Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...passed, it is important that the lasting qualities of his work-the genius and sheer power that mark his writing as some of the best of this century-not be overlooked. Happily, the first of this year's crop of Fitzgerald books, Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, does not sell its subject short...
This work's author, Aaron Latham, has smartly limited his territory-to Fitzgerald's various stints in Hollywood as a screenwriter. The novelist went to the movie capital several times during the last downhill decade of his life, partly to raise money for Zelda's sanitarium expenses, partly to save himself as a writer. What biographer Latham has done-and it is surprising that no one ever did it before-is go to Los Angeles and dig out the screenplays Fitzgerald wrote. almost none of which appeared on film in anything like their original form...
Often ingeniously. Latham interweaves his discussion of Fitzgerald's movie work with the horrifying story of the last three years of his life. This is the time when Fitzgerald fought alcoholism, bankruptcy, and tuberculosis with the help of his lover Sheilah Graham. then a fledgling Hollywood gossip columnist-and it is a hell of a depressing story...
...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...
...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 in the movies as a new art form and his desire to perfect the peculiar craft of screenwriting...