On the Waterfront came perilously close to never being produced because as Darryl Zanuck put it when he rejected the script, "Who's going to care about a lot of sweaty longshoremen?" Zanuck could not see that On the Waterfront was a natural sequel to The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. His rejection of the script sent Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg on a seemingly hopeless quest for a producer...