LOST IN HOLLYWOOD
Fitzgerald as a screenwriter
Author: Artur Ribeiro
DRAFT PAPER
(20-11-2012)
Abstract: This presentation studies the intertextuality between the literary work of the 1920’s and 30’s
American writers and the shaping of cinematic classical Hollywood narrative in its formation years, from the
silent movies to the beginnings of sound, as well as its cross-influence in the American novel. Focusing on
the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a screenwriter in Hollywood and considering his reputation as one of the
greatest american novelists, who was the voice of a generation and the man who coined the “jazz era”, I am
interested in studying what went wrong on his attempt to successfully write for the motion pictures. The
presentation will analyze samples of Fitzgerald’s screenwriting and adaptations of his own literary work and
how it compares to his novels or short-stories. The case of F. Scott Fitzgerald is paradigmatic of the
misguided “anxiety of influence” between the dual personality of an author as a literary writer and a
screenwriter. The authorial conflict with his co-writers, producers and directors is archetypical in the history of
film (or at the least in classical Hollywood’s cinematic universe) and continues to be an issue for study and
debate for which we could borrow Michel Foucault’s question: “What is an author?”.
!
1. First Act: The Cinematic Literature
Although it is often overlooked, the relation between the writers of the Lost Generation and
their work as screenwriters in the early years of Hollywood was paradigmatic, creating a crucial
correlation, even if sometimes conflictual, in the history of literature and film.
Claude-Edmond Magny in The Age of the American Novel sees the relation between
literature and film as “one constant cross-fertilization that exists between two arts continuously
exchanging procedures”, going as far as declaring that “almost all technical novelties introduced by
American writers are borrowed by the novel from the film”. In The Cinematic Imagination - Writers
and the Motion Pictures, Edward Murray concurs, stating the “the history of the novel after 1922 is
to a large extent that of the development of a cinematic imagination in novelists and their frequently
ambivalent attempt to come to grips with the ‘liveliest art’ of the twentieth century”.
The life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born with the movies and early on became
a new voice in American literature although he ended up in Hollywood with a frustrated
screenwriter career, is a perfect epitome for a greater theme, reflecting on the love-hate relationship
between literature and film, its reciprocal influence, anxiety, and the eternal question: what is an
author in the movie business?
Fitzgerald’s relation with the movies may be found in his early novels, notably in The
Beautiful and Damned, where repeating a change in format and style that he has previously used in
This Side of Paradise the prose becomes a play or screenplay, written in the present tense with
separate lines for dialogue that are written in a style that the movie industry now calls Mamet-speak,
referring to writer-director David Mamet who, regardless of his talent, is not original. In one of
these dialogues from The Beautiful and Damned Fitzgerald tells us that the characters Maury and
Anthony are “engaged in one of those easy short-speech conversations that only men under thirty or
men under great stress indulge in”:
ANTHONY: It’s true. Take art–
MAURY: Let’s order. He’ll be–
ANTHONY: Sure. Let’s order. I told him–
MAURY: Here he comes. Look–he’s going to bump that waiter.
The reason I’m drawing a parallel from Fitzgerald’s “scripted” passages to a screenplay and
not a theater play is supported by the author’s own comment when writing to his friend John Peale
Bishop: “If you think my ‘Flash Back in Paradise’ in Chap I is like the elevated moments of D.W.
Grifith say so.” Critics also noted Fitzgerald’s influence by the movies, specially in a New York
Herald review of The Beautiful and Damned that stated, albeit negatively: “The episode entitled
‘Flash-Back in Paradise’ might, except for its wit, have been conceived in the mind of a scenario
writer”.
However, without resorting to a change in the formatting of the text, his next book – The
Great Gatsby – is his most cinematographic: not by what’s on the page but precisely by what’s not
there. Gatsby is a behaviorist novel. We are told the story through Nick Carraway’s participative
narration but we are only spectators to what Nick sees, as if he’s filming the moments of the lives of
Gatsby, Daisy and Tom; his thoughts aren’t insightful in revealing what we couldn’t have seen but a
mere commentary to what he experiences as if it was through the point of view of a director, for the
benefit of the readers who are following the story as an audience in a movie theatre. Furthermore, in
practical terms it says a lot of this being Fitzgerald’s most cinematic novel the fact that Francis Ford
Coppola was able to write a screenplay adaptation for the 1974 movie in only three weeks, keeping
it very close to the original. The Australian director Baz Lurhmann, who made the most recent
adaptation of Gastby (in 3D!), replied to some criticism by stating in a interview for the NY Times:
“Everyone has strong, and generally opposing, opinions, when you mention 3D, or The Great
Gatsby, or Baz Luhrmann. But Fitzgerald would have approved. He was a modernist. He was very
influenced by the cinema.”
After the poorly received and financially unsuccessful forth book – Tender is the Night –
Fitzgerald tried to reinvent himself as movie man, even though a few months earlier, in his famous
depressive period that he immortalized in a series of essays for “The Esquire” (that were later
compiled under the title The Crack-Up) he has written:
I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought
and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and
communal art that (...) was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was
an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable
low gear of collaboration. As long past as 1930 I had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best
selling novelists as archaic as silent pictures. People still read (...) but there was a rankling indignity, that
to me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the power of the written word subordinated to another
power, a more glittering, a grosser power...
With a 6 months contract with M.G.M at a thousand dollars a week, in 1937 Fitzgerald
traveled towards that “glittering, grosser power”, in what would be his last and somehow tragic
move.
2. Second Act: The Author in Hollywood
Of all movie scripts in which Fitzgerald collaborated – which included rewrites for movies
like Gone With the Wind – the only screen credit he has received was for the movie Three
Comrades, an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque novel about three World War I veterans
struggling to survive in convulsive Germany of the 20’s, for producer Joseph Mankiewicz, with
whom Fitzgerald had an epic fight that became paradigmatic in the relations between authors and
producers.
“Oh, Joe, can’t producers ever be wrong? I’m a good writer–honest”, wrote Fitzgerald to
Mankiewicz after reviewing a final draft of the script rewritten by the producer himself:
To say I’m disillusioned is putting it mildly. For nineteen years (...) I’ve written best-selling entertainment, and
my dialogue is supposedly right up at the top. But I learn from the script that you’ve decided that it isn’t good
dialogue and you can take a few hours off and do much better.
As a sample of one of those rewrites, there’s an early scene where the 3 comrades meet
Patricia and her friend Breuer after winning a road race with the comrades personally assembled
makeshift car. Once they stop, Breuer arrogantly demands to know what make of car they’re
driving:
BREUER
What kind of a junk is that?
GOTTFRIED
Well, it’s a mutt. Granpa was an airplane,
grandma was an old radio and his pappa was an
alarm clock.
However, in Fitzgerald’s original writing, the final line is slightly but significantly different:
GOTTFRIED
Well, the granpa was a sewing machine, the
grandma was an old radio, and his pappa was a
machine gun–
Aaron Latham commentary in Crazy Sundays underlines that “the difference between the
two lines is the difference between an alarm clock and a machine gun. Mankiewicz’s line is a joke,
Fitzgerald’s a subdued threat”. Not surprisingly Fitzgerald wrote Mankiewicz: “I think that
sometimes you’ve changed without improving”.
But if this seems to be a minor – even if unnecessary – change, in terms of structure and
overall mood Mankiewicz version is clearly more sentimental without being romantic and the
friendship between the comrades less manly and more cartoonish.
If the only film where Fitzgerald saw his name up on the screen was a frustrating
experience, equally disappointing would become two other unproduced projects that he worked on
with special great dedication and enthusiasm, believing in both instances that those could be the
movies who would bring him recognition as filmmaker: these were Infidelity and Babylon
Revisited, whose development from story ideas, synopsis, character descriptions and several drafts
of the script I’ve studied at the Princeton Library Special Collection – F. Scott Fitzgerald Writings
Moving Pictures Scripts.
With Infidelity Fitzgerald reveals a great maturity and grasp of the film form while at the
same time revealing a particular sensibility and innovating spirit. In a letter to producer Hunt
Stromberg, Fitzgerald writes:
Picture yourself in that situation is a phrase we all use but here I have tried to dramatize it. You will see
how. This all is to prepare you for what I think may be a radical departure in pictures.
What Fitzgerald proposes as a “radical departure” is a reinvention of the flashback device,
where the actress who plays the character of the wife sees herself in her husband’s lover place when
the lover tells her story. With this, Fitzgerald believed he could create more empathy for the lover’s
sad life story relived by the wife, literally “picturing herself” in her place.
On the other hand, Fitzgerald proposes an opening where pictures are worth a thousand
words. On the same letter to Stromberg he declares, emphasizing again the innovation of his
proposal:
We open as discussed. A treatment of the indifference between Joan Crawford and her husband, a Gary
Cooper type. […] The scene at the table is a strange scene. Two young, handsome people who, it would
seem, should have everything in the world to talk about… whose interests should be so mutual and so rich
with companionship… speaking only perfunctorily. […] Again you wonder, and are rather maddened, by
the distance between these two young, healthy, vital people… so near… and yet so far! [...] Note how we
continue to engrave our characters and our situations with practically no dialogue – a completely new
technique and one that is not without its air of intrigue and appealing mystery.
In order to achieve this, Fitzgerald opens the scene at the rooftop of the Waldrof during a
gala night where two patrons are observing the tables through opera glasses, commenting on the
people they are observing, till they find the main characters:
CAMERA, as opera glasses, picks up in a TWO SHOT, Nicolas and Althea
Gilbert at a table beside the floor show, a handsome, attractive,
vital,
well-dressed
business
during
pair.
which
CAMERA
their
HOLDS
lips
move
on
them
during
appropriately
following
but
we
hear
nothing. They have just been served a light supper by a waiter who now
retires. Nicolas makes a polite reference to the floor show which she
answers with a courteous smile, such as one gives a stranger. The
smile fades rather quickly however, and their eyes meet for a moment,
gravely
–
but
not
as
if
they
were
strangers’
eyes,
for
with
a
stranger, some conversation would have to go with such a look.
Now Althea says something and he reacts politely and deferentially,
again as to a stranger, but once again their eyes meet and hold,
silent and inscrutable in the way no strangers’ eyes would. They are
certainly accustomed to each other – with equal certainty there is a
barrier between them.
The strangeness of this relationship is such that the two observes give up on trying to guess
if Nicolas and Althea are a married couple or a brother and sister and leave their table paying the
bill, and here Fitzgerald writes, again, with very specific camera directions:
As Grey Hair and Rumpled Hair rise to pay they bill, the CAMERA
FORGETS them and MOVES SWIFTLY FORWARD through the tables with the
music swelling up. It takes position for a TWO SHOT of Nicolas and
Althea
Gilbert
and
during
the
rest
of
this
scene,
as
a
distinct
innovation in treatment, it remains ENTIRELY STATIONARY. The SHOT IS
WIDE ENOUGH so that we can see the entertainment on the other side of
their table, enough of it to almost hold our interest by itself.
The scene carries on with the perfunctory dialogue Fitzgerald promised Stromberg revealing
the emotional distance between the couple. Considering the directions written in this opening scene
you can not help imagine what if Fitzgerald had not only written this script but directed the movie. I
believe the actors will welcome his sensibility and knowledge of human character; and an intrepid
cameraman would welcome his camera directions.
From this unproduced project on, Fitzgerald work on other projects was minor, his contract
was not renewed with M.G.M. and only in his last year of living in Hollywood (and on this planet)
did he have a last hope of making it in the movies: the adaptation of his own short-story Babylon
Revisited.
Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter that this would be the project from which he would be
recognized as a man of the movies and not only as a novelist. However, in the preface to the book
edition of the screenplay, his friend and collaborator Budd Schulberg declares:
To read the short story and then study this screenplay is to understand the terrible contortions of an artist
driven to turn himself inside out and upside down in one last desperate reach for Hollywood status.
This feeling is also subscribed by Matthew J. Brucccoli, biographer of Fitzgerald, who states
that he wrote the screenplay simply to finance his work on his unfinished book The Love of the Last
Tycoon.
It could be presumption on my part to question what these two authors believe, more so in
the case of Schulberg who has worked with Fitzgerald, but nevertheless, my intuition as a fellow
screenwriter, and after reading extensively Fitzgerald’s notes and writings on this project, is slightly
different. I believe that Fitzgerald, more than any of his contemporaries, eventually became aware
and mastered the differences between writing for the movies and writing novels. It’s true that he
went to Hollywood to make some money but if you look at it strictly through that angle you can say
that he also wrote his first book just so he can make some money so Zelda would accept his
marriage proposal. Fitzgerald was not born rich and all his adult life he made a living strictly from
his writing. And if he was famous for his excesses in the 1920’s, the truth is that for the most part of
his life he had to struggle to keep up with Zelda hospital expenses and their daughter’s education.
Regarding working in Hollywood, for as much as he has criticized it and often satirized in his
writing – notably the short stories of Pat Hobby, a Hollywood “hack” – he was clearly in earnest
trying to make a difference in the film business and his frustration was mostly for seeing others who
he thought less talented and dedicated make it effortlessly as hacks why he wanted to bring the
seriousness of his art to the movie business.
3. Third Act: The Last Tycoon
The study of Fitzgerald’s literary and film work brings me to the conclusion that potentially
he was as good as a screenwriter as he was a novelist. If not for his premature death of a heart
attack in 1940, I believe he was about to not only have a come back in the literary world with the
novel he was working about Hollywood – The Last Tycoon, that even in its unfinished state is still
considered as one of the best ever written about the movie industry – as he could have had another
chance of being taken more seriously in the movie business.
It’s also important to refer Fitzgerald’s awareness of the role of the director as the “author”
of the movie – anticipating the French Nouvelle Vague by three decades. According to Edward
Murray, in 1924 Fitzgerald wrote and outline for an essay titled “Why Only Ten Percent of Movies
Succeed” where he stated that movies would become artistically better so long as there were better
directors. Sheilah Graham, her lover and companion in his latter Hollywood years, writes in her
memoir College of One in 1967 that Fitzgerald said: “Why can’t the writer also be the director? One
man in control from the inception of the film to the finish”. Graham added: “This is quite usual
today, but Scott was laughed at when he suggested it in 1937”. And last but not the least, Fitzgerald
writes to Zelda, shortly before his death, that he hoped that one day he could direct his own movies,
adding a reference to Preston Sturges:
They’ve let a certain writer here direct his own pictures and he has made such a go of it that there may be
a different feeling about that soon. If I had that chance I would attain my real goal in coming here in the
first place.
Unfortunately, there was no time for that chance to come, but if nothing else, to quote Tom
Dardis refering to The Last Tycoon: “working as a screenwriter in Hollywood in those last years
restored a great many things to Fitzgerald, not the least of which was the slow but eventual return of
his writing talent”.
Fade out. The end.