Results tagged “onthewaterfront”

Budd Schulberg, screenwriter for On the Waterfront, died yesterday of natural causes at his home Westhampton Beach, Long Island. He was 95. Besides writing the Academy Award-winning script for On the Waterfront, Schulberg also wrote short stories, novels (including What Makes Sammy Run?) and biographies. The son of Paramount Studios production chief B. P. Schulberg, he was born in New York but grew up in Hollywood in the 1920s. He joined the Communist Party in 1934, later explaining to the Times, "It didn’t take a genius to tell you that something was vitally wrong with the country." But he bristled at party pressure to make his writing more doctrinaire and, after six years, quit. In 1951 he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and like On the Waterfront director Elia Kazan, he publicly named other Hollywood figures as Communists, including screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. and director Herbert Biberman. Both were blacklisted and imprisoned, and many in Hollywood denounced Schulberg. But in On the Waterfront, Schulberg seemed to justify his testimony with the following lines for the character of Father Barry: "Testifying for what is right against what is wrong. What’s ratting to them is telling the truth for you."

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a fall victim on Davoe Terrace in the Bronx, a bank robbery on 2nd Ave. in Manhattan between 62nd and 63rd Sts., and a missing person on 180th St. and Clinton Ave. in the Bronx.
• Jay-Z is a significant partner interested in moving the Nets to Brooklyn, but the rapper apparently is also interested in the naming rights to the team's current Meadowland arena.
• Insurance broker Noel Lauria pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment in a deal that will have him avoid jail time for errantly letting arrows fly from his compound bow on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
• Angelina Jolie looks incredible leaving the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in Manhattan, but she was crying as she related the story of two Syrian refugees.
• A Staten Island mother slapped the sunglasses off the young man who allegedly stole her son's iPod, and then stabbed the portable player purloiner with a shard of glass from his shades.
• A Manhattan mover pleaded guilty to pinching two Picassos from the apartment of an elderly man when he died intestate.
• This NYC skyline should be of some interest to graphics and image tweakers.
• This isn't New York's subway, but we still enjoyed this performance by a group of subterranean, beatbox-performing a capella artists.

Some movies on the theme: On The Waterfront, Unfaithful (never has the Metro-North been so decadent), and Plaza Suite. And find other great events in Gothamist Arts & Events.

Yikes, the Grim Reaper takes more this week. Not only pioneering tennis player Althea Gibson died yesterday, but influential and ultimately HUAC name-naming film director Elia Kazan passed away as well. The amazing breadth of his work, contrasted with his unfortunate personal decisions that affected others, makes people wonder what is he to be judged on, his incomparable work alone (like On The Waterfront) or his overall professionalism. (Recently deceased filmmaker of Nazi propaganda Leni Riefinstahl is another, though more extreme, example of this life versus art debate.)