Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (615 page)

I’m not satisfied with the opening and can’t believe now that Joe cared whether the airplane was blown up at the beginning or the end of the scene, or even liked it very much - but except for that I think we do agree on the main line even to the sequences.

But, Ted, when you blandly informed me yesterday that you were going to write the whole thing over yourself, kindly including my best scenes, I knew we’d have to have this out Whether the picture is in production in January or May there is no reason on God’s earth why we can’t finish this script in three to four weeks if we divide up the scenes and get together on the piecing together and technical revision. If you were called on this job in the capacity of complete rewriter then I’m getting deaf. I want to reconceive and rewrite my share of the weak scenes and I want your help but I am not going to spend hours of time and talent arguing with you as to whether I’ve chosen the best or second best speech of Lenz’s to adorn the dressing-up scene. I am not referring to key speeches which are discussable but the idea of sitting by while you dredge through the book again as if it were Shakespeare - well, I didn’t write four out of four best sellers or a hundred and fifty top-price short stories but of the mind of a temperamental child without taste or judgment.

This letter is sharp but a discussion might become more heated and less logical. Your job is to help me, not hinder me. Perhaps you’d let me know before we see Joe whether it is possible for us to get together on this.

This letter is an argument against arguments and certainly mustn’t lead to one. Like you, I want to work.

Scott

TO MRS HAROLD OBER

The
Garden of Allah
Hotel

Hollywood,
California

Christmas
, 1937

Dear Anne:

Thanks for your note. Scottie will be North again before school opens. As she is obviously destined to be a perpetual guest I do try to split her visits with such easily imposed-on yaps as the Finneys and Obers into reasonable bits lest the golden gooses cease to lay - wait a minute, this metaphor has gotten entirely out of hand. Anyhow all I can think of is for you and Harold to spend your old age with me - and even that won’t square things.

These letters or cards for Scottie come to hand - better hold them. I have high hopes of getting East before she goes back to school - if not I’ll go to her school in January. I love it here. It’s nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try about three years. The point is once you’ve got it - Screen Credit first, a Hit second, and the Academy Award third - you can count on it forever - like Laurence Stallings does - and know there’s one place you’ll be fed, without being asked to even wash the dishes. But till we get those three accolades we Hollywood boys keep trying.

That’s cynical but I’m not a bit cynical. I’m delighted with screen credit and really hopeful of a hit - the line-up is good, depending on whether or not one of our principals has to have an operation. I hope none of you need even an extraction.

Ever affectionately,

Scott Fitz —

P.S. I recognized the dogs individually in your Christmas card. I’m going to have my suite photographed with the mice in the hall for next Xmas. (I’m getting old and unfertile so will put this crack in my notebook.)

TO JOSEPH MANKIEWICZ

New York City

January
17, 1938

Dear Joe:

I read the third batch (to page 31) with mixed feelings. Competent it certainly is, and in many ways tighter-knit than before. But my own type of writing doesn’t survive being written over so thoroughly and there are certain pages out of which the rhythm has vanished. I know you don’t believe the Hollywood theory that the actors will somehow ‘play it into shape,’ but I think that sometimes you’ve changed without improving.

P. 32 The shortening is good.

P. 33 Tough but sentimental.’ Isn’t it rather elementary to have one character describe another? No audience heeds it unless it’s a false plant.

P. 33 Pat’s line, T would, etc.,’ isn’t good. The thing isn’t supposed to provoke a sneer at Alois. The pleasant amusement of the other is much more to our purpose. In the other she was natural and quick. Here she’s a kidder from Park Avenue. And Erich’s ‘We’re in for it, etc.,’ carries the joke to its death. I think those two lines about it in mid-page should be cut. Also the repeat on next page.

P. 36 Original form of ‘threw it away like an old shoe’ has humor and a reaction from Pat Why lose it? For the rest, I like your cuts here.

P. 37 The war remark from Pat is as a chestnunt to those who were in it - and meaningless to the younger people. In 8 years in Europe I found few people who talked that way. The war became rather like a dream and Pat’s speech is a false note.

P. 39 I thought she was worried about Bruer - not her T.B. If so, this paragraph (the second) is now misplaced.

P. 41 I liked Pat’s lie about being feverish. People never blame women for social lies. It makes her
more
attractive taking the trouble to let him down gently.

P. 42 Again, Pat’s speech beginning if all I had, etc.,’ isn’t as good as the original. People don’t begin all sentences with
and,
but,
for
and
if,
do they? They simply break a thought in mid- paragraph, and in both
Gatsby
and
Farewell to
Arms the dialogue tends that way. Sticking in conjunctions makes a
monotonous
smoothness.

The next scene is all much better but -

P.
46 Erich’s speech too long at beginning. Erich’s line about the bad smell spoils
her
line about spring smell.

P. 48 ‘Munchausen’ is trite. Erich’s speech - this repetition from first scene is distinctly self-pity.

I wired you about the flower scene. I remember when I wrote it, thinking whether it was a double love climax, and deciding it wasn’t. The best test is that on the first couple of readings of my script you didn’t
think so either.
It may not be George Pierce Baker but it’s right
instinctively
and I’m all for restoring it. I honestly don’t mind when a scene of mine is cut but I think this one is terribly missed.

P. 49 Word ‘gunman’ too American. Also ‘tried to strong-arm Riebling’ would be a less obvious plant P. 51 Roster’s tag not right. Suppose they both say, with different meanings, ‘You see?’

What I haven’t mentioned, I think is distinctly improved.

New York is lousy this time of year.

Best always,

Scott

TO JOSEPH MANKIEWICZ

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

January 20,
1938

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 has now become a sentimental girl from Brooklyn, and I guess all these years I’ve been kidding myself about being a good writer.

Most of the movement is gone - action that was unexpected and diverting is slowed down to a key that will disturb nobody - and now they can focus directly on Pat’s death, squirming slightly as they wait for the other picture on the program.

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
but utterly inexcusable because this time you
had
something and you have arbitrarily and carelessly tom it to pieces. To take out the manicurist and the balcony scene and then have space to put in that utter drool out of True Romances which Pat gets off on page 116 makes me think we don’t talk the same language. God and ‘cool lips,’ whatever they are, and lightning and elephantine play on words. The audience’s feeling will be ‘Oh, go on and die.’ If Ted had written that scene you’d laugh it out of the window.

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 life of what’s left of my lines and situations won’t save the picture.

Example number 3000 is taking out the piano scene between Pat and Koster and substituting garage hammering. Pat the girl who hangs around the garage!And the re-casting of lines - I feel somewhat
outraged.

Lenz and Bobby’s scene on page 62 isn’t even in the same category with my scene. It’s dull and solemn, and Koster on page “is as uninteresting a plodder as I’ve avoided in a long life.

What does scene 116 mean? I can just hear the boys relaxing from tension and giving a cheer.

And Pat on page 72 - ‘books and music - she’s going to teach him.’ My God, Joe, you must see what you’ve done. This isn’t Pat - it’s a graduate of PomonaCollege or one of more bespectacled ladies in Mrs Farrow’s department. Books and music! Think, man! Pat is a lady - a cultured European - a charming woman. And Bobby playing soldier. And Pat’s really re-fined talk about the flower garden. They do everything but play ring-around-a-rosie on their Staten Island honeymoon. Recognizable characters they simply are not, and cutting the worst lines here and there isn’t going to restore what you’ve destroyed. It’s all so inconsistent. I thought we’d decided long ago what we wanted Pat to be!

On page 74 we meet Mr Sheriff again, and they say just the cutest merriest things and keep each other in gales of girlish laughter.

On page 93 God begins to come into the script with a vengeance, but to
say in detail what I think of these lines would take a book.
The last pages that everyone liked begin to creak from 116 on, and when I finished there were tears in my eyes, but not for Pat - for Margaret Sullavan.

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 might 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.

Scott

TO EDDIE MANNIX AND SAM KATZ

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

Winter, 1938

Dear Sirs:

I have long finished my part in the making of
Three Comrades
but Mank — has told me what the exhibitors are saying about the ending and I can’t resist a last word. If they had pronounced on
Captains Courageous
at this stage, I feel they would have had Manuel the Portuguese live and go out West with the little boy and
Captains Courageous
could have stood that much better than Three
Comrades
can stand an essential change in its story. In writing over a hundred and fifty stories for George Lorimer, the great editor of The Saturday Evening Post, I found he made a sharp distinction between a sordid tragedy and a heroic tragedy - hating the former but accepting the latter as an essential and interesting part of life.

I think in Three
Comrades
we run the danger of having the wrong head go on the right body - a thing that confuses and depresses everyone except the ten-year-olds who are so confused anyhow that I can’t believe they make or break a picture. To every reviewer or teacher in America, the idea of the comrades going back into the fight in the spirit of ‘My head is bloody but unbowed’ is infinitely stronger and more cheerful than that they should be quitting - all the fine talk, the death of their friends and countrymen in vain. All right, they were suckers, but they were always that in one sense and if it was despicable what was the use of telling their story?

The public will feel this - they feel what they can’t express - otherwise we’d change our conception of Chinese palaces and French scientists to fit the conception of hillbillies who’ve never seen palaces or scientists. The public will be vaguely confused by the confusion in our mind - they’ll know that the beginning and end don’t fit together and when one is confused one rebels by kicking the thing altogether out of mind. Certainly this step of putting in the ‘new life’ thought will not please or fool anyone - it simply loses us the press and takes out of the picture the real rhythm of the ending which is:

The march of four people, living and dead, heroic and incon- querable, side by side back into the fight.

Very sincerely yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS EDWIN JARRETT

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

February 17,
1938

Dear Mrs Jarrett:

The play pleases me immensely. So faithful has been your following of my intentions that my only fear is that you have been too loyal. I hope you haven’t - I hope that a measure of the novel’s intention
can
be crammed into the two hours of the play. My thanks, hopes and wishes are entirely with you - it pleases me in a manner that the acting version of
The Great Gatsby
did not. And I want especially to congratulate you and Miss Oglebay on the multiple feats of ingenuity with which you’ve handled the difficult geography and chronology so that it has a unity which, God help me, I wasn’t able to give it.