On the Waterfront: The Play

By Budd Schulberg and Stan Silverman

Budd Schulberg’s Academy Award–winning screenplay, updated as a stage drama for modern audiences

First performed in 1988 and again on Broadway in 1995, Budd Schulberg and Stan Silverman’s stage version of On the Waterfront may represent the purest incarnation of his classic story. Produced forty years after the movie swept the Academy Awards, the subtly modernized stage play was a call to arms for a new generation. With this rendition, Schulberg and Silverman hoped to reach young people who seemed detached from the dehumanizing effects of poverty and the exploitation of society’s most vulnerable. Set in the 1950s and featuring original protagonists Terry Malloy and Father Pete Barry, On the Waterfront continues to stand as a masterful and uniquely American tragedy.
 
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Budd Schulberg including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jul 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781453261965

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. 

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On the Waterfront

Budd Schulberg

with Stan Silverman

PLAYS FOR PERFORMANCE

A series designed for

contemporary production and study

Edited by

Nicholas Rudall and Bernard Sahlins

This play is dedicated

to the memory of

Father John Corridan, S.J.

The Waterfront Priest

and of Arthur Browne,

the irrepressible Brownie

who kept getting up to fight again

Contents

Introduction

Background

Characters

Act 1

Scene 1 A Riverfront Street

Scene 2 Backroom of the Friendly Bar

Scene 3 Doyle Parlor

Scene 4 On Stoop Outside Doyle Tenement

Scene 5 Doyle Parlor

Scene 6 An Active Pier

Scene 7 A Loft in the Pier

Scene 8 Father Barry’s Study and the Church Basement

Scene 9 A Riverfront Street

Scene 10 Edie’s Bedroom

Scene 11 Terry’s Rooftop

Act 2

Scene 1 Father Barry’s Study

Scene 2 The Hold of a Freighter

Scene 3 Terry’s Rooftop

Scene 4 Outside the Church

Scene 5 The Friendly Bar

Scene 6 An Abandoned Pier

Scene 7 Edie’s Bedroom

Scene 8 A Riverfront Street

Scene 9 A Friendly Bar

Scene 10 Hearing Rooms: Archdiocese and Crime Commission

Scene 11 Terry’s Rooftop

Scene 12 Active Pier

Scene 13 St. Timothy’s Church Sacristy

Scene 14 St. Timothy’s Church

A Biography of Budd Schulberg

INTRODUCTION

by Budd Schulberg

ON WEST 47TH STREET in New York I stand outside the Brooks Atkinson Theater, and there it is, on the marquee in big letters: On the Waterfront. The play. Not the movie that surprised the director Elia Kazan and me when it overcame rejection by all the major studios to win a record number of Oscars and become a landmark film. But now in a legitimate theater only a ten-minute walk from the piers I had been drawn to after Kazan and I joined forces some fifty years earlier.

Malcolm Johnson’s breakthrough exposé, Crime on the Waterfront, in the long-lost New York Sun pointed us to our subject matter. Following Johnson’s lead, I had gone down to St. Xavier’s Church on West 16th Street to meet one of the most unforgettable characters of my life, the Waterfront Priest, Father John (Pete) Corridan. Tough, canny, fast-talking, chain-smoking and sometimes profane, he had become the champion of the dockworkers who were treated like convict labor by the racket-ridden International Longshoremen’s Association, whose officers were literally recruited in Sing Sing and Dannemora.

I had walked into a brutal, inhuman world—just a few blocks from Sardi’s. Rebel longshoremen daring to meet in the basement of St. Xavier’s were set upon on their way out by rackateer union goons wielding baseball bats and steel pipes. But not a word appeared in any of the New York papers the next day.

Egged on by Father Corridan, I went to Turner Catledge, then the managing editor of the New York Times, and told him about the battle for control of the harbor that was going on from the Brooklyn docks to Hoboken. He invited me to write an article for the Sunday Magazine.

I came back with Joe Docks, Forgotten Man of the Waterfront, a profile of the average longshoreman. There were some forty thousand of them, shaping up at dawn every morning, forming a human horseshoe around the hiring boss who picked them to work a four-hour shift according to his whims or according to the amount they were willing to kick back for the job—$2, $3, even $4 of the $2.27 per hour they were getting for the most dangerous work in America. Joe Docks described them as forgotten men performing rugged, thankless jobs in a jungle of vice and violence where law and conventional safeguards never existed.

My three years of prowling the waterfront resulted in a screenplay that so excited Kazan he took it immediately to Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox, who promptly threw it back at us with, Who’s going to give a damn about a bunch of sweaty longshoremen?

Longshoremen, or workingmen in general, were not in in 1953, and they’re still a rarity if not invisible in the movies of today. It was only with the intervention of a colorful, manipulative freebooter, the independent producer Sam Spiegel, that we managed to get the film made on a B budget and a thirty-five-day shooting schedule.

The Oscars, and the unexpected box-office success, were sweet revenge on the studios that had turned us down. But those years on the waterfront, including attendance at every one of the hearings held by the Waterfront Crime Commission, left me feeling that given the tight structure of a ninety-minute movie, we could tell only part of the story.

The film focused on Terry Malloy, a fringe hoodlum caught between obeisance to the mob and the gradual awakening of his own conscience, stirred by the innocence of Edie Doyle, the sister of the young rebel, whom Malloy had unwittingly helped to do in, and the prodding of the waterfront priest, now called Father Barry. What may strike many as a cliché—If you do it to the least of Mine …—becomes dangerous doctrine in Barry’s mouth. It was dangerous for him to stand up to the waterfront mobsters because behind them was a complex support system, involving the church, big business, and city politics.

In our film the priest—memorably portrayed by Karl Maiden—was a heroic figure. But there was no hint of the ordeal that his real-life counterpart had to endure in bucking the archdiocese.

The ideal film moves from sequence to sequence in a series of mounting climaxes. A novel has time to pause and wonder, time to put a Terry Malloy in proper perspective, to describe a social matrix of which Terry is totally unaware but one that is nonetheless driving him to put his life on the line. Choosing to do the novel through the eyes of Father Pete Barry gave me a vehicle for exploring his courageous challenge to church authority and describing his eventual banishment to an upstate, inland parish.

Despite what Sam Goldwyn was reputed to have said—If you want to send a message, try Western Union—I felt the message of my novel had been overwhelmed in the fame of the film and deserved to be heard more clearly.

Some fifteen years ago my lifelong friend and frequent collaborator, Stan Silverman, and I discussed still a third way of presenting the material: reinventing it as a play.

That the greatest natural harbor in the world was still held hostage by the mob exerted a nagging fascination on us. The cargo ships with their old-fashioned slings into the hold had given way to nine-hundred-foot container ships so high tech that two men could do the work of twenty. But credit the mob with resilience and resourcefulness. The Gambinos in Brooklyn and the Genoveses in Port Newark-Elizabeth weren’t going to

Reviews for On the Waterfront

[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.