‘Sammy’ still running strong

He passes off as his own scripts that were ghostwritten for him by a naive -- and hungry -- screenwriter. He does his best to sabotage the Writers Guild. He suggests to the studio’s corporate owners that the present head of production is too old and out of touch with the movies’ youthful core audience, then, when he succeeds to the job, cries copious tears at his predecessor’s memorial service. His manservant is widely rumored to be a mobster, which lends a dark criminal glamour to his doings. And, of course, he has his shoes expensively made to measure by an exclusive boot maker. (“When shoes don’t fit me perfectly, I get headaches.”)

No, it’s not just another Hollywood novel. It is the Hollywood novel -- Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?” (Vintage: 328 pp., $14 paper) -- and it happens to be the best book about the movies I read in 2004.

All right, the guilty pleasure of Joe Eszterhas’ “Hollywood Animal” aside, it wasn’t a great year for “Film on Paper.” But even if all the cinema studies I dutifully plowed through had been masterly, it would have been hard for them to achieve the freshness, the immediacy, of this 63-year-old portrait of that immortal conniver, Sammy Glick. All you’d have to do is change the names of the restaurants where Sammy preens for the gossip columnists to publish the book as a contemporary expose.

Except -- and this is what I didn’t observe when I first read “Sammy” a half-century ago -- it doesn’t read like an expose. The prose has a young man’s sunny energy (Schulberg was 27 when he published the book) and the author’s stance is one of almost reportorial objectivity. Schulberg doesn’t really hate his antihero. He’s often amused by him, and he’s often helplessly awed by his demonic energy. Sammy has a past (dire immigrant poverty) that, in a sense, “explains” what makes him run. But as it is with a lot of successful Americans, then and now, he’s sprinting so breathlessly away from his history that he never thinks of using it to justify his predations.

He doesn’t think too far ahead, either. They made pictures fast in his day, so all his schemes are relatively short-term, provisional. The guy is free to turn on a dime, his actions unclouded by gloomy recollection or by the unknowable future. (His biggest movie idea is -- uncanny prescience here -- an epic about the Titanic.) What saves the book from the potboiler cynicism of the many pop fictions that have derived from it is its context. The author, of course, was a self-described Hollywood “prince,” the son of a pioneering movie mogul, well educated and, at the time he was writing, an idealistically driven Communist (who left the party when the comrades disapproved of this very book). Some part of him always liked the town that had nurtured him, especially the working-stiff part of it. And his book is full of anti-Sammys -- notably a smart, sensible and hesitantly sexy screenwriter named Kit -- decent people toiling to make movies that are not all, as Sammy describes them, “canned goods.”

“Hollywood may be full of phonies, mediocrities, dictators and good men who have lost their way,” Schulberg wrote, “but there’s something that draws you there that you should not be ashamed of.” That grounding, that balance, is what assures his work’s continuing effectiveness.

When “Sammy” was first published people didn’t much notice its moral firmness. They -- especially the East Coast literati -- too much loved hating its eponymous heel. They had never seen his like before and too easily fell in love with the notion that he was all you needed to know about a business that was, they were sure, degrading American thought and culture.

Now -- many far worse degradations later -- we can see Sammy Glick not so much as monster but as an early archetype for thousands of other manipulators inflicting their lunatic realities on our image-driven politics, our celebrity-driven media. His inheritors have been to college, their sports jackets are a little quieter and their shoes may be store-bought, but, like Sammy working his will on a surprisingly innocent Hollywood, there is something eerie in their solipsism. Aren’t the White House advisors who tell us that there is no objective reality until the proprietors of the American empire decree what it is just smoothed-down, primped-up versions of Sammy?

In the last line of his novel, Schulberg calls it “a blueprint of a way of life that was paying dividends in the first half of the twentieth century.” All you have to do is adjust that phrase’s time frame a trifle to see why this deliciously readable tale continues to grip our imaginations. And to retain its sharply pointed relevance. *