Myron Selznick has a cameo appearance in Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? Myron Selznick was a real film producer who became one of the first great talent agents of Hollywood in the 1920’s and 1930’s. He first appears in Chapter 2, when Al Manheim jokingly encourages the naive yet confident Sammy Glick, who has just bluffed to Julian Blumberg about already having an agent, in his quest to find a Hollywood agent for his new story. Though readers now may be unfamiliar with his name, readers in 1941, when Schulberg’s novel was first published, would undoubtedly have known who Myron Selznick was. According to a short biography, “His brilliance as an agent made him a millionaire many times over. Selznick became so well-known and such a power in the industry by the early 1940s, that he was mentioned by name in Budd Schulberg’s seminal Hollywood novel, ‘What Makes Sammy Run’ (1941)” (Hopwood). This allows his minor role in the story to have a larger impact than if he were a fictional figure. Selznick does not actually appear in the flesh in the novel, but Sammy contacts him by phone and miraculously talks himself up enough to the point that Selznick takes interest in the as yet unknown writer. Al is utterly shocked with Sammy’s bold move to contact the biggest agent in Hollywood, and this is a key moment in establishing Sammy’s character in terms of how brazenly he will go after what he wants without second guessing himself or letting himself feel any fear or doubts in the moment. In Will Straw’s introduction to the “Small Parts, Small Players” dossier of Screen, he notes that small parts are “reduced, much of the time, to fleeting moments or undeveloped functions” or that they “fail to pose the problem of celebrity or to reveal the complexity of the star text” (79). This is often not the case, however, when it comes to small cameo roles. For example, Selznick’s presence in the text is reduced to being a listening ear on the other end of the phone line. However, because he is a big name in Hollywood in the real world, this small interaction still has an effect on the characterization of Sammy, more so than if he were an unnamed or fictitious Hollywood agent. Selznick’s cameo lends a level of authenticity to this character building moment, because Selznick’s fame and reputation allow the reader to fill the character space in the narrative with only a name to go off of.
Works Cited
Hopwood, Jon C. “Myron Selznick” IMBD, www.imdb.com/name/nm0783682/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm. Accessed 12 March 2022.
McKernan, Luke. “Myron Selznick.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 15 Jan. 2010, https://www.flickr.com/photos/33718942@N07/4277041721.
Shulberg, Budd. What Makes Sammy Run? 1941. E-book, Random House, Inc., 1993.
Straw, Will. “Introduction.” Screen, Volume 52, Issue 1, Spring 2011, Pages 78–81, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjq057
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