Alan Swyer
Budd
Only once in the last twenty years or so have I seen even a piece of the Oscars, and that led to quite a stir. It was back in 2013, and I'd reluctantly accepted an invitation to a watch party, figuring I could make show up, chomp on an appetizer or two, then slip out to watch basketball at home.
A series of conversations elongated my stay, which meant that through the corner of my eye I happened to catch the “In Memoriam” segment, hosted by George Clooney. Meaningful names scrolled across the screen – Nora Ephron, Ray Bradbury, Richard Zanuck, Ernest Borgnine – plus others less familiar. But unless I missed it, one important name seemed to be missing.
Early Monday morning, I called the Motion Picture Academy and asked to speak to the person in charge of those honors. After close to five minutes of sitting on hold, a woman came on the line.
“Did I not see it,” I asked, “or was Andy Griffith's name omitted?”
“He didn't belong,” she answered.
“Because?”
“We consider him a television actor.”
Dumbfounded, I took a deep breath. “Can I ask a question without your taking offense?”
“I suppose,” she replied dubiously.
“Ever seen A Face In The Crowd?”
After a moment of silence, came a hesitant answer. “Should I?”
“Only if you care about film. Please take my name and number, then promise you'll call once you have.”
“It's sounds like this is personal,” she said. “Was he a friend or family member?”
“Never even set eyes on him,” I stated, choosing not to acknowledge that it was indeed personal, but in an entirely different way.
A few years earlier, after making a documentary about the Latinization of baseball, both on the field and in the stands, I decided to address boxing in a similar way. Because of other commitments – an exploration of the criminal justice system, then a look at a Black cultural mecca in Los Angeles – my plan was to use off days to shoot as many interviews as possible so as to stockpile a library.
Despite the frustrations of filming only sporadically, I was slowly assembling a Who's-Who – Oscar de la Hoya, Sugar Ray Leonard, Julio Cesar Chavez, Larry Merchant, and others – when a producer I'd worked with informed me that one of the world's greatest boxing fans wanted to meet. The name he mentioned floored me: Budd Schulberg.
To my mind, Budd Schulberg was a giant as a screenwriter, as well as an acclaimed novelist. What I didn't learn until then was that he had once managed a couple of fighters.
When a lunch was suggested, I was thrilled. Getting to the restaurant early, I was already seated when a frail-looking older man approached ever so slowly. But all signs of frailty faded once Budd and I started talking.
First and foremost, Budd asked if I had ever spent time in the ring. Far too often, he explained, people use boxing in fiction or films without any real connection to the sport.
When I answered that I'd boxed at two different stages of my life, Budd pressed me for specifics.
The first, I told him, came at the Police Athletic League in New Jersey, where I was mentored by a middleweight contender named Gene “Ace” Armstrong.
“Topnotch fighter,” said Budd approvingly. “But what made you start?”
“Jewish kids didn't play basketball in my high school.”
“And you knew you'd get hazed?”
When I nodded, Budd smiled. “And the second time?”
After my second year of college, I recounted, I got a job writing the Paris section of a travel guide for the youth market, then wound up living in a place without a shower. That led me to the Paris University Athletic Complex, where my attempt to join the basketball team was spurned. Sports that were alien to me – tennis, golf, soccer – were suggested, leading me to ask if there wasn't anything else.
Only if you box, I was told dismissively. When I said yes, I immediately acquired fifteen friends, plus the opportunity to swim and shower six days a week after practice.
“I love it!” Budd exclaimed, as a waitress appeared to take our orders.
“I'm assuming you know,” Budd then said, “that I wrote a novel about boxing that was made into a film.”
“The Harder They Fall,” I replied. “Based on Primo Carnera, plus mobsters like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo?”
“Inspired by,” corrected Budd. “Did you watch the fights growing up?”
I stated proudly that I never missed the Gillette Friday Night Fights: Sugar Ray Robinson vs Carmen Basilio, plus the likes of Dick Tiger, Emile Griffith, and Nino Benvenutti.
“When boxing was boxing,” Budd said approvingly. “So tell me the focus of your film.”
“As you know better than anyone, boxing has always been about chauvinism – people supporting their own as group after group fought its way out of poverty.”
“Jews, Irish, Italians, Poles” said Budd. “And, of course, Blacks. Joe Louis knocking out Schmeling on the eve of World War II made him the first African-American hero.”
“So my film, El Boxeo –”
“Spanish for boxing –”
“Is about the Latinization of the sport in the ring and in the stands.”
“Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans,” said Budd. “Nicaraguans like Arguello, Panamanians like Duran –”
“And at the same time a migration west from Madison Square Garden to LA and Vegas.”
“Can't wait to see it,” Budd exclaimed.
“Me, too. But it's a long way from finished.”
“You'll get there,” Budd assured me.
As we dove into our food, Budd quizzed me about the people I'd interviewed. He was particularly curious about Sugar Ray Leonard, whom he had in his Top Ten of all time, and Oscar de la Hoya, the first Latino crossover star. Then he asked for my impression of Larry Merchant, whom he called “the last of the great sports columnists” before transitioning to HBO, where he became the resident boxing expert.
By the time we finished our meals, Budd's energy was beginning to fade. “I'd like to do this again, if it's okay with you,” he said as he got up from his chair. “And I'd love to see anything you're willing to show me – individual interviews, rough cuts, or whatever.”
“I'll send some interviews to you.”
Budd smiled, then grew pensive. “With me showering you with questions, I never gave you a moment to ask me. Anything you want to know?”
I nodded. “But not about your writing. Tell me about the Watts Writers Workshop?”
Budd beamed. “Truthfully, that's what I'm proudest of, even more than my own work.”
“But how did you get it started?”
“After the awful riots, I wanted to help. The only thing I knew something about was writing, so I started a writers' workshop.”
“Was it strange driving down there?”
“My friends thought I was out of my mind. But think of the talent that got its start there. Quincy Troupe, who wrote that great biography of Miles Davis. The actor Yaphet Kotto. Poets like Wanda Coleman and Ojenke. Plus the Watts Prophets, who were the West Coast equivalent of the Last Poets. But I'd bet anything you've got an activist side. Right?”
It was my turn to nod. “I'm on the Board of CBATS, Compton Baseball Academy Training,” I said.
“Getting kids off the streets and onto the ball field?”
“Yup.”
“And?”
“The Board of one of the Historic Black Colleges.”
Budd grinned. “I could tell we had more in common than just boxing. And?”
“Together with the Chief Probation Officer and the Presiding Judge of Juvenile, I created the LA County Team Court, in which first time offenders can face a jury of their peers.”
“Which, if I remember correctly, is called front-end intervention. Mind if I ask you one more thing before we go our own ways?”
“Please –”
“Among the films and books I've written, do you have a favorite?”
“I love all of 'em,” I said.
“But if you had to pick one –”
“A Face In The Crowd.”
“That's mine, too,” Budd gushed, giving me a hug. “Let's do it again sooner rather than later.”
Sooner wasn't possible since I was soon off to San Diego to film interviews for what would come to be called It's More Expensive To Do Nothing.
Before leaving, I sent Budd the unedited footage I'd shot of Sugar Ray Leonard, Oscar de la Hoya, and Larry Merchant lunch date.
“Great stuff!” Budd asserted when I finally returned his call from San Diego after several days of marathon filming. “I can't wait to see how it cuts together. But tell me about what you're doing down there.”
I was documenting, I explained, a pilot program emphasizing remediation rather than incarceration. With the recidivism rate at nearly 70 percent, prisoners upon release were getting loaded, getting laid, then getting into more trouble. The solution, it was felt, was to treat chronic criminality in the same way as a chronic disease. That meant overcoming illiteracy, substance abuse, and an absence of job skills, with the belief that productive citizens would make for a safer community. With that in mind, I had already interviewed not just the Presiding Judge and Chief Probation Officer, but also several ex-cons whose lives had been turned around.
“Beautiful!” blurted Budd. “My kind of stuff.”
Before hanging up, the two of us made a date for another lunch soon after my return to LA.
That date, however, wound up being postponed because of what I was told was an unexpected medical emergency.
Apologetically, Budd called a few days later to reschedule. When our get-together was delayed another time it, was clear to me that Budd, who was in his nineties, was rapidly declining.
That was reinforced during subsequent phone conversations, in which the strength of his voice progressively diminished.
Still it was rewarding to get his comments about El Boxeo sequences I sent him, and even more exciting when I could get him to talk specifically about his own work.
One Tuesday morning, he spoke about how and why in On The Waterfront he made Terry Malloy, the Marlon Brando character, an ex-boxer. Then he informed me that Brando's famous line – “I could've been a contender” – was something Budd overheard in a bar near New York's legendary Stillman's Gym.
A week or so later, after getting him to discuss his documentary about Joe Louis. I asked why he considered him, rather than Muhammad Ali, the greatest of all heavyweight champs. “Without Joe, there'd be no Ali,” replied Budd. “68 wins, 54 by knockout, and only 3 losses. 25 consecutive title defenses – still a record for all weight classes. Plus the longest single reign as champ of any boxer in history. Not to take anything away from Ali, who was a great champion and an even greater man,”
As much as I admired Ali, I wasn't about to argue.
The best phone call came ten days later, when I finally got Budd to talk to me about A Face In The Crowd, his parable about a small-town con artist who uses radio to attain the power to sway the country. When I asked if it was true that the Lonesome Rhodes character, portrayed by Andy Griffith, was modeled on a radio personality named Arthur Godfrey, Budd chuckled.
“Only if you throw in some Huey Long,” he replied, “plus a dose of Billy Graham.”
When I wondered if a charismatic so-called populist could rise to power for real in contemporary America, Budd groaned. “The question is not could it happen,” he stated emphatically, “but will it happen.”
Though Budd made me promise that I would give him an advanced peek at El Boxeo before its first festival screenings, that was not to be the case. Sadly, he passed away just as I was finishing post-production.
But I did eventually get a call from the woman I'd spoken to at the Motion Picture Academy. She apologized profusely, then proceeded to rave about not just the film, but especially Andy Griffith's performance..
“I hope the film's not prescient,” she commented. “I'd sure hate to see a con man use radio or TV to rise in politics the way he did.”
Unfortunately, we now know all to well that the woman's fears were not unfounded.
Alan Swyer is an award-winning filmmaker whose recent documentaries have dealt with Eastern spirituality in the Western world, the criminal justice system, diabetes, boxing, and singer Billy Vera. In the realm of music, among his productions is an album of Ray Charles love songs. His novel 'The Beard' was recently published by Harvard Square Editions.