Budd Schulberg, who has died aged 95, wrote the screenplay for the 1954 film On the Waterfront, and gave Marlon Brando, playing the longshoreman Terry Malloy, one of the classic lines in movie history: "I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody."
Schulberg's screenplay won one of the film's eight Oscars. It was a collaboration between the director, Elia Kazan, and Schulberg – two ex-communists who a few years earlier had both testified voluntarily before the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac). On the Waterfront suggested that naming names could be the honourable thing to do. The New York mob had long dominated the longshoremen's union on the Hoboken waterfront, and Schulberg was attracted by the brave struggle against a corrupt union hierarchy. He spent time with the men in their waterfront saloons, and believed in their cause.
Major studio heads were not interested in a story about labour trouble in Hoboken ("Who gives a shit about longshoremen?" wondered Darryl F Zanuck, production head of 20th Century-Fox, amiably), but the Austrian-born independent producer Sam Spiegel liked the project and brought it in on a 35-day shooting schedule for under $900,000. Spiegel ignored Kazan's wish to cast Frank Sinatra, who spoke "perfect Hobokenese", in the role of Molloy, and signed Brando for the inarticulate lead. It was one of his greatest roles.
Schulberg was the eldest son of Jewish parents who had risen from East Side poverty to a life of comfort and elegance on New York's West Side. His father, Benjamin, known as "BP", wrote screenplays for Adolph Zukor's Famous Players film company before moving to Hollywood in 1920, where he became the cigar-chomping, poker-playing, hard-drinking head of production at Paramount studios. The sound of his father throwing up at dawn after an evening "script conference" with his latest female star was a familiar one to Budd.
His mother Adeline, or "Ad", was a tough-minded literary agent. A cultured woman, she believed in Freud and progressive education, and despised the trash emitted by her husband's studio. She had little time for parenting, and none for maternal affection, but was proud of her son's intellectual and artistic interests.
Schulberg grew up a crown prince in the heyday of the Hollywood studios. With the run of the studio lot, he was spoiled by everyone who sought BP's favour, and grandly drove around town in his father's Duesenberg. When BP temporarily left his wife for the actor Sylvia Sidney, Budd screamed at his father: "You son of a bitch! You're coming home with me. Right now!"
In 1931 Schulberg was sent east to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and then attended Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, where he graduated with the highest honours in 1936. In his time at Dartmouth, the college maintained a quota system, as did Yale, Harvard and Princeton, limiting the number of Jews admitted to each freshman class. Schulberg's response to the prevailing ethos was aggressive and witty. The summer before he entered Dartmouth, he worked for David O Selznick in the story department at the RKO studio, and was paid $1,500 for a story. A copy of the cheque was framed and displayed in his college dormitory.
On a visit to Moscow in 1934, Schulberg attended the first Soviet Writers' Congress, where he heard Maxim Gorky's sycophantic praise of socialist realism. He admired the Soviet experiment, and was devoted to Vsevolod Meyerhold's theatre.
After graduating from Dartmouth, he returned to Hollywood, joined the Communist party, and again worked for Selznick. His father's heavy drinking, and a power-play by east coast investors, pushed BP out of Paramount. Determined not to follow in his father's footsteps, Schulberg began writing ironic short stories about Hollywood, and took part in the leftwing Western Writers' Congress in 1936. He married Virginia Ray, also a Communist party member, in the same year.
In 1939 Schulberg was hired by Walter Wanger to develop a screenplay for United Artists, set at the annual Dartmouth winter carnival. When the script faltered, F Scott Fitzgerald was brought in as a collaborator. Fitzgerald found Schulberg "a very nice, clever kid", who told wonderful stories about Hollywood. He later used some of Schulberg's stories in The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald was drunk throughout their three days at the carnival, and no work was done. Wanger fired them both. An incoherent Fitzgerald was taken by Schulberg and Sheila Graham to New York, where he was admitted to hospital. Schulberg eventually completed the script for Winter Carnival, which was released in 1939. In 1950 he published a novel based on his Dartmouth visit, The Disenchanted, and later described the fiasco in his highly readable autobiography, Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince (1981).
In 1939 Schulberg also began work on a novel based on his 1937 short story What Makes Sammy Run? about Sammy Glick, a ghetto kid who cynically rose to power in Hollywood. It was an ethnic variant on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The novel trod on sensitivities among studio bosses, who were afraid of public attention being drawn to the pervasive Jewish influence in movies. They feared an antisemitic backlash and BP begged his son not to publish it.
Schulberg had his own problems with the Jewish community, having been expelled from the Wilshire Boulevard temple as a result of teenage pranks. The Communist party demanded that he play down the Jewishness of the central character in What Makes Sammy Run? and demanded a more positive portrait of a strike led by the Screen Writers Guild. The pugnacious Schulberg rejected this and broke with party discipline, publishing What Makes Sammy Run? to good reviews and sales in 1941. It was dramatised on television in 1959.
After divorcing his first wife in 1942, he enlisted in the navy, serving in John Ford's documentary film unit. In 1945 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant (junior grade), and was assigned to gather photographic evidence to be used at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
Schulberg's novel The Harder They Fall (1947) portrayed the seamier side of boxing. Its accuracy was warmly praised by the former champion Gene Tunney. A lifelong fight fan, Schulberg became boxing editor of Sports Illustrated. He wrote a biography of Muhammad Ali in 1972 and collected his vivid accounts of major fights in Sparring with Hemingway (1995). In 2001 he collaborated with Spike Lee on an unused screenplay about the fights between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling.
He also wrote A Face in the Crowd (1957), about a rising demagogue. When the Huac arrived in Hollywood in March 1951, Schulberg contacted the committee voluntarily and named 15 members or supporters of the party, an act which separated Schulberg permanently from those, including Arthur Miller, who declined to assist the committee. There were social penalties for his pugnacious stand. For decades, blacklisted writers regarded him as an informer. For the rest of his life the Huac testimony remained a deeply troubling issue for him. But the way the Communist party tried to change his novel always filled him with indignation at its fanaticism and bullying.
Schulberg's hatred for labour racketeering, the source of his deep empathy for the longshoremen in On the Waterfront, led in 1960 to an invitation from Robert Kennedy to write a script based on Kennedy's The Enemy Within, an account of his legal war against Jimmy Hoffa and racketeering in the Teamsters union. The film was never made, but Schulberg returned to Hoffa in a novel, Everything That Moves, in 1980.
Schulberg remained an archetypal liberal figure in Hollywood. He founded the Watts Writers Workshop in 1964 and edited From the Ashes: Voices of Watts in 1967. He also founded the Frederick Douglas Creative Arts Centre in New York in 1971, and received the Amistad award for his work with African-American writers.
His personal reminiscences were published in Four Seasons of Success (1972, expanded 1983). He was a man who knew Hollywood from the inside, as he came to know the lives of longshoremen and boxers, and wrote with a hard energy and a dogged loyalty to an individual's search for the truth.
Schulberg is survived by his fourth wife, Betsy, whom he married in 1978, a daughter, Virginia, from his first marriage, two sons, Stephen and David, from his second marriage, and two children, Benn and Jessica, from his fourth.
Steven Berkoff writes: Nothing made us, the cast and producers, more proud than to have Budd Schulberg come to the Edinburgh festival last year to see On the Waterfront being staged. It was a long haul, more than two years since its first workshop, its subsequent showing at the Hackney Empire in London under the enlightened auspices of Simon Thomsett, who financed its first staging, then to Nottingham Playhouse and then Edinburgh, when Budd saw it for the first time.
Perhaps deep in our hearts we thought we might be racing against time, since Budd was 94 and frail, but he made the long journey with his wife Betsy and soon we were sitting with one of the giants of American movies. He came to the press night and sat in the front row.
Carol Winter, one of our producers, asked me to bring him on stage and introduce him. The show, led by Simon Merrills as Terry Malloy, was as good as it had ever been. Budd came gingerly on stage and received the biggest ovation I have heard in a theatre.
Then he spoke and with a voice so slight and small, yet his words carried to the back. He said: "This is one of the happiest days of my life." It was for us too.