Failing The Screen Test

When F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, he took screenwriting seriously – which was a serious mistake, Richard Brody argues:

Much to his credit and much to his misfortune, he was unable to sell out. He didn’t condescend to the movies, but took them seriously—so seriously that he made the mistake of thinking that screenwriting was writing, and that it could take its place in his oeuvre, which, in turn, would mark the cinema with his original artistry. In the introduction to Fitzgerald’s screenplay for his story “Babylon Revisited,” the novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg (who fictionalized their relationship in the novel “The Disenchanted”) explained:

Instead of rejecting screenwriting as a necessary evil, Fitzgerald went the other way and embraced it as a new art form, even while recognizing that it was an art frequently embarrassed by the “merchants” more comfortable with mediocrity in their efforts to satisfy the widest possible audience. …

In short, Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting-is-writing mistake. It’s a notion that has its basis in artistic form. Look at Fitzgerald’s books: they are stylistically pellucid, following on the great realistic tradition, brushed only lightly by the wings of self-consciously interventionist, modernist formalism (as in the list of party guests in “The Great Gatsby”). By contrast, William Faulkner, who went to Hollywood in the early nineteen-thirties, had no such illusions about screenwriting—in part because his sinuous and syntactically profuse writing bore so little relation to the lens-like transparency of a screenplay’s overt storytelling.

How, then, could Fitzgerald have sold out successfully? Brody proposes an alternate history: “Had Fitzgerald only been born half a century later, he … might have made the successful transition to a television-series showrunner.”

Previous Dish on Faulkner’s Hollywood detour here.