Plot Summary for What Makes Sammy Run – Budd Schulberg

What makes Sammy Run? Budd Schulberg game summary Told in first person narrative by Al Manheim, drama critic of The New York Record, this is the tale of Sammy Glick, a young illiterate boy who rises from copy boy to the top of the screenwriting profession in thirty-something Hollywood by backstabbingothers. Manheim recalls how he first met the 16-year-old Sammy Glick when Sammy was defecateing as a copy boy at Manheims newspaper. Both awed and disturbed by Sammys aggressive personality, Manheim becomes Sammys primary observer, mentor and, as Sammy asserts numerous times, his best friend.Tasked with taking Manheims column down to the printing room, unrivalled day Glick rewrites Manheims column, impressing the managing editor and gaining a column of his own. Later he steals a piece by an draw a bead on young writer, Julian Blumberg, sending it under his own name to the historied Hollywood talent agent Myron Selznick. Glick sells the piece, Girl Steals boy, for $10,000 and leave s the paper to go to work in Hollywood, leaving behind his girlfriend, Rosalie Goldbaum. When the picture of Girl Steals Boy opens, Sammy is credited for original screenplay and Blumberg is not acknowledged.Glick rises to the top in Hollywood everywhere the succeeding years, paying Blumberg a small salary under the add-in to be his ghost writer. He even manages to accommodate his stageplay Live telegram performed at the Hollywood Playhouse, although the script is actually a case of plagiarism, The trend Page in flimsy disguise strangely enough, no one except Manheim seems to notice. Sammys bluffing besides includes talking ab bring out books he has never read. Manheim, whose ambitions be much more modest, is both fascinated and disgusted by the examine of Sammy Glick, and Manheim carefully chronicles his rise.In Hollywood, Manheim is disheartened to learn that Catherine Kit Sargent, a novelist and screenwriter he greatly admires, has fallen for Sammys charms. Although Manhei m is quite open about his feelings for Kit, she makes it clear that it is Sammy she prefers, peculiarly in bed. When she met Sammy, she tells Manheim, she had this crazy desire to know what it felt like to have all that driving ambition and frenzy and violence inside me. Manheim also describes the Hollywood system in detail, as a money motorcar oppressive to talented writers.The bosses prefer to have carte blanche when dealing with their writers, ranging from having them work on a week-to-week basis to giving them a seven-year contract. In the film industry, Manheim remarks at one point in the novel, it is the rule rather than the ejection that convictions are for sale, with people double-crossing each other whenever the slightest chance presents itself to them. Hollywood, he notices, regularly and efficiently turns out three products moving pictures, ambition, and fear.Manheim becomes an eyewitness to the hand over of what was to become the Writers Guild, an organization creat ed to protect the interests of the screenwriters. After one of the studios periodic reshufflings, Manheim finds himself out of work and goes back to New York. There, still preoccupied with Sammy Glicks rise to stardom, he investigates Sammys past. He comes to understand, at least to some degree, the machinery that turns out Sammy Glicks and the anarchy of the silly.Manheim realizes that Sammy grew up in the dog-eat-dog world of New Yorks Lower East perspective (Rivington Street), much like the more sophisticated dog-eat-dog world of Hollywood. The one fraternity between Sammys childhood days and his present position seems to be Sheik, mortal who went to school with him and regularly beat him up. Now Sheik is working as Glicks personal servant (or almost slave)possibly some kind of belated act of revenge on Sammys part, or the victims triumph. When Manheim returns to Hollywood he becomes one of Glicks writers.There he realizes that there is also a small minority of honorable me n working in pictures, especially producer Sidney Fineman, Glicks boss. Manheim teams up with Kit Sargent to write several films for Glick, who has successfully switched to production and moved into a gigantic manor in Beverly Hills. Finemans position becomes compromised by a drawing string of flops, and Manheim attempts to convince Harrington, a Wall Street banker representing the film companys financiers, that Fineman is still the right on man for the job. This is the moment when Glick sees his chance to get rid of Fineman altogether and hold back his fructify.At a reception, Glick meets Laurette, Harringtons daughter he immediately and genuinely falls in chicane with this golden girl, discarding his girlfriend. He feels that he is about to kill twain birds with one stone by uniting his personal ambition and his love life. Fineman, only 56, dies soon after losing his job to Sammyof a broken heart, it is rumoured. Sammys hymeneals is described by Manheim as a wedding party- to-end-all-marriages staged in the exquisite setting of Sammys estate. Manheim and Kit Sargent, who have finally decided to get married, fracture away early to be by themselves.Sammy discovers Laurette making love in the guest room to Carter Judd, an actor Sammy has just hired. Laurette is not repentant She coldbloodedly admits that she considers their marriage to be purely a business affair. Sammy calls Manheim and asks him to come over to his place immediately. Once there, Manheim for the first time witnesses a self-conscious, desperate, and suffering Sammy Glick who cannot stand being alone in his big house. In the end, Sammy orders Sheik to get him a prostitute, while Manheim drives home.