Listen to part of a lecture in a film studies class.

Listen to part of a lecture in a film studies class.

So last class, we started to talk about the transition from Silent films to sound films in the 1920s and 30s, Hollywood was already the center of the US film industry, and the industry was rapidly growing. With the advent of sound, the public demand for movies really took off, and the studios found themselves needing more screenwriters in a hurry. They decided to offer extremely large salaries to established authors of serious fiction to induce them to come to Hollywood.

One of these authors was the very popular American Novelist F Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had established himself as an important novelist at the young age of 23 with a novel about his college years, and it made him an instant celebrity. Unlike a lot of the other serious writers who came to Hollywood, who frankly, were only in it for the money, Fitzgerald recognized the creative possibilities that film offered, and he wanted to be part of it.

He was a frequent moviegoer himself. He also directed and acted in plays. He was particularly noted for writing expressive dialogue, just what a good screenplay needs, right? In other words, he had every reason to think he'd be great at it. So what happened when he went to Hollywood? First of all, Fitzgerald discovered that coming to Hollywood meant sacrificing his independence. See, a fiction writer works alone and gets the credit for the final product. But making movies is a collaborative effort. It's done by a team which includes the director, actors, composer, set designer, etc. The screenplay is just their framework, not an end in itself. So the famous F Scott Fitzgerald found himself reduced to a very small part of a giant movie making machine.

Also, he seems to have had trouble grasping certain essentials about writing for the screen. For instance, he wanted his film characters to have the same complexity as the characters in his novels. He'd packed the screenplay with way too much background information about his characters, you know, details about their past or about their family history, far more than the director could actually convey. And the kind of dialogue that worked so well in his fiction, well, it just didn't sound natural when it was spoken by movie characters.

As a matter of fact, it occurs to me that this might have something to do with why Fitzgerald's great novels make such bad movies. His language is so rich, his descriptions are so lyrical and so detailed, no director has been able to come up with a proper visual equivalent for his literary style.

But getting back to Fitzgerald in Hollywood. he decided that there must be some trick to writing a good movie screenplay, and he was going to figure it out. So he started watching popular films over and over, making lists of camera shots and other techniques the filmmakers employed. It would amaze you to see just how hard he worked in his craft. He was meticulous about it and all the effort he put into this.

Well, of course, he had trouble accepting it later, when his screenplays were revised or rejected, when that happened, he would claim that writing screenplays was an indignity, it was beneath someone with his talents. Yet, as much as Fitzgerald came to hate Hollywood, he ended up in debt and needed the income from screenwriting.

In total, he worked on six screenplays, but one after another, they were discarded or so heavily revised that he didn't feel like they were his anymore, and that's all he had to show for his years in Hollywood. Although that's not entirely true, he did get something out of it. He wrote some stories about a bumbling, washed up Hollywood screenwriter who can't do anything right. Actually, they're very funny. They put you in mind of the great early television comedies of the 1950s. Pity Fitzgerald didn't survive into the television era because he might have had a lot to offer.