Being the son of a successful Hollywood producer gave Schulberg an insider's viewpoint on the true happenings of Hollywood, which was reflected in much of his writing. His 1941 novel
What Makes Sammy Run? allowed the public to see the harshness of Hollywood stardom via Sammy Glick's rise to power in a major Hollywood film studio. This novel was criticized by some as being self-directed anti-semitism. Then a member of the
Communist Party USA, Schulberg quit in protest after he was ordered by high-ranking Party member
John Howard Lawson to make changes to the novel. Schulburg has said that the Sammy Glick character was a "composite" based partly on producer Jerry Wald and Milton Sperling, who was Harry Warner's son-in-law. In 1950, Schulberg published
The Disenchanted, about a young screenwriter who collaborates on a screenplay about a college winter festival with a famous novelist at the nadir of his career. The novelist (who was then assumed by reviewers to be a thinly disguised portrait of
Fitzgerald, who had died 10 years earlier) is portrayed as a tragic, flawed figure, with whom the young screenwriter becomes disillusioned. The novel was the tenth bestselling novel in the United States in 1950 and was adapted as a Broadway play in 1958, starring
Jason Robards (who won a
Tony Award for his performance) and
George Grizzard as the character loosely based on Schulberg. In 1958, Schulberg wrote and co-produced (with his younger brother Stuart) the film
Wind Across the Everglades, directed by
Nicholas Ray. Schulberg wrote the 1957 film
A Face in the Crowd. Based on the short story "Your Arkansas Traveler" in his book
Some Faces in the Crowd, the film starred newcomer
Andy Griffith as an obscure country singer who rises to fame and becomes extraordinarily manipulative to preserve his success and power. Schulberg encountered political controversy in 1951 when screenwriter
Richard Collins, testifying to the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), named Schulberg as a former member of the Communist Party. Schulberg, still resentful of the influence Communist officials tried to exert over his fiction, testified as a friendly witness and explained how Communist Party members had sought to influence the content of
What Makes Sammy Run? and "named names" of other Hollywood communists. Schulberg was also a sports writer and former chief boxing correspondent for
Sports Illustrated. He wrote some well-received books on boxing, including
Sparring with Hemingway. He was inducted into the
International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2002 in recognition of his contributions to the sport. Schulberg wrote a script for a film adaptation of
Bobby Kennedys book
The Enemy Within, with
Jerry Wald set to produce the film for
Twentieth Century Fox. However the studio backed out over fears that truckers from the Teamsters union would refuse to transport the film tape to the theaters. The book exposed criminality by
Jimmy Hoffa and others in the Teamsters hierarchy. In 1965, after a devastating
riot had ripped apart the fabric of the
Watts section of Los Angeles, Schulberg formed the
Watts Writers Workshop in an attempt to ease frustrations and bring artistic training to the economically impoverished district. He penned the introduction to
Walter Sheridan's 1972 book
The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa. In 1981, Schulberg wrote
Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince, an autobiography covering his youth in Hollywood growing up in the 1920s and 1930s among the famous motion picture actors and producers as the son of
B. P. Schulberg, head of
Paramount Studios. ==Personal life and death==