While serving in the Navy during World War II, Schulberg was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), working with John Ford's documentary unit, the Field Photographic Branch.

[7] He was involved in gathering evidence against war criminals for the Nuremberg Trials, an assignment that included arresting propaganda film maker Leni Riefenstahl at her chalet in Kitzbühel, Austria, ostensibly to have her identify the faces of Nazi war criminals in German film footage captured by the Allied troops.

Georgy Avenarius, a film critic before the war and the Soviet major in charge of UFA GmbH Babelsberg Studio in Soviet Berlin, allowed the Field Photo team access to the Nazi newsreels and propaganda films in his custody upon learning that his admired Ford was the branch head.

[11] Schulburg has said that the Sammy Glick character was a "composite" based partly on producer Jerry Wald and Milton Spurling, who was Harry Warner's son-in-law.

[12] In 1950, Schulberg published The Disenchanted, about a young screenwriter who collaborates on a screenplay about a college winter festival with a famous novelist at the nadir of his career.

The novelist (who was then assumed by reviewers to be a thinly disguised portrait of Fitzgerald, who had died 10 years earlier) is portrayed as a tragic, flawed figure, with whom the young screenwriter becomes disillusioned.

In 1958, Schulberg wrote and co-produced (with his younger brother Stuart) the film Wind Across the Everglades, directed by Nicholas Ray.

Based on the short story "Your Arkansas Traveler" in his book Some Faces in the Crowd, the film starred newcomer Andy Griffith as an obscure country singer who rises to fame and becomes extraordinarily manipulative to preserve his success and power.

[citation needed] In 1981, Schulberg wrote Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince, an autobiography covering his youth in Hollywood growing up in the 1920s and 1930s among the famous motion picture actors and producers as the son of B. P. Schulberg, head of Paramount Studios.

[23] In 1977, he married Betsy Anne Langman, daughter of Anne W. Simon, stepdaughter of real estate developer Robert E. Simon, granddaughter of investment banker Maurice Wertheim and great-granddaughter of US ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr.; they had two children: Benn and Jessica.

His brother, Stuart Schulberg, was a movie and television producer (David Brinkley's Journal, The Today Show).