy Run? revolves around the rise of Sammy Glick from newspaper copyboy to a movie studio boss in 1930s Tinseltown. The story is told from the perspective of Al Manheim a columnist turned screenwriter and Glick's personal "Boswell" to put it in the novel's lingo (Boswell was Samuel Johnson's biographer). Glick is ruthless in his self-serving aspirations, stepping on anyone and anything to get ahead.

Manheim, Glick's first stepping-stone, chronicles the whole thing and he can't help but be intrigued behind the titular question: What makes Sammy run? Sprinkled throughout the two principle characters' intermingling stories are clues. Eventually, Manheim discovers Sammy's secret and he sees everything clearly.

Along the way, some very unflattering episodes about the so-called "Dream Factories" that turned out movies in an assembly line process are depicted. Glick is a master brown-noser, and he uses the ego of his producers and bosses to move up. Also, there are multiple asides to the casting couch and "unpackaging a new crate of virgins." Again, something Hollywood loves to keep on the down-low. But the biggest accusation comes through Glick's unabashed re-purposing of produced films and old stories, which he brands as "originals." Show business loves to think of itself as being artistic and creative, and this is a slap in the face. One that happens to have some truth behind it.

There are many, many more escapades, and all of them undoubtedly lead to the belief that this novel is "anti-Hollywood." For this to be completely true, however, cynicism has to win out over the optimism and the Hollywood (appropriate) desire for a neatly wrapped-up and mostly positive ending. That is not the case.

Everyone "gets what is coming to them." All of Glick's victims, it seems, end up with some degree of redemption. Manheim has what he wants. Julian Blumberg, a writer Glick uses, has what he wants. Kit Sargent, another writer and Glick's ex-lover, has what she wants. Then there's Glick, who wallows in the shallowness of his success. One gets the sense that Schulberg is being too nice and too 1930s show business with his conclusion.

Sorry Spielberg, it looks like this story has been filmed for TV back in the old days.

This bow-tied ending ultimately weakens his critique of show business and diminishes the strength of his story as a whole.

Regardless, the novel is worth reading for it's historical value alone. There are some very interesting descriptions of 1930s Los Angeles.