Screenwriter in the Ghetto

Every Friday afternoon, Novelist and Screenwriter Budd Schulberg leaves his tree-shaded home in North Beverly Hills and drives across town to the Negro slum of Watts. There, at the Watts Happening Coffee House, a ramshackle building across the street from the charred foundation of a store razed in last year's riots, the author of What Makes Sammy Run? sits down for three hours with a small group of ghetto-scarred Negroes and teaches them how to write poetry, plays, short stories and novels. A onetime teacher of creative writing at Columbia, Schulberg says that their writing ability is "so much higher than my group of college students."

Schulberg, whose standard fee for a script is $100,000 and up, takes no money for his teaching chore, for which he volunteered after driving around Watts one night in the wake of the troubles. Shocked by the evidence of repression and neglect, the following week he asked the Westminster Neighborhood Association, which runs a number of adult education programs in Watts, if he could help. He was told that there were plenty of people hanging around the settlement house with nothing to do; maybe some of them could write.

Conquering Distrust. For the 52-year-old writer, the workshop at Watts has been his toughest task since the days when he prowled the docks gathering material for the screenplay of On the Waterfront. When the Westminster Association announced his first class, ten young Negroes signed up, but only two bothered to show. Undiscouraged, Schulberg kept at it, eventually conquered the distrust of his students. Now he has 18 regulars, ranging from boys in their teens to unemployed rniddle-aged workers.

To outsiders, the class seems like scarcely organized chaos. Schulberg, wearing chinos and loafers, sits on a sofa. Young Negroes in Bermudas and sawed-off jeans, women in simple dresses, are grouped around him on threadbare chairs. While one of the writers reads from his latest work, or Schulberg lectures on the mechanics of publishing, a stranger may enter the room to bang away at the scarred upright piano.

"Full of Talent." Schulberg has found that the ghetto is "full of talent, full of innate ability," and his charges have already produced enough poetry to consider publishing an anthology to be called Voices of Watts (see box). Star pupil is unquestionably Johnie Scott, 20, who was born in the ward of a women's prison, nonetheless won a scholarship to Harvard but dropped out after a year. Scott, whose poem bad news has been published in Los Angeles magazine, has been contacted by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. and Harper's magazine, is planning to return to college this fall. Schulberg is equally high on the talents of Leumas Sirrah, 18, a high-school student whose poems are generally lyrical abstractions about God and life, and Jimmy Sherman, 22, whose four-stanza verse TH' WORKIN' MACHINE is being set to music by television's Steve Allen.

Gentle in his comments, Schulberg urges his budding poets and playwrights to express their own personal experience of life in a black ghetto, spends much of his class answering such questions as, "Do you think the poem's finished?" or "How do I approach a publisher?" Even more than by the vivid quality of the work produced by his class, Schulberg is impressed by the way his writers cooperate and encourage one another. "I wouldn't have believed they would listen so intently to each other's work," he says. "They listen and are moved." In turn, Schulberg has finally earned their acceptance and admiration. "At first people were skeptical as to why he was down here," says Sonora McKellar, one of Schulberg's regulars. "But it's different when you find that a person is dedicated and might well be somewhere else making money."

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