On The Waterfront

Written by Budd Schulberg

Narrated by William Hootkins

Terry Malloy is a hoodlum, caught between the beginnings of a conscience and the racketeers for whom he works. Katie is t hat conscience. But she is torn between her love for him and her belief he killed her brother. Together with a slum-reared Catholic priest, Father Pete Barry, Terry and Katie take on the gangster-ridden waterfront unions of Johnnie Friendly. After writing the award-winning film of On The Waterfron, Budd Schulberg developed the story of Terry Malloy into a novel. An exceptionally talented and experienced reader, William Hootkins captures the mood of this stark, realistic, story of brutality, corruption and tender love with great force and energy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780003344

Budd Schulberg

Budd Schulberg (1914–2009) was a screenwriter, novelist, and journalist who is best remembered for the classic novels What Makes Sammy Run?, The Harder They Fall,and the story On the Waterfront, which he adapted as a novel, play, and an Academy Award–winning film script. Born in New York City, Schulberg grew up in Hollywood, where his father, B. P. Schulberg, was head of production at Paramount, among other studios. Throughout his career, Schulberg worked as a journalist and essayist, often writing about boxing, a lifelong passion. Many of his writings on the sport are collected in Sparring with Hemingway (1995). Other highlights from Schulberg’s nonfiction career include Moving Pictures (1981), an account of his upbringing in Hollywood, and Writers in America (1973), a glimpse of some of the famous novelists he met early in his career. He died in 2009. 

Reviews for On The Waterfront

[Jimmy DeFoor · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good compliment to the movie. Good length for car trip.

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Budd Schulberg wrote the screenplay for the film released in 1954, starring Marlon Brando the contender. On the heels of that success he published a novelization a year later. Then in 1984, he wrote a stage adaptation which premiered on Broadway. It used lasers (!) and surround sound systems which were technological innovations for the time. The chronology is somewhat confusing because usually movies follow the play, and plays follow the novel, but in this case everything was reversed. I listened to the full-cast LATW production of the stage play and found it to be very good. Amazingly I never saw the movie nor knew the story so this radio play was my first exposure. I did read that the ending of the film is "Hollywood" whereas the play (and novel) are more "realistic". Presumably he gets the girl in the film, what happens here I leave to the reader to find out. This story concerns issues that are somewhat arcane today - with the rise of the shipping container the old-fashioned dock worker has morphed into the Minecraft architect, moving around giant cubes with giant machines. Even by 1954 the beginnings of this revolution were starting to take shape. Nevertheless, it has a timeless quality concerning doing what is right versus what is expected. The characters are memorable though probably even more so on the screen with Bernstein's score.