The Screengrab : f. scott fitzgerald

Morning Deal Report: Horton Hears a Hex

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Horton Hears a Who director Jimmy Hayward has lined up his next gig: he’ll be bringing DC comics gunslinger Jonah Hex to the screen. “The character of Hex, known for having the right side of his face disfigured and wearing a Confederate army uniform, was a rough-and-tumble gunslinger and part-time bounty hunter whose adventures always ended in blood,” notes The Hollywood Reporter. Josh Brolin is attached to star as Hex.

The Painted Veil director John Curran will direct Keira Knightley in The Beautiful and the Damned. “Hanna Weg script concerns the turbulent marriage of alcoholic writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his mercurial wife Zelda Sayre, who was schizophrenic. The tempestuous relationship, which unfolded in the high society of the Roaring '20s, inspired some of the novelist's works,” Variety reports.

Fresh from inflicting Bedtime Stories upon us, Adam Shankman will direct a remake of Bye Bye Birdie for Columbia. “A stage favorite for the past half-century, Birdie centers on Conrad Birdie, a popular singer whose character is based loosely on Elvis Presley. He's about to be shipped off to the army, but as part of a publicity stunt, he agrees to one last encounter with a fan before he goes to war.” Ah yes, it’s truly a timeless tale, but without Dick Van Dyke, we’re not interested.

Related:
Keira Knightley's Last Night
The Butler Did It

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood/ Hollywood in F. Scott Fitzgerald

Phil Nugent — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As Susan King points out in the Los Angeles Times, David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that first appeared in Collier's magazine in 1922, represents the latest development in an intense, dysfunctional love affair between Hollywood and Fitzgerald that goes right back to the days when the author was alive and the hottest thing in publishing. King quotes Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor of Fitzgerald's published notebooks and correspondence, as saying that Fitzgerald, who claimed to have come up with the idea of a man born old and growing younger through the years based on a remark by Mark Twain, was "probably attracted to this [fantasy] form by its tension between romanticism and realism, for the challenge of fantasy is to make events convincing." But maybe he was just looking for a fresh spin on the way that youth slips away, which was one of the writer's obsessions for all his short life. Fitzgerald, who from the evidence of those notebooks and letters, had begun complaining that his best years were past him as early as his twenties, was once so great a literary celebrity that he and his wife, Zelda, were given screen tests and offered the chance to star in a silent version of his novel This Side of Paradise. They turned the offer down; Gore Vidal has written that "like so many romantics, then and now, the Fitzgeralds did not want to go through the grim boring business of becoming movie stars. Rather they wanted to live as if they were inside a movie... Each lived long enough and suffered enough to realize that movies of that sort are to be made or seen, not lived. But by then she was in a sanitarium full-time and he was a movie hack."

When Fitzerald returned to Hollywood in the '30s to work as a screenwriter, he was a has-been in need of money; his private life was a mess and his career had begun to slide downward with the commercial failure of his greatest book, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald was genuinely interested in doing good work for the movies--unlike, say, William Faulkner, who made no bones about just being there for the money and who, coincidentally or not, wound up getting credit for having worked on some pretty good movies. Fitzgerald's only screen credit was as co-writer of Three Comrades, a 1938 adaptation of an Erich Maria Remarque novel, directed by Frank Borzage. Two years later, he died, following his second heart attack, at 44. According to Vidal, Fitzgerald may have run afoul of his boss, "the boy genius Irving Thalberg, whose "tasteful" films (The Barretts of Wimpole Street) were much admired in those days. On one occasion (recorded in the story 'Crazy Sunday') Fitzgerald held riveted a party at the Thalbergs with a drunken comedy number. Movie stars do not like to be upstaged by mere writers, especially drunk writers. But next day, the hostess, the ever-gracious Norma Shearer, wired Fitzgerald (no doubt after an apologetic mea culpa that has not survived), "I thought you were one of the most agreeable persons at our tea." In Hollywood that means you're fired; he was fired.

When Hollywood at the actual, still-living Fitzgerald nestled in its bosom, it may not have been able to overcome its natural aversion to the aura he then had as a washed-up failure--an aversion that Fitzgerald shared, and that may have contributed to his physical deterioration as much as the fast living and his alcoholism. But it still loved his stories about scandal and blighted romance among the rich and the beautiful: it rushed to turn them into movies when they were hot off the presses and then, after his death, was quick to reconceive them as nostalgic odes to a vanished time. Leading the league in film adaptations is Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby, which Baz Luhrmann is currently threatening to film. It's a little hard to gauge Hollywood's track record with this book, because the first, silent adaptation, made in 1926 with Warner Baxter in the title role, has been lost, and the first sound version, made in 1949 with Alan Ladd in the lead and Elliott Nugent (no relation) directing, was pulled from distribution when the 1974 Robert Redford Gatsby was released and has been little seen since. The Redford movie, which was much-hyped at the time, was so long on expensive period detail and production values and so short on emotion, depth, and poetic feeling that it was as if it had been written by the Fitzgerald of The Beautiful and the Damned, a tyro whose greatest gift was for snappy titles. The second most popular Fitzgerald novel among would-be film adapters is probably Tender Is the Night, which was made into a bad movie in 1962 and a somewhat better TV miniseries in 1985, with a script by Dennis Potter. In a lighter key, in 1977 Joan Micklin Silver made an hour-long TV film for PBS based on the short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair; it contains tickling performances by Shelley Duvall as a country mouse cousin and Veronica Carthwright as the citified relation driven to jealousy by her toothy charms.

There's also a whole subgenre of attempt to capture some of what Fitzgerald had to say, in the writing he did in his last years, about Hollywood while he was there, in the process of being ground up in the gears of the machine itself. It's not his best work, but Hollywood is always suitably impressed with a genuine great writer deems Hollywood a fit subject for him to grapple with. The great white whale is The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald's unfinished attemtpt at a Hollywood novel, with a Thalberg-like studio chief as its hero. It's one of the ironies of both men's careers that Fitzgerald had it in him to buy the hype surrounding Thalberg as the most culturally sophisticated of the studio bosses and to try to turn him into a tragic hero, even while Thalberg was shafting him, just as he'd shafted his other betters, from Erich von Stroheim to the Marx Brothers. The 1976 movie version, adapted by Harold Pinter and starring Robert De Niro, was the last movie directed by Elia Kazan; it's a stiff, largely because the filmmakers were too reverential towards the material to dare to flesh out Fitzgerald's incomplete novel and turn it into a story. (A 1959 TV version was directed by Ted Kotcheff and starred John Ireland.) And Christopher Lloyd played Pat Hobby, the hack-screenwriter antihero of a series of stories--attempted comedies that Fitzgerald must have ground out in a grumpy, self-lacerating mood--in a 1987 film shown on PBS as part of its Tales from the Hollywood Hills anthology series.

But as Vidal wrote, some people would rather live the movies than make them, and some would rather bypass the art in favor of gossipy dreams about the artist. That's the idea behind F. Scott Fitzgerald and "The Last of the Belles", a 1974 TV movie that fuses an adaptation of the title story with Richard Chamberlain playing the young Scott as he romances Blythe Danner's Zelda, and another TV film, 1976's F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, which dispenses with the fictional adaptations and just dives right in to scenes of the dissipated Scott (played by Jason Miller, with Tuesday Weld as Zelda and Julia Foster as his Hollywood mistress, Sheila Graham) reeling around Hollywood in a half-potted stupor. Neither film is very good, but the casting directors can congratulate themselves on hiring two very different actors, neither of whom looked a thing like Fitzgerald, to represent the two popular fantasies of how he was at either end of his famous life: chipper and civilized as young Dr. Kildaire when starting out and as gaunt and pathetic as a bad playwright turned John Garfield imitator at the end. It probably says something about the mysteries of creation that, even when Fitzgerald adaptations are good, none of them really convey as much of his style and feeling as the work he himself did for the script of Three Comrades, just as it probably says something about the frustrating nature of writing for movies that, even with Fitzgerald's fingerprints on it, Three Comrades is still mostly a terrible movie.

Trailer Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Trailer #2

Paul Clark — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Last month, I declared David Fincher’s film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story to be my most-anticipated movie of the fall. This trailer only made me more breathless in my anticipation. For one thing, the trailer affords me a more in-depth look than ever before at the breadth of Brad Pitt’s performance- sure, there’s plenty of CGI and makeup effects involved, yet Pitt (a perpetually underrated actor) nonetheless has plenty of responsibility in bringing the character to life. In addition, the story is shown a little more in-depth, including supporting characters played by Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, and Taraji P. Henson. There’s been some bad buzz coming out of early screenings that the film is “too long”, but to hell with that. I could be happy luxuriating in Fincher’s world for hours on end.

Morning Deal Report: Improving “Moby Dick”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:45:00 GMT

That sound you just heard was Herman Melville rolling over in his grave. Wanted director Timur Bekmanbetov will direct a (you guessed it) reimagining of Moby Dick for Universal Pictures, and there are some absolutely fabulous lines from this Variety report that I must quote at length. Screenwriters Adam Cooper and Bill Collage “revere Melville’s original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes how Ahab’s obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain. This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive.” Wow, sounds great so far! “This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story,” says Cooper. Please just tell me they’re keeping Queequeg.

Speaking of great American authors, the love story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayme will come to the screen as The Beautiful and the Damned, to be directed by Nick Cassavettes. Although no actor has been announced for the male lead, The Hollywood Reporter has Keira Knightley in talks to play Zelda.

Shane Black will follow up 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with Cold Warrior. According to Variety, the story “revolves around a spy from the Cold War era who comes out of retirement to team with a younger agent from the new school to confront a domestic terrorism threat orchestrated by Russia.” Time to lure Sean Connery out of retirement?

Related:
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Sean Connery's Life an Open Book

Screengrab Fall Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Yesterday, my colleague Scott Von Doviak dared all of his fellow Screengrab staffers to weigh in on our most anticipated movies of the fall. Given my lifelong inability to resist a dare (which resulted in my eating far too many unspeakable things in my younger days) I’ve decided to answer the call. Craving an additional challenge- and hoping to spotlight the wide array of good and bad releases coming soon to a theatre near me- I’ve decided to eliminate all contenders that appeared in Scott’s preview. Here goes:

3 UP

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – for years, David Fincher has been one of Hollywood’s most gifted filmmakers, with last year’s Zodiac his best film yet. With Button, Fincher turns his camera on an honest-to-goodness work of literature (an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, fer chrissakes), but don’t expect a workmanlike Tradition of Quality-style adaptation. Button re-teams Fincher with Brad Pitt, who continues to improve as an actor by seeking out adventurous material, and this story gives him his biggest challenge yet, not only playing a character from childhood through old age, but playing him while aging in reverse. It’s the kind of story that requires a visionary to pull off, and I can think of few better candidates for the job than Fincher. Every year, there’s at least one high-profile movie that I actively root for to be great, and this year, it’s Benjamin Button.

2. A Christmas Tale – Unlike Benjamin Button, the latest film by the great French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin is something of a known quantity, premiering at Cannes to almost universal acclaim. But even if it hadn’t already screened, my hopes for this one would be through the roof. In the past few years, Desplechin has become one of my favorite filmmakers, and he’s coming off his finest work yet, 2004’s Kings and Queen. Factor in that Christmas Tale re-unites four of that film’s stars- Matthieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Devos, and Hippolyte Girardot- and I’m sold. That the film’s IMDb recommends the Steve Martin remake of Cheaper By the Dozen shouldn’t be held against it.

3. The Brothers Bloom – as I stated in my Trailer Review earlier this week, I’m in the pro-Brick camp, so naturally I’m excited for Rian Johnson’s follow-up project. But he’s also assembled an irresistible cast (I love Brody and Ruffalo as brothers, and Rachel Weisz is always best when she plays daffy), so I’m extra-stoked for this one. Could we be witnessing the rise of a major American filmmaker? Here’s hoping.

3 DOWN

1. Defiance – tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Ed Zwick directs a film about an outsider who aids a group of minorities in fighting about those who oppress them. That the minorities are Jews and the time period is during World War II only makes Defiance’s Oscar-grubbing even more blatant. Thanks, but no thanks.

2. RockNRolla – you know, I was under the impression that the abject failure of Revolver coupled with the divorce from Madonna meant that the moviegoing public would get a break from Guy Ritchie. Alas, that beautiful dream wasn’t to be. It was nice while it lasted though…

3. Bedtime Stories – Adam Sandler’s comic persona might be juvenile, but he’s always been at his best at unleashing his rage onscreen in decidedly un-kid-friendly ways. Less successful are his attempts to warm the heart, which makes the idea of a Sandler family comedy all the more misguided. The presence of Adam (The Pacifier) Shankman in the director’s chair doesn’t inspire much confidence either.

WILD CARD

It’s not as odd as Scott’s choice of Oliver Stone’s W. (what could be?), but I’m pretty conflicted about Quantum of Solace. What made Casino Royale so damn good is that it combined a kickass James Bond thrill ride with a legitimately compelling story. But although hiring director Marc Forster hints that the producers might be trying for that same balance of action and drama, I have my doubts that lightning will strike twice. Add to this Forster’s lack of experience in the action genre, plus the fact that unlike Casino this one doesn’t have an Ian Fleming novel to provide a solid narrative foundation, and Quantum has a lot to live up to. Sure, it might be diverting, but after Casino Royale, that just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. However, I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about this.