“Fitzgerald, to put it mildly, did not impress the studio bosses. The rap against him was that he couldn’t make the shift from words on the page to images on the screen. His plotting was elaborate without purpose; his dialogue arch or sentimental; and his tone too serious — at times, even grim. Billy Wilder, who seemed genuinely fond of Fitzgerald, likened him to ‘a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job’ — with no idea how to connect the pipes and make the water flow.”
The November 16 New Yorker features an article by Arthur Krystal (abstract) about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s years trying to make a go of it in Hollywood, from 1937 until his death in late 1940. It’s a fascinating overview, not only of those years in his life, but of Fitzgerald’s entire career and how Hollywood worked at the time. Fitzgerald never had much luck with anything after 1930, and as Krystal writes, “on the face of it, he should have taken Hollywood by storm: he wrote commercially successful stories; he knew how to frame a scene; and his dialogue, at least in his best fiction, was smart, sophisticated, evocative. […] So what was the problem?”
The main reason Krystal settles on, is that Fitzgerald couldn’t content himself with the partial nature of a screenplay; he couldn’t make peace with the fact that a screenplay is ultimately just one contribution to a finished film; he was always trying to dictate too much, or write a novel instead:
The unfinished nature of the form is, ultimately, what Fitzgerald could not abide. You can feel it in the prolixity of his scripts and in the dark grooves of his pencilled notes: he wanted every screenplay to impart a moral lesson while illuminating the hidden facets of its characters.
(This reminds me of another writer who failed to make it in Hollywood around the same time, also for temperamental reasons: Henry Miller, who described what the studios wanted, and he was unable to provide, as “just plain shit wrapped in cellophane.”)
But Fitzgerald had a larger problem with focusing his ambition:
In the end, Fitzgerald’s attitude to Hollywood was as inconsistent as his attitudes toward everything. The warring impulses in him never really subsided. He was alternately sensible and reckless; worldly and adolescent; down to earth and somewhere above Alpha Centauri. He said that he knew more about life in his books than he did in life, and he was right. In life, he simply wanted too much. He wanted to be both a great novelist and a Hollywood hot shot. He wanted to box like Gene Tunney and run downfield like Red Grange. He wanted to write songs like Cole Porter and poetry like John Keats. He wanted the trappings of wealth but was drawn to the social idealism of Marx. He wasn’t so much a walking contradiction as a quivering mass of dreams and ambitions that, depending on how he was feeling and whom he was talking to, created a dizzying array of impressions. […] Fitzgerald’s own schoolmaster at Princeton, Christian Gauss, [said that Fitzgerald] reminded him of all the Karamazov brothers at once.
Krystal has these beautiful, and very true lines in the final passage:
Fitzgerald drew his faith not from camera angles or even plotlines but from sentences; and what draws us powerfully to his work is the sensitive handling of emotional yearning and regret. […] Perhaps Fitzgerald could have captured this heightened state of awareness in a script, but was this what the studios were looking for? Fitzgerald’s vision of becoming a great screenwriter was no more realistic than the likelihood of his returning a kickoff or writing a hit Broadway show. But, then, Fitzgerald was not one to give up on dreams; if he had, he could not have written so beautifully, so penetratingly, about their loss.
See also Richard Brody’s take on the article.
