Word: fitzgeralded
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...Fitzgerald, as Latham painstakingly documents, was always fascinated by the film and the new industry it had created in America. Representatives of the movie world appear as characters in Tender is the Night (1934), many short stories, and of course at the center of The Last Tycoon, the Hollywood novel Fitzgerald was working on when he died. Latham mines all these works for relevant material-including some passages Edmund Wilson left out of the unfinished Tycoon manuscript he edited after Fitzgerald's death and an early unpublished draft of Tender . in which the novel's central figure was a movie...
Much of it has been told before. of course. Latham has drawn, for a large part, on Miss Graham's memoirs of the period ( Beloved Infidel and College of One ), as well as from Fitzgerald's published letters to Zelda and his daughter Scotty, other Fitzgerald biographies, and the novelist's own autobiographical fiction and essays of the period. Still, Latham has pulled together his resources neatly to tell of Fitzgerald's decline, and he has also filled in many of the gaps by interviewing the survivors of the period who remember the fading Scott...
...here we get, in all the bloody detail, much of the exciting poop about the years when Fitzgerald was a struggling and forgotten artist: his fight with Hollywood director-writer-producer Joe Mankiewicz, his failed screen test, his drunken weekend with the young Budd Schulberg at Dartmouth while working on a picture called Winter Carnical . The hard-core gossip is laced with memory portraits provided by such Fitzgerald comrades as screenwriters Nunnally Johnson, Frances and Albert Hackett, and Anita Loos, and friends like actress Helen Hayes and director George Cukor...
MORE REVEALING, though, are Fitzgerald's lost screenplays themselves, among them an early version of Madame Curie , some rewrite work on Gone With the Wind , and an adaptation of his own story "Babylon Revisited" called Cosmopolitan , which finally appeared in drastically altered form as The Last Time I Saw Paris in 1954 (fourteen years after Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at age 44). Latham quotes amply from the screenplays (when the studios allow him to) and points up the obvious connections between the writer's Hollywood works and his novels. He also dramatizes Fitzgerald's growing interest...
...Crazy Sundays also makes a more than convincing case for Fitzgerald's comprehension of the film as a medium distinct from the novel or the play. By dramatizing the writer's development from screenplay to screenplay, Latham shows how Fitzgerald gradually began to disregard dialogue for visual images until, in Cosmopolitan , he wrote what seems to be an ideal script for the motion picture camera. We also see Fitzgerald's continued interest in sexual politics: in Madame Curie the novelist-turned-screenwriter played up the fact that his heroine had managed to fashion a successful marriage despite her devotion...