Word: tycooning
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Stahr is not simply another Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald was far older when he wrote The Last Tycoon, and the romantic fervor which defined Gatsby has been replaced in Stahr by a "mixture of common sense, wise sensibility, theatrical ingenuity, and a certain half-naive conception of the common weal." A paternalistic employer of the old school, Stahr, like his literary forerunner, is condemned to repeat the past in an age which values only the present moment. In contrast to Gatsby, however, his nemesis is not the carelessness of the very rich but the more modern venality of American capitalism...
...faults of The Last Tycoon as a movie are mainly those of the book, to which screenwriter Harold Pinter has, on the whole, been faithful. What Fitzgerald left us when he died was only a fragment of a novel, a draft of a story still halfway from completion. Fitzgerald's narrator is Cecilia Brady, the daughter of Stahr's business partner, who views Hollywood "with the resignation of a ghost assigned to a haunted house." It is through Cecilia, whose gaze is at first glazed by infatuation and later embittered by cynicism, that we meet and experience Monroe Stahr...
DESPITE ITS FAILINGS, one thing The Last Tycoon as a movie manages to do that the book cannot is to actualize the metaphoric connection between cinematic illusion and real life romance. As a producer, Stahr feeds a dream-starved audience "movie movies," where the hero is brave, the heroine is crystalline pure and the romance is sustained right through the end. Coaching an overly literary writer, Stahr at one point dramatizes a scene from an imaginary film to demonstrate the art of film-making. "What happens?" the writer asks, when Stahr stops short of the finish. "I don't know...
...advent of Murdoch, publishing tycoon on three continents, is of more than parochial New York City interest: he gave promise, with his money and his maverick irreverence, of brightening up the increasingly sedate American newspaper scene. The trend is all the other way: newspapers in monopoly cities being sold for huge sums to absentee conglomerates. Unless a local editor with courage and energy insists otherwise, the natural commercial impulse is to put out complacent, unenterprising papers that don't embarrass the local powers that be and make no waves. So far Murdoch, a fellow refreshingly free of cultural pretensions...
...glimpses a man stuffing what turns out to be the body of a murdered girl into a trash can. Though the view is only in silhouette, Bone has enough of a sense of the man to gasp "It's him!" when later he sees a newspaper photo of Tycoon J.J. Wolfe, a cornpone millionaire from the Ozarks. Such a flash of recognition would, of course, never persuade any court of Wolfe's guilt. But Bone's pal Cutter is convinced-perhaps because he associates the Wolfe type with those who sent him to Viet Nam. He devises...