Guilt Trip: Why Didn’t this ‘Sammy’ Run?

If you ever doubted that Hollywood can run a good Jewish guilt trip on even the best known among us, read Ben Stiller and Jerry Stahl on Huffington Post. Nearly a month after the death of legendary author/screenwriter Budd Schulberg (he died on Aug. 5 at 95), and 13 years after they collaborated on a screenplay of “What Makes Sammy Run,” they’re still beating themselves up. It’s a classic story of aspiration, frustration, guilt and regrets. And funny too. I hope the movie gets made someday, the book still seems to reveal an insiders’  Hollywood story better than any other.

It starts:

I guess you could say that our relationship with Budd Schulberg was typical Hollywood: we met him, we liked each other, and in the end, we kind of broke his heart. But that didn’t mean we didn’t stay friends. In Hollywood, nobody will hurt you like your friends. It’s a given. Sometimes it’s intentional, Sammy Glick-style, but it’s worse when it isn’t. Which doesn’t make it any easier to write about. We both ended up loving Budd and, given the shot, like many others before us, we couldn’t get the movie of his classic, ‘What Makes Sammy Run?,’ made.

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