Book Review of Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hollywood.

Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. Aaron Latham. New York NY: The Viking Press, 1972. 306 pages


By Patrick Charsky


What would have become of Scott Fitzgerald had he lived beyond the age of forty-four? Would he have become a great success in Hollywood? Maybe he would have won the Nobel Prize like Hemingway? Or Faulkner? Perhaps he would have fallen further into despair and addiction? Those are the questions left unanswered by Fitzgerald’s early death and Aaron Latham’s book about Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood. Aaron Latham’s book is a sad, sad, tale of woe about Scott Fitzgerald’s struggles against the Studio System.

Latham is a famous Journalist who co-wrote the script for Urban Cowboy starring John Travolta. Latham has written extensively for numerous publications including The New York Times and Rolling Stone.

This review will analyze how Latham presents Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood; his struggles to get credits and fulfill his outsized ambition, his relationships with producers, and the emotional toll of struggling to find work in the midst of financial hardship and alcoholism. Fitzgerald would never reach the sublime heights he reached as a novelist in the 1920’s, he would struggle until his death to make a living as a writer.

Latham relates Fitzgerald’s woes with getting credits. It seems almost anything Scott did was an abysmal failure. It started with A Yank at Oxford which Scott did some work and came up with no credit. The only film Fitzgerald ever got credit on was Three Comrades. Latham goes into detail about Fitzgerald’s role as screenwriter. At first, Scott was left alone, it was only further into the writing process that producer Joe Mankiewicz added a co-writer much to the chagrin of Fitzgerald. Three Comrades was one of the best films of 1938; but, as the book makes clear, Fitzgerald hated it. He felt that Mankiewicz had ruined the film and slashed his screenplay to something totally different from what he had imagined. Fitzgerald then tried to write an original, titled Infidelity, but ran into censorship problems. Then, worst of all, he was assigned to write Madame Curie. A film he was not suited at all to write for. Fitzgerald was known for romance, and Madame Curie was heavily laden with science, a subject which Scott was not well informed.

In Latham’s telling it seemed that Fitzgerald never wrote anything that was deserving of his big, weekly salary. Fitzgerald arrived in Hollywood with a big applause, but when it came to writing films he was still too much of a novelist. And too infatuated with the idea of his own legend.

Fitzgerald felt he was a prophet of the Jazz Age. His reputation preceded him, only the fact that the World was in a Depression seemed to escape him. He was obsessed with his usual themes; strong willed men like Gatsby and women who were suffering and in need of a man for help, like Daisy Buchanan, or his own wife, Zelda. His themes of high living and high society fell on deaf ears in the 1930’s. Latham makes this abundantly clear. He portrays Scott as a drunkard in deep financial straits with a mentally ill wife.

Time and again, Latham shows Scott sober, working hard, downing Coke after Coke only to come up short and be faced with unemployment. In contrast to this portrait, Tom Dardis argues in his book, Some Time in the Sun, that Fitzgerald rebounded from the moribound early thirties to rise up again and recover his creativity which he thought he had lost. Dardis’s counter- argument does show some of the positives that Scott accomplished over the two years he worked as a contract writer. He paid off debts, he was mostly sober, and he was able to support his wife in an asylum and daughter at college. It is one of the major weaknesses of Latham’s book that he doesn’t reveal these facts, but rather focuses on and helps to perpetuate the myth of Fitzgerald as a failure in Hollywood. Maybe not a legend while he lived, which is what Fitzgerald wanted to be, he became an asterisk; a question always asked, what if he had lived?

Another aspect of Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood that Mr. Latham doesn’t mention is Fitzgerald’s failure to have any movie directors as allies. Mr Dardis makes a convincing argument in his Some Time in the Sun, that Fitzgerald might have profited more had he cultivated working relationships with directors rather than producers. Mr. Latham does a great job showing the fight Fitzgerald had with Joe Mankiewicz and his difficulty in pleasing another producer, Hunt Stromberg. Perhaps it was true that Fitzgerald was a “whiner.” It is also true that he made bad decisions.

Latham’s book shows Scott at his worst; a paranoid, guilt-ridden, alcoholic. Scott’s behavior was awkward and reckless; an un-funny song at a house party filled with celebrities, his drunken tirade against Nunally Johnson, and most damning of all his Winter Carnival catastrophe. And the ensuing guilt and shame about having been so bad. Latham shows Scott at his worst. In comparison, was he really that bad? So many writers in Fitzgerald’s era had drinking problems. Perhaps Fitzgerald’s behavior was inexcusable. Perhaps he was judged too harshly.

Latham presents the facts, some stories, but they are made to fit his arguments. Perhaps they are myth, perhaps reality, perhaps some of both. Tom Dardis goes a long way to discredit the myth built by Latham and Bud Schulberg. Dardis shows how both writers created fictions. Schulberg’s novel The Disenchanted is full of half truths and the ending is a total fabrication.

The truth was that Fitzgerald’s move to Hollywood was the best thing he did for himself. Dardis is right, Fitzgerald experienced a rebirth of his creative self. Even Latham shows that Scott thought his stock was rising shortly before his heart attack at Schwab’s and his eventual death. I think an apt comparison is with William Faulkner. Both had to endure the hardships of the Depression, but if Scott had lived, I think he would have experienced a rediscovery of his writing and a true appreciation of his creative genius.

Any fan of Fitzgerald’s novels, short stories, films made from his books, or his life would want to read this book. But I would also include a reading of Tom Dardis’s Some Time in the Sun. It presents a counterargument to the myth Latham’s book perpetuates. It is my opinion that Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood was not an absolute failure. The Last Tycoon shows Scott was able to write again. It shows he regained something he thought he had lost; his creativity. Had he lived would he have written another Gatsby? Or This Side of Paradise? Or perhaps a hit film, like The Last Time I Saw Paris? We will never know.