The Master Novelist and the Screen Cliches
The New York Times featured an article on a few upcoming films that will be based on the stories of twenties novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many, many films have been made from his work, none of which I have seen, but apparently thus far not one has done justice to the power of his writing. One sentence in particular from the Times’ article grabbed my attention: “To date, more than 20 films have been drawn from Fitzgerald’s life and books – and their almost unalloyed failure to do justice to his work is rivaled only by Fitzgerald’s own failure to make it in Hollywood as a screenwriter.”
This immediately reminded me of a scene in Fitzgerald’s final, unifinished novel The Last Tycoon: a meeting between the novelist-turned-screenwriter Mr. George Boxley and the master producer Monroe Stahr. Boxley is clearly unhappy as a screenwriter, and is trying desperately to quit. As the passage demonstrates, Boxley’s opinion of Hollywood is so low that his writing suffers from his perception of far lower standards for screenwriting:
Stahr smiled at Mr. George Boxley. It was a kind 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 deulling 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 deuls 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 the table–“
Stahr stood up, tossing his key-ring on his desk.
“She has two dimes and a nickel–and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black glvoes to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match in the match box 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.”
My point? At a glance (which is about as much thought as I lent this idea–I have no real historical basis for this) Mr. Boxley is a window to Fitzgerald’s feelings as a screenwriter. If this is true, what’s amazing to me is that someone so incredibly suited to one medium can find himself so completely inadequate in another.