The Failed Screenwriting Career of F. Scott Fitzgerald

The popularity of novelist and short story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who achieved fame in the 1920s, began to wane considerably once the Great Depression hit. With the public no longer interested in reading about the extravagant lifestyles of the American elite, Fitzgerald was facing serious financial problems by the mid-1930s. Convinced that he could become a successful screenwriter, the author returned to Hollywood where he had briefly worked in 1927 and 1931.

In 1937, Fitzgerald was hired by MGM where he would earn $1000 a week (raised to $1250 after six months), his highest salary up till then. While under contract to the studio Fitzgerald was given three major script assignments: Three Comrades (1938), the only film for which he received screen credit; Infidelity, a Joan Crawford vehicle, which was abandoned after he had worked on it for several months; and The Women (1939), on which he and Donald Ogden Stewart collaborated but were eventually replaced by Jane Murfin and Anita Loos. In addition, Fitzgerald also worked (uncredited) on screenplays for A Yank at Oxford (1938), Marie Antoinette (1938), Gone With the Wind (1939) and Madame Curie (the project was shelved and not released until 1943).

F. Scott Fitzgerald (above) enjoyed great successes in the 1920s with his first two novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) as well as his short stories for popular magazines. While his novel The Great Gatsby (1925) was not a success at the time, it is now regarded as one of the greatest American novels ever written. The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald's unfinished novel about Hollywood, was published after the author's death. 

After eighteen months MGM decided not to renew Fitzgerald's contract. Much to the studio's annoyance, the writer often disregarded the rules of screenwriting, providing stylised dialogue and long descriptions that would be right for a novel but wrong for a script. Director Billy Wilder once said about Fitzgerald's screenwriting efforts that he was like "a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job”. Still, Fitzgerald was determined to succeed in Hollywood and not only because of the money he could make. He was passionate about films and at one point even dreamed about being both screenwriter and director. (In a September 1940 letter to his wife Zelda, Fitzgerald wrote: "They've let a certain writer here [probably Preston Sturges] direct his own pictures and he has made such a go of it that there may be a different feeling about that soon. If I had that chance, I would attain my real goal in coming here in the first place.")

In the end, Fitzgerald's Hollywood career ended in failure. After leaving MGM in 1939, the author went freelance, taking on assignments like Winter Carnival (1939), with his contributions again uncredited. A few other projects he had high hopes for were eventually shelved, most notably Cosmopolitan, a film that was to star Shirley Temple. Fitzgerald's screenwriting career just wouldn't take off and this prompted him to start drinking excessively again. On 21 December 1940, after years of severe and chronic alcohol abuse, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, only 44 years old.

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As mentioned, the only film for which Fitzgerald had received screen credit was Frank Borzage's Three Comrades, produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Fitzgerald didn't even receive sole billing, being later paired with screenwriter Edward Paramore. Mankiewicz was not at all happy with the script, saying about it years later: "The actors, among them Margaret Sullavan, absolutely could not read the lines. It was very literary dialogue, novelistic dialogue that lacked all the qualities required for screen dialogue. The latter must be 'spoken'. Scott Fitzgerald really wrote very bad spoken dialogue." The producer, who had started his career as a screenwriter, made many changes to the script, and not just to the dialogue. Outraged by what was done to his work, Fitzgerald wrote to Mankiewicz on 20 January 1938, excerpts of his letter seen below. (His impassioned plea to undo the changes was ignored.)

Dear Joe: 

Well, I read the last part and I feel like a good many writers must have felt in the past. I gave you a drawing and you simply took a box of chalk and touched it up. Pat [played by Margaret Sullavan] has now become a sentimental girl from Brooklyn, and I guess all these years I've been kidding myself about being a good writer. 

[....]

To say I'm disillusioned is putting it mildly. For nineteen years, with two years out for sickness, I've written best-selling entertainment, and my dialogue is supposedly right up at the top. But I learn from the script that you've suddenly decided that it isn't good dialogue and you can take a few hours off and do much better. 

I think you now have a flop on your hands— as thoroughly naive as The Bride Wore Red [another Mankiewizc production] but utterly inexcusable because this time you had something and you have arbitrarily and carelessly torn it to pieces. [...]

You are simply tired of the best scenes because you've read them too much and, having dropped the pilot, you're having the aforesaid pleasure of a child with a box of chalk. You are or have been a good writer, but this is a job you will be ashamed of before it's over. The little fluttering of life of what's left of my lines and situations won't save the picture. 

[....]

My only hope is that you will have a moment of clear thinking. That you'll ask some intelligent and disinterested person to look at the two scripts. Some honest thinking would be much more valuable to the enterprise right now than an effort to convince people you've improved it. I am utterly miserable at seeing months of work and thought negated in one hasty week. I hope you're big enough to take this letter as it's meant — a desperate plea to restore the dialogue to its former quality — to put back the flower cart, the piano-moving, the balcony, the manicure girl— all those touches that were both natural and new. Oh, Joe, can't producers ever be wrong? I'm a good writer — honest. I thought you were going to play fair. Joan Crawford may as well play the part now, for the thing is as groggy with sentimentality as The Bride Wore Red, but the true emotion is gone. 

Source:  The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Andrew Turnbull. 

Note: As the letter indicates, Fitzgerald was not at all impressed with Joan Crawford. In a 1938 letter to a friend, he wrote while working on the script for Infidelity: "Writing for her is difficult. She can't change her emotions in the middle of a scene without going through a sort of Jekyll and Hyde contortion of the face, so that when one wants to indicate that she is going from joy to sorrow, one must cut away and then cut back. Also, you can never give her such a stage direction as "telling a lie", because if you did, she would practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British." (Infidelity was eventually abandoned due to the film's taboo subject of adultery.)

Joseph Mankiewicz (above) was a successful screenwriter, producer and director. His films include box-office hits like The Philadelphia Story (1940; as producer), Woman of the Year (1942; producer), All About Eve (1950; screenwriter, director) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959; director). On most of his films as producer, Mankiewicz also made uncredited contributions to the screenplay.

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One of Fitzgerald's freelance assignments was Cosmopolitan, based on his own short story Babylon Revisited. In March 1940, having bought the rights to the story, independent film producer Lester Cowan approached Fitzgerald and asked him if he would write the script himself. The author accepted, but after finishing the script he disagreed with Cowan about the casting of the lead, the youngster Honoria. Cowan wanted Shirley Temple in the role and it was only after Fitzgerald had met Shirley in July 1940 that he approved of Cowan's choice. Fitzgerald was optimistic about the project and wrote to his wife Zelda on 21 September 1940: "... the Shirley Temple script is looking up again and is my great hope for attaining some real status out here as a movie man and not a novelist." Despite Fitzgerald's high hopes, however, Shirley's mother objected to the film and the project was abandoned.

Below is a letter from Fitzgerald to his secretary Isabel Owens, dated 16 August 1940. A month earlier Fitzgerald had met Shirley Temple and the second paragraph of his letter refers to that meeting. 

Source: icollector.com