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| F. Scott Fitzgerald |
Of the many novels that use Hollywood as a backdrop, there are two that stand out: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, published in 1939, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, left unfinished at the author’s death in December 1940.(1) Edmund Wilson, who had been a close friend of Fitzgerald’s, and who had corresponded with him during the writing of the novel, undertook the preparation of The Last Tycoon for publication in 1941. Both Fitzgerald an West had worked in Hollywood movies as script-writers. The money they made there was outrageously disproportionate to their output, although the money that West made allowed him to live out his last years in comfort. And they both managed, with uneven results, to turn their experiences under what Wilson called “the insipid Hollywood sun” into compelling novels.
But I left out a particular passage from Wilson’s review of the book The Great Goldwyn because I wanted to expand on it. The passage was about Hollywood’s treatment of writers:
And the writers. Before the vultures have picked the bones of theatrical talent, the big white worms of the studios have grown fat on the decaying flesh. But the vultures get the worms, too. Have we not all had needy friends who have gone West with a smile on their lips and who have never returned again? – from whom we have ceased to hear and whose names we no longer mention, whom we remember as young people of promise, wondering what they have found to do and never thinking to connect them with the processed stuff we hear croaked out, between kisses and pistol-shots, by the smooth-faced gigantic phantoms, when we are foolish enough to go to the movies? It is true, as Mr. Johnston tells us, that Sam Goldwyn always wants the best writers; and there they are out on the Golden Coast, cooped up in their little cells, like school children in study hour. Teacher is the supervisor, and one hopes to be teacher’s favorite. There they are, blowing in their money on goofy Los Angeles houses and on ostentatious cocktail parties, at which they talk about their salaries and their options and always speak of their superiors with admiration, while they submit to being spied upon and having their correspondence opened. Those who do not care to admit surrender pretend to be uncompromising Leftists, getting together in little groups to give three discreet cheers for Stalin and to shed a tear for Republican Spain. But when the Writer’s Guild was organized, it took only one woof from Schulberg to send them running like prairie-dogs – leaving the job to the technicians and the actors. And now the blacklisted leaders ate creeping back, having become so profoundly habituated to high salaries for low work that, no matter how radical they claim to be, they don’t know how to get along without them.
As I mentioned above, Wilson had been in correspondence with Fitzgerald when he was at work on The Last Tycoon, which is an intimate portrait of a maverick young movie producer that resembled Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald knew first hand how writers were valued by the big studios, and how their treatment by the producers exposed their utter incomprehension of what writers do. Fitzgerald introduces a character named Boxley in the novel and includes him in the following scene in which Monroe Stahr, the novel’s protagonist, tries to explain to him how to write a movie scene:
Stahr smiled at Mr. George Boxley. It was a kindly fatherly smile Stahr had developed inversely when he was a young man pushed into high places. Originally it had been a smile of respect toward his elders, then as his own decisions grew rapidly to displace theirs, a smile so that they should not feel it finally emerging as what it was: a smile of kindness sometimes a little hurried and tired, but always there toward anyone who had not angered him within the hour. Or anyone he did not intend to insult, aggressive and outright.
Mr. Boxley did not smile back. He came in with the air of being violently dragged, though no one apparently had a hand on him. He stood in front of a chair, and again it was as if two invisible attendants seized his arms and set him down forcibly into it. He sat there morosely. Even when he lit a cigarette on Stahr's invitation, one felt that the match was held to it by exterior forces he disdained to control.
Stahr looked at him courteously. "Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?" The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence. "I read your letter," said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference.
"I can't get what I write on paper," broke out Boxley. "You've all been very decent, but it's a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you've teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it - they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words."
"Why don't you write it yourself?" asked Stahr.
"I have. I sent you some."
"But it was just talk, back and forth," said Stahr mildly. "Interesting talk but nothing more."
Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but none to amusement, and said: "I don't think you people read things. The men are duelling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket." He barked again and subsided.
"Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?''
"What? Naturally not."
"You'd consider it too cheap."
Movie standards are different," said Boxley, hedging.
"Do you ever go to them?"
"No – almost never."
"Isn't it because people are always duelling and falling down wells?"
"Yes – and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue."
"Skip the dialogue for a minute," said Stahr. "Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write - that's why we brought you out here. But let's imagine something that isn't either bad dialogue or jumping down a well. Has your office got a stove in it that lights with a match?"
"I think it has," said Boxley stiffly, "but I never use it."
"Suppose you're in your office. You've been fighting duels or writing all day and you're too tired to fight or write any more. You're sitting there staring - dull, like we all get sometimes. A pretty stenographer that you've seen before comes into the room and you watch her idly. She doesn't see you, though you're very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table --" Stahr stood up, tossing his key-ring on his desk. "She has two dimes and a nickel and a cardboard matchbox. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match in the matchbox and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there's a stiff wind blowing in the window but just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello - listens and says deliberately into the phone, 'I've never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.' She hangs up, kneels by the stove again, and just as she lights the match, you glance around very suddenly and see that there's another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes." Stahr paused. He picked up his keys and put them in his pocket.
"Go on," said Boxley smiling. “What happens?"
"I don't know," said Stahr. "I was just making pictures."
Boxley felt he was being put in the wrong. "It's just melodrama," he said.
"Not necessarily," said Stahr. "In any case, nobody has moved violently or talked cheap dialogue or had any facial expression at all. There was only one bad line, and a writer like you could improve it. But you were interested."
"What was the nickel for?" asked Boxley evasively.
"I don't know," said Stahr. Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, yes the nickel was for the movies."
The two invisible attendants seemed to release Boxley. He relaxed, leaned back in his chair and laughed. "What in hell do you pay me for?" he demanded. "I don't understand the damn stuff."
"You will," said Stahr grinning, "or you wouldn't have asked about the nickel."
Nearly a decade after Fitzgerald’s death, Wilson was asked to look at a movie adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, starring Alan Ladd. Stanley Kauffmann was at the private screening and provided the following account:
When I saw the 1949 film of The Great Gatsby, the only other person in the screening room was Edmund Wilson (whom I didn’t know). Afterward, as he left, a smiling Paramount publicity man asked him how he had liked the picture. “Not very much, I’m afraid,” said Wilson, and kept walking to the elevator. The Paramount man looked less disappointed than betrayed, as if saying, “We’ve gone to the trouble of making a whole movie out of your friend’s book and you don’t even appreciate it!”
(1) Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940 and Nathanael West was killed in a car crash on December 22. Fitzgerald was 44, West was 37.
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