F. Scott Fitzgerald and the problem of film adaptation

Producer David O. Selznick once said of his Hollywood dream factory, in an image reminiscent of the aftermath of the studio earthquake in The Last Tycoon:

"Hollywood's like Egypt. . Full of crumbled pyramids. It'll never come back. It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands . . . There might have been good movies if there had been no movie industry. Hollywood might have become the center of a new human expression if it hadn't been grabbed by a little group of book-keepers and turned into a junk industry." (Hecht 25$)

After three periods in Hollywood as a screenwriter, F. Scott Fitzgerald agreed with the mogul that Hollywood's waste of human creativity was degrading of the human spirit: "This is no art. This is an industry" (Phillips 27). As early in his writing career as "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," Fitzgerald's disappointment with that industry is satirically evident as Percy Washington explains that a great family estate had been designed by "a moving picture fella," after other kinds of creative people had failed. "He was the only man we found who was used to playing with an unlimited amount of money, though he did tuck his napkin in his collar and couldn't read or write:' And in the opening pages of "The Rich Boy," Fitzgerald employs a disparaging metaphor in treating the authorial handling of Anson Hunter's viewpoint: "If I accept his for a moment I am, lost-I have nothing to show but a preposterous movie" (Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited 98; 153).

Yet Fitzgerald, like many artists and intellectuals, was fascinated by Hollywood even as he was repelled by it; Jay Gatsby's parties reveal many of the skills and aptitudes of the film director (Way 154) and films function throughout Fitzgerald's fiction as a repository of ideas and images (Marsh 3). On his initial sojourn in the film capital, Fitzgerald became most impressed with Irving Thalberg, the brilliant young production chief for MGM Studios, for whom the writer worked in 1931 on the script of director Jack Conway's RedHeaded Woman, and of whom the major artistic film director, George Cukor, said nearly half a century after Thalberg's death in 1936 from exhaustion and overwork, "the most brilliant, the most creative producer that I ever worked with. That includes everyone!" (Phillips 149). Fitzgerald's great professional respect for Thalberg led him to fashion The Last Tycoon on the producer's career, on "the shrewdness of what he said-something more than shrewdness . . . the largeness of what he thought" (Fitzgerald, Tycoon 135), 1 and Frances Ring notes that, in contrast to Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, Fitzgerald's "own focus would appraise the antagonism between the creative and corporate interests and bring a grander scale to the Hollywood story" (Ring 103).

Considering the carelessness and outright tawdriness of many Hollywood renditions of major literary works-an especially egregious example, director Lloyd Bacon's 1930 Moby Dick, ends with Ahab's clumping back to his lady love, having dispatched the whale, and his lady sighing, "Why, Ahab, you're crying!"-Fitzgerald's attraction/repulsion to popular film is often shared by literary scholars who have tended to view cinematic adaptation of literary subjects with considerable suspicion. The situation has hardly been aided by the now dominant, highly impressionistic trend in popular film commentary over the past thirty years, sponsored by Pauline Kael, in which, as a critic has written concerning such serious and literary directors as John Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet, "film more and more is regarded as merely a means of escape from increasingly unpleasant, even barbaric, social realities into infantile fantasy, as merely an emotionally seductive medium, designed to titillate the ultimate feel-good consumer with, in Kael's unfortunately reductive phrase, `the whole illusionary delight of movies"' (Cunningham 244). But among the profusion of such sentimental films and unsuccessful adaptations, there remain many excellent film adaptalions of literature, such as Orson Welles's restored Othello and his The Magnificent Ambersons, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Akira Kurosawa's interpretation of Macbeth, Throne of Blood, Olivier's Hamlet, Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust, John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Carol Reed's The Third Man, Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey into Night, Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire (if not Kazan's The Last Tycoon), and Tack Clayton's The Innocents (The Turn of the Screw) and, as I shall attempt to show, his 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

Accompanying this creative achievement, a rich and diverse body of film adaptation theory, from Hugo Munsterberg to Seymour Chatman, has arisen in an attempt to assert the legitimacy of the adaptational enterprise. A major position on film adaptation of literary works with which perhaps a majority of theorists would agree is that of director-writer Eleanor Perry (David and Lisa, The Swimmer):