On the Waterfront: A Screenplay (Screenplay Library)

On the Waterfront came perilously close to never being produced because as Darryl Zanuck put it when he rejected the script, “Who’s going to care about a lot of sweaty longshoremen?”

Zanuck could not see that On the Water­front was a natural sequel to The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. His rejec­tion of the script sent Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg on a seemingly hopeless quest for a producer to make their film.

Both Kazan and Schulberg had been bit­ten by the waterfront bug, Kazan having aborted a project he had begun with Arthur Miller, and Schulberg having a possible dra­matization of Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles, Crime on the Waterfront, fail to materialize. With their decision, Schulberg went down on the docks to research the more than 750miles of shoreline containing 1,800piers.

Over a year of research had gone into the script Schulberg and Kazan carried from stu­dio, to studio, to studio. Their despair was made whole when the Hollywood Reporter re­ported their grim odyssey in a gossip col­umn. They retreated to their hotel room, and Schulberg booked an early flight East. At this point Sam Spiegel dropped in to invite them to a party in his room across the hall and learned of their plight. A story session in Spiegel’s room at seven in the morning with Spiegel in bed, sheet and blanket drawn up under his chin, wrested a murmured, “I’ll do it. We’ll make the picture.”

Budd Schulberg received the New York Critics Award, Screen Writers Guild Award, and Academy Awards for best story and best screenplay for On the Waterfront.