Refresh and try again. What Makes Sammy Run? Quotes Showing of I was modulating my hate for Sammy Glick from the personal to the societal. I no longer even hated Rivington Street but the idea of Rivington Street, all Rivington Streets of all nationalities allowed to pile up in cities like gigantic dung heaps smelling up the world, ambitions growing out of filth and crawling away like worms. I saw Sammy Glick on a battlefield where every soldier was his own cause, his own army and his own flag, and I realized that I had singled him out not because he had been born into the world anymore selfish, ruthless and cruel than anybody else, even though he had become all three, but because in the midst of a war that was selfish, ruthless and cruel Sammy was proving himself the fittest and the fiercest and the fastest.
Nothing is ever quite so drab and repetitious and forlorn and ludicrous as truth. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion. Used to run copy for me. Always ran. Always looked thirsty. It must have been charged with a couple of thousand volts. He raced out, too quickly, a little ferret. Smart kid, I thought. Smart little yid. He made me uneasy. That sharp, neat, eager little face. I watched the thin, wiry body dart around the corner in high gear.
It made me uncomfortable. The boss told me Sammy was getting a three-week tryout. But Sammy did more running around that office in those three weeks than Paavo Nurmi did in his whole career. Every time I handed him a page of copy, he ran off with it as if his life depended on it. I can still see Sammy racing between the desks, his tie flying, wild-eyed, desperate. After the second trip he would come back to me panting, like a frantic puppy retrieving a ball. I never saw a guy work so hard for twelve bucks a week in my life.
You had to hand it to him. He might not have been the most lovable little child in the world, but you knew he must have something. I used to stop right in the middle of a sentence and watch him go.
Although Manheim is quite open about his feelings for Kit, she makes it clear that it is Sammy she prefers, especially in bed. When she met Sammy, she tells Manheim, she had "this crazy desire to know what it felt like to have all that driving ambition and frenzy and violence inside me.
The bosses prefer to have carte blanche when dealing with their writers, ranging from having them work on a week-to-week basis to giving them a seven-year contract. In the film industry, Manheim remarks at one point in the novel, it is the rule rather than the exception that "convictions are for sale," with people double-crossing each other whenever the slightest chance presents itself to them.
Hollywood, he notices, regularly and efficiently turns out three products: moving pictures, ambition, and fear. Manheim becomes an eyewitness to the birth of what was to become the Writers Guild, an organization created to protect the interests of the screenwriters. After one of the studio's periodic reshufflings, Manheim finds himself out of work and goes back to New York.
There, still preoccupied with Sammy Glick's rise to stardom, he investigates Sammy's past. He comes to understand, at least to some degree, "the machinery that turns out Sammy Glicks" and "the anarchy of the poor". Manheim realizes that Sammy grew up in the "dog-eat-dog world" of New York's Lower East Side Rivington Street , much like the more sophisticated dog-eat-dog world of Hollywood.
The one connection between Sammy's childhood days and his present position seems to be Sheik, someone who went to school with him and regularly beat him up. Now Sheik is working as Glick's personal servant or almost slave —possibly some kind of belated act of revenge on Sammy's part, or the "victim's triumph". When Manheim returns to Hollywood he becomes one of Glick's writers.
There he realizes that there is also a small minority of honorable men working in pictures, especially producer Sidney Fineman, Glick's boss. Manheim teams up with Kit Sargent to write several films for Glick, who has successfully switched to production and moved into a gigantic manor in Beverly Hills.
Fineman's position becomes compromised by a string of flops, and Manheim attempts to convince Harrington, a Wall Street banker representing the film company's financiers, that Fineman is still the right man for the job.
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