I doubt that Budd was affected as personally as I was by the parallel of Tony Mike’s story. His reaction to the loss of certain friends was not as bitter as my own; he had not experienced their blackballing as frequently and intensely as I had in the neighborhood known as Broadway. I believe Budd regarded our waterfront story with greater objectivity, an objectivity I appreciated. But I did see Tony Mike’s story as my own, and that connection did lend the tone of irrefutable anger to the scenes I photographed and to my work with actors. When Brando, at the end, yells at Lee Cobb, the mob boss, “I’m glad what I done—you hear me?—glad what I done!” that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I’d testified as I had. I’d been snubbed by friends each and every day for many months in my old show business haunts, and I’d not forgotten nor would I forgive the men, old friends some of them, who’d snubbed me, so the scene in the film where Brando goes back to the waterfront to “shape up” again for employment and is rejected by men with whom he’d worked day after day—that, too, was my story, now told to all the world. So when critics say that I put my story and my feelings on the screen, to justify my informing, they are right. That transference of emotion from my own experience to the screen is the merit of those scenes.