“Richard Brooks, a sharp-tongued ex-Marine, was adapting Evan Hunter’s bestselling novel Blackboard Jungle at Metro–William Wyler was scheduled to shoot it, but Brooks wound up directing as well. He’d heard a song on his car radio driving home one night from a poker game, and realized it was perfect for the movie. He tried to hunt it down.

I went to a music store, to another one, finally one guy said, ‘Where did you hear it?’ ‘I don’t even know the station,’ I said. ‘It was way up around 1500 somewhere.’ He said, ‘It probably was a station where they played black music. Do you remember how it sounded, do you remember any words, how was it?’ I told him, ‘One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock.’ He said, ‘Let me find out.’ He called about two weeks later. He said, ‘Ya, there is a record like that, but it died–they played it for a week–you want that record?’ . . . So he got this 78 record and I used to play it all day while I was writing the screenplay. When we finally began shooting the picture I used to play it whenever we were shooting a scene, so the kids would begin to walk to the rhythm, work to that rhythm.

And so a screenwriter introduced rock and roll to Hollywood. The first great rock anthem, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” was the perfect soundtrack for the slouching gang that fills Glenn Ford’s inner-city classroom, finger-popping, rebellious, nasty.”

– from “What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting” by Marc Norman