On the Waterfront Writer Schulberg Dead at 95

Legendary Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg has died, the New York Times reports. He was 95. Schulberg, who won an Oscar for On the Waterfront in 1955, was the son of a movie mogul and grew up as a Hollywood insider. His 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run?, a scathing look at the workings of Hollywood, earned him the wrath of Tinseltown and a round of fisticuffs with John Wayne.

Schulberg again angered Hollywood by naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee during its early '50s probe of the Communist Party's influence in the film industry, a decision he defended as an effort to tackle the party's stifling of free speech. The lifelong boxing fan kept writing until the end: He was working with Spike Lee to get a screenplay on the 1938 Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight made into a movie.
(More Budd Schulberg stories.)