Oscar Winning Screenwriter Budd Schulberg is Dead at 95

Posted on August 6, 2009

Novelist, boxing journalist and Oscar-winning screenwriter Budd Schulberg has died. He was 95. Schulberg was best known for his Oscar-wining screenplay for On the Waterfront. The film starred Marlon Brando and was directed by Elia Kazan. It won 8 Oscars.

Schulberg suffered breathing problems Wednesday afternoon and was rushed from his Westhampton, L.I., home to Peconic Bay Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead, a family spokesman said. The legendary writer had been in good health, even attending a reading last week in Hoboken, N.J., of "On the Waterfront" put on by members of the cast of "The Sopranos." "I thought they did an excellent job. I was very pleased with it," Schulberg told the Jersey Journal in what turned out to be his last interview.
Born Seymour Wilson Schulberg in New York City, he was raised in Hollywood, where his father, B.P. Schulberg, was a movie pioneer and head of Paramount Pictures. Struggling throughout his youth with a speech impediment, he became a good listener with an ear for poetry. While at Dartmouth, Schulberg collaborated with F. Scott Fitzgerald on a script based on the school's annual winter carnival.
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Schulberg was also the former chief boxing correspondent for Sports Illustrated and was elected to the Boxing Hall of Fame in 2002.

Schulberg's first novel, What Makes Sammy Run?", was published in 1941 and won the National Critics' Choice for Best First Novel of the Year. He is survived by his fourth wife and two children. Our condolences to his family.