Leaving The Last Tycoon

Abstract

Fitzgerald approached his third and final period as a Hollywood screenwriter in a thoroughly professional manner. He believed he could make a success of the job and was determined to do so. Older and wiser than in the past, he was ready and willing to commit himself unequivocally to whatever the work involved. There would be no question of his posing as the superior artist victimized by the crass commercialism of the Hollywood movie machine. In mid-1939, replying to a query from a young would-be writer about possible Hollywood opportunities, he made the point more or less directly:

there was a period when the eastern writer was suspect — he was ‘high hat,’ he did not know the medium, and wouldn’t take the trouble to learn it — … but I believe that time is gone. (L, 606)