I’m hearing a lot this afternoon about the death of film director John Hughes. I have no objection to that (although I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen any of his films myself) but I think the really big story should be the passing of novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who gave us the classic “On the Waterfront.”

“On the Waterfront” is such a great movie that even Hollywood, which never really forgave Schulberg for naming names to the House Unamerican Activities Committee, has to respect it. It’s the kind of movie that couldn’t be made today. A union looks bad. A Christian priest is a hero.

It’s amazing to me to read, on the Wikipedia page, that Schulberg worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald on a screenplay. He turned that strange experience into a novel.

Naturally affected by the experience of helping to liberate Nazi concentration camps in World War II, he was a Communist for a while, but left the party when it tried to tell him what to put in his movie, “What Makes Sammy Run?” He cooperated with the HUAC, earning him many enemies in the business.

And he did a lot of other big stuff. It was quite a life.