The Screengrab : the great gatsby

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.

Down, Down, Down, Way Down Under: Baz Luhrmann Defends "Australia", Plots "Gatsby"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Baz Luhrmann, seen in the photo at the right maintaining an even strain while trying to fend off the slavering zombie armies who wanted their money back after a screening of his latest epic, Australia, wants you to know that he's not going anywhere, so you might as well just knock it off with the death threats. "We're making people cry," said Luhrmann in defense of his film, a two-hour, forty-six-minute celebration of the complete immobility of Nicole Kidman's facial muscles. (Try anything! Wire her up to jumper cables and run five hundred volts through her. Have Tom Cruise dragged onto the set and let a kangaroo kick him in the nuts. She won't pout and she won't smirk. The woman's a sphinx!) "I know it," he said in defense of the claim about the crying, "because they write to us." (Actually, nobody doubted that the movie is making people cry. We're just open to the possibility that it had something to do with thoughts about what else they could have done with the evening.) "But," he added, "there are those that don't get it. A lot of the film scientists don't get it. And it's not just that that they don't get it, but they hate it and they hate me, and they think I'm the black hole of cinema. They say, 'He shouldn't have made it, and he should die.'" The problem, as Luhrmann sees it, is that the film scientist community tends to be between the ages of 18 and 39 and likes their movies more formulaic than he can supply. "This is not a romantic comedy for 40-year-old women or action movies for 17-year-old boys, and that's not OK with some people. It's not OK for people to come eat at the same table of cinema. But you look at movies like Gone With the Wind and Old Hollywood classics, and they don't fit in any box. Corny Hollywood movies from the '40s freak out (the film scientists)."

To combat this problem, Luhrmann hopes, on his next project, to abandon the corny old '40s and jumpback twenty years: he's planning to film F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. This would mark the third time the novel has been filmed, following a 1926 silent film starring Warner Baxter, a 1949 version starring Alan Ladd, and the infamous, hugely expensive, misguidedly nostalgic 1974 waxworks edition starring Robert Redford. (More recently, there was a 2000 miniseries made for cable TV; it starred Tobey Stephens, Mira Sorvino, Paul Rudd, and Martin Donovan. There was also a weird 2002 indie called G. that transposed the book's plot and characters to a modern hip-hop milieu.) For Luhrmann, Gatsby provides the opportunity to say something about contemporary society, specifically the economic calamity: "If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money,' they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time they'd be willing to...People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and The Great Gatsby can provide that explanation." Given that Australia cost a reported $130 million and has given little indication that it'll be earning that back anytime soon, Luhrmann may have already made his searing indictment of those drunk on money, without knowing it at the time.

While Luhrmann was recasting himself as David Selznick crossed with Paul Krugman, one of his homeland's most flamboyant literary celebrities was recasting herself as a film scientist. Writing in the Guardian, Germaine Greer let fly with this opening: " The scale of the disaster that is Baz Luhrmann's Australia is gradually becoming apparent," and responded to those who praised the film's "myth of national origin" with the observation that "Myths are by definition untrue." In Australia, Luhrmann's gooey, corny epic isn't just a throwback to "Old Hollywood" romances but a political film, one that "is designed to promote the current government policy of reconciliation" by misrepresenting the history of the mistreatment and exploitation of the Aborginal population. In fact, the government had a hand in getting the thing paid for: "Australia cost the Fox Corporation about $90m, minus a hefty tax rebate. The other $40m was contributed by the Australian Tourism Export Council, in the sanguine expectation that the film would do for Australian tourism what Schindler's List did for Kazimierz, the Jewish district of Krakow." The fact that so much is riding on the movie's success has not ensured it good word of mouth or positive reviews even in Australia, where one writer speculated: "it's an elaborate joke. A ruse. A jape. A gag . . . Some drunken nut challenged Luhrmann to break box-office records by making the most astonishingly bad Australian film of all time." Given notices like that, you might forgive a little whining on Luhrmann's part, but he's way ahead of you: "I'm not whining," he's insisted, "because when you do what I do, you expect to be covered in mud. But there seems to be a lot of misinformation."

That Guy!: Scott Wilson

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

That Guy! tends to focus on beloved or quirky character actors, but there's a different species of That Guy! who's just as worthy of attention: the so-called "working famous". These are actors and actresses who aren't especially noteworthy for character parts, quirky looks, or distinctive voices; they're normal-looking men and women who seem like they're perfectly capable of filling leading roles, but never quite make it to the upper echelons of stardom and spend long and often rich careers constantly working in Hollywood without ever becoming household names. Scott Wilson, one of our favorite examples of the working famous, seemed like he was destined for superstardom; after taking up acting more or less on whim after hitch-hiking to Los Angeles from his native Georgia, he starred in two groundbreaking films at the age of twenty-five (In the Heat of the Night and In Cold Blood). Somehow, though, despite starting his career with two breakout roles in blockbuster films, never quite crossed the threshhold into movie stardom. Handsome and versatile, with a laconic Southern drawl and a sad demeanor, Wilson could have been a huge star; but he's never allowed the fact that he didn't go on to become a household name to get in the way of working constantly and making himself a consummate professional. Wilson has gone one to become one of the most reliable actors in the business, capable of delivering terrific, emotionally rich performances even in small roles (such as in the 1974 Robert Redford adaptation of The Great Gatsby). Capable of light, breezy comic performances as well as intense, explosive dramatic roles, he's seemingly up for any challenge as long as it gives him a chance to stretch, and he's never shied away from playing against type. While he's mixed in a decent amount of family films and television work to pay the bills, he's been drawn for over forty years to dark, compelling, risky character roles, and his reputation as a reliable pro has attracted a number of well-known younger actors to working with him. His career has undergone a mini-renaissance of late, with some of his most memorable performances coming after he hit age sixty. His next role (in the Philip K. Dick adaptation Radio Free Albemuth) will be as the President of the United States, and he's been married for twenty-five years to a woman named Heavenly, so he must be doing something right in his life.

Where to see Scott Wilson at his best:

IN COLD BLOOD (1967)

Wilson is so polished and natural in the film adaptation of Truman Capote's infamous non-fiction novel about the senseless murder of the Clutter family in Texas, it's hard to believe it was only his second film role ever. Having previously wowed audiences as the murder suspect in the well-received In the Heat of the Night, Wilson is absolutely dynamite as the confused, wheedling killer Dick Hickock. He's paired opposite the veteran actor Robert Blake in one of his most memorable roles, and the two of them take the movie to a higher level almost by themselves. It also helps that the young Wilson bore an almost eerie resemblance to the actual Hickock.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

In one of his most emotionally intense roles, Wilson was cast by William Peter Blatty as the mentally fragile ex-astronaut Captain Billy Cutshaw in this cult favorite. It's a demanding role, not only because of its depths of sorrow and need, but because it requires Wilson to make the transition from broad comic delivery early on in the film to cynical aggression in its middle passages to vulnerable despair late in the movie. It's pretty close to being the performance of a lifetime, and while the movie wasn't a commercial success, he was rewarded by those who did see it with a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

JUNEBUG (2005)

In the middle of enjoying an exceptionally rewarding late-career comeback over the last decade, Wilson found himself playing a small-town Southern patriarch in this acclaimed indie drama. Although Amy Adams rightly captured the attention of moviegoers and critics in her role as the impossibly hopeful pregnant sister of the male lead, it's Scott Wilson's performance that seems to anchor the film from the moment he steps on the screen. Showing how far he's progressed as an actor, he manages to dominate every scene he's in with his very presence — nearly silent, but holding impossible, hard-earned wisdom on his lined face whenever we see him.