FITZGERALD, HIS “CALIFORNIAN COSMOLOGY”1, AND THE
COMPROMISE OF TALENT
Somdatta Mandal
“The Scott Fitzgerald I knew had made some money at MGM, working on an odd
assortment of film scripts, but his track record as a screenwriter was negligible.”
-- Budd Schulberg.
2
Fitzgerald went to Hollywood in the summer of 1937 with a six-month MGM contract at
$1000 a week. He received his only screen credit for adapting Three Comrades (1938)
and his contract was renewed for a year at $1250 a week. In December 1937, he worked
on unproduced scripts for “Infidelity”, Marie Antoinette, The Women, and Madame
Curie. In 1939, he had traveled to Dartmouth College with Budd Schulberg to work on
Winter Carnival, which, according to Schulberg, was “a silly story”, but Fitzgerald was
trying to write with him so that he could “restor[e] his shattered economic equilibrium
as well as his place in society. From that base he had hoped to re-establish his tarnished
literary reputation.”3 But, unfortunately, Fitzgerald was fired from the job for
drunkenness. After MGM dropped his option at the end of 1938, Fitzgerald worked as a
freelance scriptwriter and wrote short stories for Esquire. From March 1939 to October
1940 he had freelance assignments with Paramount, Universal, Fox, Goldwyn and
Columbia studios. In his first Hollywood venture in 1927, he had written a screenplay
titled Lipstick for United Artists, especially for Constance Talmadge. But long before
that, as early as in 1923, he had attempted to write screenplays for the lure of the lucre so
to say. When the interest in a movie version of This Side of Paradise revived, Fitzgerald
was asked to write the screenplay. “Famous Players” paid him ten thousand dollars; for
the money they were to receive the rights to Paradise and what the author called, “a ten
thousand word condensation of my book.” “This is not a synopsis,” Fitzgerald seems to
have told a reporter, “but a variation of the story better suited for screening.”4 That he had
to alter the story according to the requirements of the screen proves that at the beginning
he had not taken the cinema as seriously as he would later on. Thus when H.N. Swanson,
Hollywood agent, had tried to get him a screenwriting assignment at MGM on a movie
called The Duke Steps Out, his pride as a novelist hurt his feelings. To Harold Ober he
wrote that “the Hollywood affair was a blow of course” and that he was reluctant “to go
out there and sell myself for a few hundred a week”5 but that he was helpless: “I’m afraid
I’ll have to go to Hollywood before accumulating my surplus.” Stressing the fact that his
‘true career’ was ‘as a novelist, he also wrote to Dr. Robert S. Caroll:
I don’t think I could keep up at this work for more than two years at a
stretch. It has a way of being very exhausting, especially when they put on
pressure.6
Fitzgerald’s final Hollywood period has been described by many critical observers as a
time of decline in both his personal life and in his capacities as an artist, which could not
produce any ‘serious’ work. His superficially perceived ‘shortcomings’ as a screenwriter
have caused detractors to portray him in his final period as a Hollywood hack, working
solely for money, completely lacking any artistic impulse. His letter to his daughter
Scottie, dated 7 July 1938, where he despaired that what he was doing there was “the last
tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better,” testifies this point of view
further. But, a study of his good filmscripts like Infidelity and the incomplete novel, The
Last Tycoon, helps to dispel these erroneous notions. Instead of rejecting screenwriting as
a necessary evil, Fitzgerald went the other way and embraced it as a new art form, even
while recognizing that it was an art frequently embarrassed by the “merchants” more
comfortable with mediocrity in their efforts to satisfy the widest possible audience.
George Garrett, his friend at Princeton, who also “served a time or two in Hollywood as
scriptwriters”, tells us that Fitzgerald was “better at it, pretty good in fact, all in all.” He
even admitted that he was “told by those who had seen it that Fitzgerald’s script for Gone
With the Wind, which was impossible to do under the limits imposed by Selznick, is
wonderful.” 7Fitzgerald’s fantastic pride as a writer dictated his electing to play the game
of screenwriting the way he thought Hollywood wanted it played, even going as far as
‘tailoring’ his scripts for the talents of Shirley Temple or Joan Crawford. By desperately
embracing the Hollywood “system,” he wound up by severely compromising his talents
and wrote some truly substandard material even by Hollywood standards. He played it
safe, so safe that he was often absurdly wrong, but he found that he simply could not
accept the professional judgement of people he considered to be his literary inferiors,
which they certainly were. To his cousin Cecilia Taylor he expressed the dichotomy
facing him:
Everything here goes rather badly….your correspondent in rotten health +
two movie ventures gone to pot – one for Gracie Allen + Geo. Burns that
damn near went over + took 2 wk’s work + they liked + wanted to buy -- +
Paramount stepped on. Its like a tailor left with a made-to-order suit - no
one to sell it to. So back to the Post.
In his postscript to the same letter he also added:
For two years I’ve gone half haywire trying to reconcile my double
allegiance to the class I am part of, and the Great Change I believe in considering at last such crazy solutions as the one I had in mind in
Norfolk….have only health enough left for my literary work, so I’m on the
sidelines.8
What interests us is the fact that unlike William Faulkner and other novelists who went to
Hollywood only for money, Fitzgerald wanted much more. He had come to believe that
he could no longer write novels and short stories, but he thought that he could write
pictures. Although he was comparatively ignorant of the technical side of filmmaking, he
had previously demonstrated a capacity to conquer new fields through systematic and
laborious study. It is said that he not only made it his business to go to the movies, but he
would go home and even outline their plots and sequence development. As Aaron
Latham points out:
In his younger days, Fitzgerald had methodically analyzed the plots of one
hundred Saturday Evening Post stories. He was teaching himself the
genre. Now in Hollywood he wanted to teach himself another story form,
moving pictures, and he took up the task in much the same way: he had
countless movies run off for him in a classroom -sized projection room
where he carefully studied each one.9
In his first visit to Hollywood in 1927, he had accepted an offer from John W. Considine
to write a flapper movie for Constance Talmadge. Though the screenplay was rejected
and never produced, “Lipstick”10 serves as an example of the kind of story with an
extremely slight plot that was written and produced for the typical formula picture in
Hollywood during the first three decades of this century. It also indicated that the
cultural values of most of these films were the typically middle class ones of optimism,
materialism, and romantic escapism. Set in Princeton, its heroine, Dolly Carroll, is a girl
who has been wrongly imprisoned and now possesses a magic lipstick which makes
every man want to kiss her. For Dolly, as for many others less literally imprisoned by
American society, pictures in a newspaper seem to be about as close as she will ever get
to the ‘Roaring Twenties’ or the American Dream. The “world outside,” “pictures of
debutantes, of society functions, bathing beauties, actresses, golf champions, people
revelling through life, being happy” (7) – all entice her. Dolly goes up and stares into the
newsprint eyes of one of the debutantes gracing her cell wall. “You wait,” she promises
Mimi Haughton’s picture. “I’ll catch up with you.”(8) Then we have a series of
adventures and Dolly’s race to overtake the privileged class. With a sudden reversal of
fortune, she is freed from prison, and is given a stick of magnetic lipstick, the latter
evidently proving that magic is a great leveller of men in society. Once out of jail, Dolly
gets an invitation to the university prom which “stands for music, lights, fashion, youth the things that apparently she has missed for ever”(11). After a lot of slapstick comedy,
the final scene leads up to the climactic larceny when Dolly, wearing her magic lipstick,
attracts dance partners the way an heiress attracts proposals. The plot develops as many
twists and turns as the university’s Wedding Stair, with chases, locked doors, and in the
end, theft. Mimi steals Dolly’s lipstick but this is all to no avail and she almost winds up
in jail herself. The girl with the prison record ultimately wins the hero in the end and the
debutante with the pedigree comes up empty-handed. What interests us is that in spite of
having created a story that was simultaneously hackneyed and far-fetched, Fitzgerald
attempted to “jazz-up” the screenplay by leavening it with trick narrative effects. At one
point in the script, he suggested that a prom sequence be shot from above, a technique
which director Busby Berkeley would later use to great advantage in his Warner Brothers
musicals of the 1930s such as Dames (1934) and 42nd Street (1933).11
Another Fitzgerald work entitled “The Feather Fan”12 which was to have been a projected
movie, also deals with a fantasy plot with the only difference that in it also runs a serious
theme - the kind of life led by girls in 1919-20 with their “infinite belief.” Fitzgerald
divides the story into twenty-one different scenes. Geneva Barr, a poor girl who had to
strive on her own to succeed, meets another “hopelessly impractical inventor, dream
character” named Blake, who helps her. She also meets another “romantic type,” a
confirmed bachelor named Legendre. The girl buys a splendid feather fan from Persia,
and this fan, which is an equivalent of the ancient wishing ring, a token, will give us
everything which humanity longs for. The absurdity of the plot lies in the fact that every
time she desires something and does achieve material success, the fan “diminishes in size
and feathers seem to be missing.” When she falls desperately in love with Blake, the fan
shrinks further still, and she feels a diminution of energy in herself. All attempts to
destroy the fan turn futile. In the end, her last wish is fulfilled and she dies. In the
synopsis Fitzgerald compares the girl’s fruitless and dramatic fight against death with that
of the girl in the movie Dark Victory (1939), which starred Bette Davis in the lead role.
In spite of the weak plot, what Fitzgerald stresses here is that the same sort of tragic
ending has happened to many women of that generation of the ‘twenties, who thought
that the world owed them happiness and pleasure if only they had courage enough.
Another movie synopsis that Fitzgerald wrote in 1936 with the view of making a sale to
the Goldwyn studio, entitled “Ballet Shoes,”13 shows that like Boxley in The Last
Tycoon, Fitzgerald was still thinking of movies in terms of cheap stories. The story
involves a benevolent and “adventurous young rum runner,” a “little waif,” a long-lost
father, and a surfeit of confidence. A young girl, coming from Europe, loses her family
and is rescued by the young “rum runner,” who accompanies her to theatrical agencies in
New York. On the way she saves a “little waif” who eventually stays with them.
Meanwhile, the father, after a vain attempt to find his lost daughter, becomes a theatrical
booking agent without any idea that ‘Madame Serene,’ the ballet studio owner, is his own
daughter. A number of incidents take place until in the end all identities are revealed, and
the story ends with the young girl dancing alone on the stage while her father plays the
piano.
That Fitzgerald was interested in writing this sort of screenplays and believed that he had
special qualifications for the project is revealed in his letter to Harold Ober stating that he
“ should be able to deliver something entirely authentic in the matter full of invention and
feeling.”14 Earlier he had written another ballet synopsis, “Lives of the Dancers,” and his
continued interest in the subject is revealed in another letter which suggests three possible
alternative ideas for a ballet screenplay:
Let me repeat that this is the most difficult idea to sell but in some ways
the most interesting of the three. A Russian ballet dancer finds herself in
the extra line in Hollywood; they pick her out of the crowd for her good
looks, gave her bits of one kind or another but always on some other basis
than the fact that she is a ballet dancer. This treatment of the general
subject would have to close with a crash, at least I haven’t thought any
further than that.
It would turn entirely on the essential tonal background of the adventures
of Europeans who develop their metier in a Yiddish world…
(T)hat would be interesting to the people in the same rococo sense that the
demand for pictures about places like Shanghai and the Trans-Siberian
Railroad have in the American people. Combined with it is the always
fascinating Hollywood story.15
Considering the demand for formula films of the time, therefore, we cannot dismiss
Fitzgerald’s scriptwriting as mere trash or as totally degrading element in his career.
As mentioned earlier, though the general impression remains that Fitzgerald went to
Hollywood “to sell (him)self for a few hundred a week,”16as he himself saw it, there are
evidences to prove that he took his script writer’s job equally seriously. For instance,
when he decided that he and Charles Warren would script a movie treatment of Tender is
the Night, which they would sell to Hollywood, Scott began by thinking up a dream cast
that included Ina Clare and Robert Montgomery and the changes in the plot structure are
interesting to note. Warren remembers that Fitzgerald did not pay heed to his advice to
do the book only. “He was going to show them, going to prove that he knew movies,”17
and changes in the story were made accordingly. The use of music to create a kind of
poetic emotional state in a motion picture was nothing new. Even before the old movie
houses were wired for talkies, they all had pianos. Yet, when Fitzgerald introduced a
melody after the marriage of Nicole and Dick, marriage, he wanted to lay emphasis on
the “personal charm of the two Divers and the charming manner in which they are able to
live.” After being unsuccessful with the treatment in Hollywood, when Warren advised
Fitzgerald to write more trash because “they buy trash here - they’re quite willing to pay
for it…”, and asked him to “forget originality and finesse and think in terms of cheap
melo-theatrics,”18 Fitzgerald is said to have sent him an outline for a story offering to “go
50-50” if he sold it to a studio. Fitzgerald concluded by saying, “Can’t co-operate at the
moment but would if it isn’t too like Merton of the Movies.” 19
Perhaps the greatest influence of the cinema on story plots is seen in Fitzgerald’s
treatment of the Cosmopolitan script20, which was based on his own story “Babylon
Revisited,” and which was his “great hope for attaining some real status out here as a
movie man and not as a novelist.”21 Though this seems a strange goal for an author who
rivalled Ernest Hemingway as the most celebrated novelist of his time, his sincerity in the
job should not be overlooked. In The Love of the Last Tycoon, this exchange occurs
between the brilliant producer Monroe Stahr and the English novelist George Boxley:
“I don’t think you people read things. The men are duelling when the
conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has
to be hauled up in a bucket.”
“Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?”
“What? Naturally not.”
“You’d consider it too cheap.”
“Movie standards are different,” said Boxley hedging.
Since Fitzgerald wrote the screenplay for his story “Babylon Revisited” to support his
work on The Love of the Last Tycoon, the pronouncements on the movies in the novel-inprogress bear on his practices as a screenwriter. He perforce set different standards for his
movie work. For this assignment, therefore, he was required to enlarge a short story with
very little action into a full-length screen drama by providing a new plot. Another Stahr
instruction to Boxley is that “There’s always some lousy condition” in moviemaking. The
‘lousy condition’ for the “Babylon Revisited screenplay - that it was intended especially
for Shirley Temple - necessitated that the child’s role be augmented. Apparently, the
basic situation and the problem in both the versions of Cosmopolitan and “Babylon
Revisited” remain the same: a father is separated from his daughter. In the short story, the
father knows from the beginning what he wants - he wants his daughter back. The
screenplay, on the other hand, is actually the story of how the father comes to discover
his need for that daughter. Most authors who adapt their own literary work are stubbornly
faithful to their original creations. Fitzgerald, perhaps because he had become so
immersed in screen technique, takes enormous liberties with his story, retaining the
principal characters, Charlie Wales, Honoria/Victoria, and Marion, but adding an
elaborate and sometimes top-heavy plot of business machinations, involving new
characters that are still two-dimensional and seem unable to break through the mechanics
of the plot Fitzgerald had imposed on them. According to Schulberg, in his zeal to
“make” a movie rather than attempt to retell his short story in cinematic form, “he has
stood it on its head by having Charlie Wales triumph heroically at the end, even to his
knocking out the young thug who’s sent by his former business partner (now enemy) to
kill him for the million-dollar insurance policy this “heavy” has taken out on Charlie’s
life. It’s all pretty melodramatic, and it concludes with a happy Hollywood ending, the
unsympathetic sister-in-law thwarted and Charlie and Honoria/Victoria reunited, with
Charlie’s final line, “Aw, there’s a lot to live for.” Fade out.”22 Further, in Cosmopolitan,
the shadow of the past is lifted completely so that past events really recede into the
background and much of the past world is seen projected through Victoria’s eyes.
Incidentally, Fitzgerald had planned to have his camera record from the child’s point of
view the world in about half the shots whereas the other contrasting shots were to be
taken as if through the eyes of an adult. This he thought would lend greater ‘objectivity’
to his treatment.
It has to be mentioned here that Fitzgerald was of course, not always happy with the kind
of compromises that he had to make as a scriptwriter. As he insisted to Lester Cowan,
writing a script of a story was to be “felt in the stomach first, felt out of great conviction
about tragedy of father and child - and not felt in the throat.”23 As the movie script of
Cosmopolitan reveals, Fitzgerald’s picture world is in black and white rather than his
once-beheld luminous universe of shimmer and gleam. Also he removed the revisited
theme. Charlie does not return to Paris to recover his Honoria; in the screenplay Victoria
seeks him out in Switzerland. Fitzgerald’s own copy of the screenplay includes an
“Author’s Note”:
This is an attempt to tell a story from a child’s point of view without
sentimentality. Any attempt to heighten the sentiment of the early scenes
by putting mawkish speeches into the mouth of characters – in short by
doing what is locally known as “milking it,” will damage the force of the
piece. Had the present author intended, he could have broken down the
sentimental section of the audience at many points, but the price would
have been the release of the audience too quickly from tension - and would
wonder at the end where the idea had vanished - or indeed what idea had
been purchased. So whoever deals with this script is implored to
remember that it is a dramatic piece - not a homey family story. Above all
things, Victoria is a child - not Daddy’s little helper who knows all the
answers.
Another point: in the ordinary sense, this picture has no moral than
Rebecca or The Shop Around the Corner - though one can draw from it
any moral one wishes about the life of the Wall Street rich of a decade
ago. It had better follow the example of Hamlet, which has had a hundred
morals read into it, all of them different - let it stand on its own bottom.24
Despite the measure of difficulties in writing for the movies and his subsequent dejection
at the fact that he had been reduced to a “writer only”, the plot construction of everything
he wrote after this shows a marked compromise between his talent as a writer and his
experience as a scenario-hack. Also, in spite of knowing that for “the last nineteen years
…(he had) …written best selling entertainment,”25 Fitzgerald also recognized that he
could never again keep the plots of his stories free from the influence of the cinema.
Fitzgerald’s film script, Infidelity,26(based on Ursula Parrot’s short story) was not made
into a movie because the theme of an American marriage breaking-up was not a subject
that the Hays Office (a censorship board under the rule of Joseph Breen) could
wholeheartedly accept and approve in the 1930’s. Apart from the theme, the cinematic
style and technical details best suited to any film adaptation of Fitzgerald’s works is that
specified by the author himself. As seen in this screenplay, as well as mentioned in an
earlier chapter, by the late 1930’s, Fitzgerald had developed an engagingly complex
visual sensibility, which relied on fluid, expressive camera work and judicious
intercutting of alternative narrative viewpoints. Considering his ‘New Treatment for the
End of Infidelity,”27 Fitzgerald tried his best to justify his work thematically, and in the
end, even agreed to the changed title to “Fidelity”:
I ask you to look at this situation for the end of INFIDELITY. First let me
state it in terms of a parallel, highly justified in this case because adultery
is a form of thievery. It is regarded as such in the standard book on
situation.(Polti’s 36 Situations).
Let me tell this story in terms of thievery instead of adultery and see if it
doesn’t offer itself to drama and also to a theme……..
A Catholic like Breen would, I think, accept the morals of this situation
completely. The thieving partner is redeemed. The unreformed accomplice
is punished.
Now let us transfer this to our situation in INFIDELITY and we will see a
theme emerge……..
Now the question arises as to whether we have a theme here to place
beside the themes of, say, CHAINED, POSSESSED and DIVORCEE, all
dealing with the subject of adultery. The answer is we have not and cannot
according to the state of the censorship. What we have is the story of a
man who was unfaithful to his wife and who, years later in trying to
protect her from another such experience, wins her back again. Or, from a
woman’s angle, FIDELITY is the story of a woman’s faithfulness to the
ideal of chastity which is finally rewarded.
As Wheeler Dixon rightfully comments,
What MGM should do is dust off the Infidelity screenplay and film it,
following the author’s own shooting instructions….Hollywood allowed
Fitzgerald to perfect his craft as a scenarist, and then completely ignored
the best screenwriting that he ultimately produced.28
Though his remunerative but professionally frustrating work as a scriptwriter euphemistically described as “between pictures” - makes us sympathetic towards an
author who wasted his talent, there is in the F. Scott Fitzgerald correspondence about
Three Comrades screenplay (based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel) an incredible
innocence, as well as the integrity of an artist working in a field where he did not have
the final say over his work. Fitzgerald must have known by the time he went to work on
the Three Comrades script that what the studio wanted was not quality or believable
characters, but a picture that would satisfy the desires of a mass audience. He might have
been honest and sincere, but his deep concern about his dialogue being true to the
characters indicates a lack of understanding on several levels - that a novelist’s dialogue
is rarely used in film. Also, whereas the novelist need not limit the number of crises that
make up his tale, the screenwriter generally must hold to about twenty-five, averaging
about five pages a scene. This requirement meant that Fitzgerald had to restructure the
Remarque novel into a dramatic form with all of the requirements of the motion-picture
script: conflict, opening exposition, rise to a climax, character change, and denouement.
In addition, he had to make visual what the novelist had the liberty of placing in a
character’s head. To quote Irwin R. Blacker, “Fitzgerald was not deeply concerned with
the proper script form. In all probability, he was not even expected to create a shooting
script, as M.G.M. knew that his version would be reworked by someone else who better
understood the problems of production.”29 In the next section we shall discern how
Faulkner’s problems were similar to that of Fitzgerald, and however seriously he might
work there to learn the art of collaboration that scriptwriting essentially was, he was
ultimately augmenting the Hollywood-as-destroyer legend.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. Eds. M.J.Bruccoli & Judith S. Baughman. New York: Scribner’s,
1994:330
2
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited: The Screenplay. With an Introduction by Budd Schulberg. New
York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1993:7
3
Budd Schulberg, “Thoughts on the F. Scott Fitzgerald Centennial,” F. Scott Fitzgerald at 100: Centenary
Tribute by American Writers. Rockville,MD: Quill & Brush, 1996. unnumbered pages.
4
B. F. Wilson interview in Scrapbook, quoted in Aaron Latham, Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in
Hollywood. London: Secker and Warburg, 1970: 40.
5
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters: 320-21.
6
Ibid. 350.
7
George Garrett, F. Scott Fitzgerald at 100: Centenary Tributes by American Writers.Rockville:MD: Quill
and Brush, 1996. No pagination.
8
9
Letter to Cecilia Taylor, August 1934. A Life in Letters. 265.
Aaron Latham, Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. New York: Viking, 1970: 153.
10
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Lipstick: A College Comedy”. Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1978. .1-35. All
quotes are from this edition.
11
Wheeler W. Dixon, The Cinematic Vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ann Arbor, Michigan:UMI, 1986:7.
12
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Feather Fan,” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1977: 3-8.
13
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Ballet Shoes: A Movie Synopsis.” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1976: 5-7.
14
As Ever Scott Fitz --.eds.M.J.Bruccoli & Jennnifer Attkinson. New York: Lippincott, 1972. 248.
15
Letter to Harold Ober, Feb.8, 1936, Ibid. 250-51.
16
Letter to Harold Ober, April 6, 1937. A Life in Letters. 321.
17
F. Scott Fitzgerald & Charles Warren, “Summary Treatment of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night”, Ms. In
Princeton University Library.40. Quoted in Aaron Latham, Crazy Sundays. 87-88.
18
Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, New York: Scribner’s, 1963: 248.
19
Unpublished Fitzgerald outline in the possession of Charles Warren, envelope postmarked June 19, 1934.
Quoted in Latham. 93.
20
Fitzgerald wrote this screenplay for the producer Lester Cowan in 1940 with the intended title of the
movie being Cosmopolitan. The film was never made and Cowan sold the screenplay to MGM which
was then extensively rewritten and produced in 1954 as The Last Time I Saw Paris.
21
To Zelda. Lettters, ed. Andrew Turnbull. London: Bodley Head, 1964:141.
22
Budd Schulberg, Introduction. Babylon Revisted : The Screenplay. 12-13.
23
L.D. Stewart, “Fitzgerald’s Film Scripts of ‘Babylon Revisited,’” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1971.
84.
24
25
Babylon Revisited : The Screenplay.189-90.
Letter to Joseph Mankiewicz, Jan 20, 1938. Letters.563-64.
26
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Infidelity: A Screenplay.” Esquire, Dec’73: 193-304. (This publication was made
thirty-five years after its original composition.)
27
28
Letter dated May 10, 1938. Quoted in Appendix A, The Cinematic Vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 111-3.
Ibid, 110.
29
Irwin R. Blacker. “Preface.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Screenplay for Three Comrades by Erich Maria
Remarque.Ed. with an Afterword by M.J. Bruccoli. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978: Ix-xi.
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