The many faces of Sammy Glick

The great and terrible Sammy Glick embodies everything that is wrong with Hollywood.

Smart and ruthless, savvy and crude, he'll do anything to claw his way up the ladder of success in Tinseltown.

Glick was the iconic creation of novelist and Oscar-winning writer Budd Schulberg ("On the Waterfront"), who died on Wednesday. Schulberg introduced the world to Glick in his 1941 novel "What Makes Sammy Run?" The controversial bestseller put the young Schulberg on the map. Over the decades, the name Sammy Glick became synonymous with coldblooded ambition -- he's a Hollywood type with offspring both fictional and real.

The rags-to-riches tale chronicles the rise and fall of Glick, a Jewish boy from the Lower East Side who begins as an uneducated copy boy at a New York newspaper and ends up a conniving, manipulative and callous screenwriter, producer and studio head. Glick takes the American dream of success and twists it into a nightmare.

"Sammy" was first dramatized for live TV in 1949 with Jose Ferrer, and most notably as a two-part "NBC Sunday Showcase" in 1959 with Larry Blyden. A musical version opened on Broadway in 1964 with Steve Lawrence as Glick. But the novel seems to hit a little too close to Hollywood's bone: It has yet to be turned into a feature film. Back in 2001 DreamWorks bought the rights for a movie version for Ben Stiller, who had Schulberg's blessing on the project, but eight years later a film has yet to be made.

But that doesn't mean Sammy Glick has left the scene. You can see aspects of Sammy in any number of film and TV characters, including Jeremy Piven's foul-mouthed Ari in "Entourage" and Tim Robbins' coolly calculating Griffin Mill in "The Player." Here's a look at some of the movies, TV series and characters that would make Sammy proud.

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"A Face in the Crowd"

Schulberg himself wrote the screenplay for this gritty 1957 Elia Kazan-directed drama. While "Sammy" is distinctly Jewish, Schulberg gives this story a Southern twang. Andy Griffith, in a remarkable debut, plays Lonesome Rhodes, a crude, rude and ambitious young man who knows how to weave a tale with charm and humor. Discovered by a small-town radio personality (Patricia Neal), Rhodes is given his own radio show and soon becomes a TV star. Rhodes rides roughshod over everyone, destroying lives. Eventually, Neal's character decides he has to be stopped and exposes him to his gullible public for what he really is.