In the middle of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing there is a quick cultural reference that is easy to miss, or at least misinterpret as simply a joke. Da Mayor, an elderly drunk in the neighborhood, stops a boy on the street and asks, “What makes Sammy run?” The boy replies, “My name is Eddie.” As easy it is to think Da Mayor thinks this boy is named Sammy, or is speaking nonsense to a kid he doesn’t know, this question Da Mayor is asking is the exact title of Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run? A blink-and-you-miss-it reference to Schulberg’s novel is minor in comparison to the film’s memorable cultural touchstones — Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”, Mookie’s listing of Black athletes and musicians that Pino thinks are “different” from the Black people he hates, a Larry Bird jersey worn by a white man from Brooklyn, Jackie Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers jersey, and an homage to Night of the Hunter, with Radio Raheem’s “love and hate” monologue to camera. But quick as it is, the usage of the question “What makes Sammy run?” is, interestingly, a creative crystallization of some of the film’s political themes.
I have great affection for What Makes Sammy Run? My 2022 book, The Political Economy of Hollywood, opens with a reference to the novel:
In Budd Schulberg’s novel What makes Sammy Run?, Al Manheim becomes obsessed with trying to understand the behaviour of Sammy Glick, his work colleague and pseudo-friend. Manheim first becomes puzzled when he notices that Sammy never really walks anywhere–he literally runs from spot to spot. Sammy’s general mode of behaviour is also much like that of a driver who is willing to run over anything in his way. And when Sammy runs over other people in his pursuit of success, he does not slow down to look behind him.
A flabbergasted Manheim witnesses Sammy Glick successfully lie, sweet-talk, bullshit, backstab and plagiarize his way up the ranks, first as a journalist in New York and then as a screenwriter in Hollywood. While also working in Hollywood, Manheim comes to realize that the film business might be better suited for the Sammy Glicks of the world. Although Manheim is older and wiser than Sammy, and although he actually writes his own screenplay assignments, he fails to synchronize himself with the pace of the Hollywood “Dream Factory.”
And why not? If Manheim cannot keep pace with a capitalist institution like the Hollywood film business, what makes Hollywood run? What does Hollywood want and what are its strategies to achieve its goals?
McMahon, James. (2022). The Political Economy of Hollywood. Routledge.
Lee likely references What Makes Sammy Run? for two reasons. First, Manheim’s obsession to know Sammy, to answer the titular question, has investigative merit. Manheim sincerely wants to uncover the causes of Sammy’s behavior, and Manheim goes to considerable lengths to find the origins of Sammy’s successful ruthlessness in Hollywood in his childhood in the rough neighborhood of the Lower East Side, New York. Second, what makes Sammy run is a combination of childhood poverty, bullying, Jewish immigration to New York, and American antisemitism. Neither aspect of Schulberg’s novel has a literal referent in Do The Right Thing, but Lee skillfully finds the common political problem: an action (plagiarism in Hollywood or throwing a trash can through a pizzeria) can be unethical or morally bad in itself, but the same action’s meaning is complicated greatly by social context (poverty in childhood or racism of the NYPD). It might not be a coincidence that Da Mayor is the character that both asks a kid “What makes Sammy Run?” and tells Mookie to “Always do the right thing.”
Budd Schulberg came to learn what happens when his readers separated the descriptions of Sammy Glick’s behavior as an adult from the parts of the novel that explore his past. In the preface to the 1993 edition of the novel, Schulberg described the shock he felt when young readers would tell him they used What Makes Sammy Run? as a sort of self-help manual. In the minds of these readers, how Sammy became successful in Hollywood was the behavioral model for succeeding in modern society, where dog ate dog and so on. It is much harder to separate Mookie’s decision at the end of the film from the history of racism in America — up to and including the history of Black people being murdered by the police. Or if there is an attempt to interpret Mookie’s throwing of the trashcan through Sal’s window as an isolated act of vandalism, Do The Right Thing has you cornered. Focused attention on moralizing Mookie’s behavior in the final act of the film lets a much greater act of violence off the hook. Just two minutes before Mookie’s act, we watched the NYPD choke Radio Raheem to death and put his lifeless body into the back of a police car. Does this not speak to what makes Mookie run?
notes on cinema 