[0.1] Abstract - In Tender Is The Night, Fitzgerald wrote the screenplay commentary about Hollywood that Hollywood itself would never have let him write.
[0.2] Keywords - film, performance, literary vs. cinematic techniques, montage, flashback, narratology, Hollywood
Glicklin, Harry. 2026. “Writing Like, About, and For Film: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Characterization of Actors and Directors and the Use of a Cinematic Writing Style in Tender Is the Night.” Wings of Fire. Volume 4, No. 1.
[1] Introduction
[1.1] F. Scott Fitzgerald was no stranger to Hollywood and the film industry. Beginning in 1927, the author had relationships with studios, such as being a screenplay writer for United Artists and MGM (Bruccoli ix). However, both of the screenplays that predated the publication of Tender Is the Night, “Lipstick” and “Red-Headed Woman,” were rejected; Fitzgerald, though seeking Hollywood success, struggled to break into the industry as a writer until 1938 (Bruccoli ix-xxi). Fitzgerald both feared and aspired to silver screen success. He had consciously become an “accomplice” in the effort by Hollywood to turn himself into an international “‘brand’ to attract new audiences” (Birch & Lena 111), and was consistently contracted by studios (Bruccoli ix-xi). At the same time, however, he made many, mostly unsuccessful, attempts to sell his screenplays, including one “intoxicated” effort to sell the movie rights to Tender Is the Night (Bruccoli xxii), a novel riddled with film motifs and references to the industry in style and content.
[1.2] The novel presents Fitzgerald’s “insider knowledge of the industry along with an outsider’s critique” (Hackman 64). In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald is both critical of the industry and in love with it because it’s viewed as the future of monetized storytelling, pushing aside the written medium to promote a visual one. “The potential for profits in Hollywood is both its greatest attraction and power as well as its greatest detriment. The ease with which money can be made is both to its discredit and part of its appeal for an artist like Fitzgerald,” (Hackman 80). Therefore, Tender Is the Night, a novel written and published during the adolescence of his film career, may be viewed as a “stick it to the man” ploy to present Fitzgerald’s script-writing skills in a medium that already brings him success: literature.
[1.3] F. Scott Fitzgerald’s use of film motifs and a cinematic writing style throughout Tender Is the Night suggests that the novel’s characters are fragmented as actors, performing a life that is not authentic to their internal desires but designed to accord with their societally-crafted destinies. Yet, Fitzgerald’s writing of the novel as if it were a screenplay connects to his intrinsic desire to become part of the film industry and find his footing in Hollywood.
[2] Literary Research
[2.1] Fitzgerald centers ideas of performance in the narrative of Tender Is the Night. The original protagonist in Book I, Rosemary Hoyt, is an actress by trade. She’s introduced as a personification of the film industry and Hollywood, as though she is always in a film herself. Her looks and glamour are seemingly more important to her characterization than identity factors like age and name (Hackman 73). Fitzgerald uses “camera-like techniques” in the novel to convey Rosemary “as both an actress and a fairly superficial attraction” (Hackman 81). Her characterization is that of an “innocent and as yet entirely plastic girl,” who is “introduced merely as a catalytic agent” (Chamberlain 96). She is the “flat image” (Hackman 72) of Hollywood who enters into a new world for the sake of causing it to explode.
[2.2] Rosemary is the obvious subject of the perception of Fitzgerald’s characters as exaggerated representations of artificiality (Bilton 50). She has a youthful, celebrity-like ability to be both naive and yet somehow bulletproof at the same time, hard like “plastic” (Chamberlain 96), while also see-through, which is to say, her fictionality or coding as a constant performer isn’t difficult to trace because of her surface-level assignment as “actress.” As John Chamberlain argues in his essay on Tender Is The Night: “Rosemary was evidently intended to be meaningless in herself, an unknown quantity projecting itself into a situation that merely required leverage, any leverage, to start its development to a predictable end” (Chamberlain 96). But Rosemary isn’t Fitzgerald’s most complex character by far. Rosemary’s narrative inclusion is for the sake of centering this simply fake “product and servant of the illusion-making industry of Hollywood” (Trachtenberg 181) as Fitzgerald himself was intended to be in his Hollywood infancy.
[2.3] Importantly, Rosemary’s protagonist status becomes lost as the novel progresses and shifts to Dick Diver. As critic Paul Hackman has argued: “[T]he drastic difference in style and tone between the respective descriptions of Rosemary and Dick encourages the reader to understand the depths of Dick’s life and mental development but to ‘see’ the surface of Rosemary Hoyt” (Hackman 73). Though Rosemary is the actress in the story, Dick is the actor, director, and all-around performer, and he derives serious joy and purpose from these roles: as Lee Whitehead has articulated it, Dick Diver “is the center of the group, the focal point of attention, drawing the group together, making it happy by ‘performing’ before it,” (Whitehead 165). As suggested, Dick’s performative tendencies are grounded in the appeal of attention. He doesn’t perform solely for his own pleasure, but as a means of interaction with others; Dick is a “social actor,” in competition with Rosemary, the screen actor (Irwin 112). Dick is an interpersonal actor, taking on “roles” that allow him varying relationships. To Nicole, his wife, he plays the role of husband and doctor. To Rosemary and his Nicole, he positions and characterizes himself as a father, “[a]nd it is clear that both Nicole and Rosemary attribute this role to him” (Hall 149). The roles Dick plays are constructed societally, through occupation or audience/interpersonal expectation, not just internally.
[2.4] Many scholars allude to the idea that Dick has a singular alter ego, a “character,” and that he moves between being his character and true self, rather than taking on multiple characters. His characterized self is one of “the charming, protective, essentially paternal figure” (Hall 148), and “the voice of morality” (Nowlin 71). There is a sense that the Dick Diver presented at face value is “only a role and not his true nature” (Hall 148), and that his “fatherly demeanor” to the women in his immediate life is “the mark of his unseducible character– [it] is but a sham” (Nowlin 71). This is supported, too, by the idea that some of his dialogic and monologic statements “seem scripted and rehearsed” (Birch & Lena 108). He is not, therefore, an improvisational actor, but a writer, actor, or director, and this holistic capability as a director/producer allows him to synchronously “realiz[e] his own idealistic character” (Trachtenberg 181). He can be both the critic of others’ performances and the performance himself.
[2.5] Dick’s characterization as a director is congruous with how he “always arranged his social events as if they were mini-dramas” (Irwin 112). His events have “a cinematic aura with Dick as movie director presenting one of his films to a spellbound audience gathered inside a picture palace” (Birch & Lena 109). It is this audience, ultimately, that Dick seems to be concerned with when performing. The fatality and deterioration of Dick’s social life is, then, what takes away from his ability to perform. “He is an actor losing his audience, and his desperate need, for dignity and for a coherent identity, is to recapture enough attention to the self-created illusion of himself to permit an orderly and fairly decent exit,” (Trachtenberg 184). Dick may be aware of his role as the actor, and is trying to uphold his character and the roles he fulfills for others as a means of publicizing his self worth and purpose. Rosemary does this too: “She is an actress in life. She does not ‘respond.’ Her audience does so,” (Hall 148). She, like Dick, is beholden to the reaction from her audience to understand her position and interpersonal interactions. It’s less ‘what should I do,’ and more ‘what would the audience think of what I do?’
[2.6] The ideas of performance in Tender Is the Night serve to reflect Fitzgerald’s own experiences in Hollywood. Fitzgerald was conscious of his position as a promising writer meant to boost the industry, just as Dick is conscious of his acting and directing, and that Dick’s demise “might be interpreted as a self-satiric commentary on the hangover [Fitzgerald] suffered from being overconfident that associating with bad company (Hollywood) would not damage his literary reputation” (Birch & Lena 111). Moreover, Dick is the personification of exclusivity and “class distinction” in Hollywood (Irwin 110), in line with Fitzgerald’s in-tandem acceptance and rejection in the film industry.
[2.7] Fitzgerald didn’t intend to be liked by everyone, but he wanted to be desirable to the right people, those with social and cultural power. As Michael Nowlin puts it, “F. Scott Fitzgerald saw popular culture not as a vehicle for identifying with ‘everybody,’ but rather as an institution through which he might realize his dream of being one of the chosen” (Nowlin 60). It’s not that Fitzgerald was opposed to the exclusivity of Hollywood, but that he desperately wished he was part of that “in” group. It’s for that reason that Tender Is the Night is filled with screenplay or script-like techniques such as “[f]oreshadowing, flashbacks, and midplot summaries” (Cokal 86). These techniques evoke “film’s ability to preserve and replay the past” (Bilton 29), a playing with time already congruous with Fitzgerald’s writing. For the author, “film is both the means of arresting time and a sign planted to mark its passing” (Bilton 32). Therefore, Fitzgerald’s toying with chronology and time in the novel is synonymous with those instances in film. Alan Bilton, in an essay about Fitzgerald’s film techniques, notes that, “[T]he jump cuts and ellipses between locations, the polished artificiality of the dialogue and relentless physical action” (Bilton 42) in Tender is the Night further film-ifies the text as though a script. Ultimately, Bilton argues that “a consideration of the essential nature of the cinematic experience lies at the very heart of Fitzgerald's thematic concerns” (Bilton 29) in Tender Is the Night.
[2.8] The author, moreover, writes the novel with both “the sense that we are looking through a camera” (Hackman 73), and the sense that we are reading a screenplay, especially with his usage of color; as Paul Hackman argues, “The vibrant colors… perhaps bear a resemblance to the saturated hues of the recently popularized Technicolor process being used in many Hollywood films” (Hackman 73). Alternatively, some of the cinematic landscapes are more akin to “black-and-white figures projected on a movie screen” (Birch & Lena 116). Fitzgerald tactfully switches between descriptions in black and white and vivid color, likened to films that relate to Hollywood’s history (black and white) and future (Technicolor). As Alan Bilton argues, “Fitzgerald’s prose [in Tender is the Night] keeps trying to turn moving pictures back into still photographs,” tying back to Fitzgerald’s general distaste and fear of the progression of the film as a medium that needs to be “rescued” (Bilton 44).
[2.9] Therefore, Fitzgerald holds two truths at once: he is both enamored by the film industry and the prospect of his own entrance into the medium and also disgusted by the lack of depth in its product and those who make it. Therefore, he writes Tender Is the Night in a cinematic style that is both a theoretical pitch deck for his screenwriter career and a plea to audiences about the impending takeover of moving pictures over literature. His characters are presented as performers to uplift the inherent fakeness of Hollywood, which simultaneously serves to entertain.
[3] Tender Is the Night Textual Analysis
[3.1] Much of the connection between Tender Is the Night and film is exemplified by the novel’s introduction/exposition. Fitzgerald is painting the picture of the scenery much like that of a film set: “On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach” (Fitzgerald 1934, 3). The visual is laid out quite explicitly as though a blueprint, noting where this scene takes place and that location in proximity to other notable landmarks. What makes the novel’s references related specifically to film and not theater is Fitzgerald’s ability to write with multiple psychic distances, and look at scenes from multiple perspectives, not just at a metaphorical stage from the mezzanine. The next paragraph of the novel continues that sentiment, specifically pointing out the multitude of vivid colors, comparable to the ideas of the “technicolor” film (Hackman 73), stating, “In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy… a man came down the beach in a blue bathrobe” (Fitzgerald 1934, 3). These, notably, aren’t the gray-mixed colors used to describe other settings– “a narrow and tubular court of the chateau, gray as rats…” (Fitzgerald 1934, 260), but true hues. He’s created this opening shot as lively, colorful, and cinematic. It is beautiful and vivid, a “rose-colored” glasses view of the future of film.
[3.2] This scene is also the introduction of Rosemary Hoyt, the novel’s protagonist, and an actress who can be quickly linked to being inside of a film, as she has just gotten back from the Hollywood success of her movie Daddy’s Girl. Before Fitzgerald even clues the readers into her name, she’s written as someone “who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame… her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright… the color of her cheeks was real…” (Fitzgerald 1934, 3-4). It’s “lights up” on Rosemary– exactly what her palms, cheeks, hair, and eyes look like, how they’re meant to be interpreted, “like an armorial shield,” or as “magic,” and all of this before the statement that “she was almost eighteen, nearly complete” (Fitzgerald 1934, 4). Moreover, it isn’t until a few paragraphs later, after listing her physical attributes, her relationship with her mother, how “she carried herself like a ballet-dancer,” and pieces of dialogue that we finally get her name (Fitzgerald 1934, 4). She is the subject of the film, able to be envisioned or cast before she is actualized as human enough to be named. What she brings to the scene, at this moment, is more valuable to the narrative than an understanding of who she is, previously unable to be considered as anything but her mother’s daughter, or “the girl” (Fitzgerald 1934, 4).
[3.3] Rosemary’s introduction is quite different from Dick’s formal one at the beginning of Book II. Since Book II occurs chronologically before Book I as a flashback, and versions of the novel have been made with the two reordered, the beginning of Book II may be analyzed similarly as a beginning of the novel. This Book begins, “In the spring of 1917 when Doctor Richard Diver first arrived in Zurich, he was twenty-six years old, a fine age for a man… who was already too valuable, too much of a capital investment to be shot off in a gun” (Fitzgerald 1934, 115). This writing is less like Rosemary’s “opening shot” and more like the character guide of a screenplay– name, age, quick description, and nothing else; it’s just the background information necessary to begin the action. It is only after Dick’s introduction that “Dick Diver’s moment now began,” followed by a chapter demarcation, and the subsequent writing begins with a more scenic exposition of “a damp April day” (Fitzgerald 1934, 118). In addition to the statement of year and city at the beginning, he is introduced here as “Doctor Richard Diver,” before immediately switching back to his nickname of “Dick” (Fitzgerald 1934, 115). Those three words provide his first and last name, and a suggestion of his vocation as a doctor, whereas it isn’t until the end of the first chapter that Rosemary’s surname is earned and her vocation inferred by the line “we want to know why you’re not back in America making another marvellous moving picture” (Fitzgerald 1934, 7). The comparison between Rosemary and Dick can be understood as qualifying the most important “role” they play, at least in their narrative infancy– Rosemary is someone’s daughter, and Dick is a doctor. The text shows Rosemary in the process of being characterized, still developing, and Dick as finished or “ready for his closeup.”
[3.4] Not to be understated is Fitzgerald’s use of two film techniques in Book II, the flashback and the montage (Cokal 86). The Book is, in its entirety, a flashback, jumping from 1925 in Book I back to 1917 to give the situational history and infancy, as well as the important backstory of Dick and Nicole’s relationship that speaks to where Book I left off. This flashback allows for the reintroduction of characters, somewhat detached from their actions in Book I, giving readers the opportunity to hold the power of narrative memory over them– the dramatic irony that the readers know what’s coming before the characters do, since it was just read a few pages prior.
[3.5] One of the text’s largest montages is written toward the middle of Book II. Fitzgerald leaves a line gap on the page (Fitzgerald 1934, 159), signifying that a shift in position or point of view is occurring between the main narrative, which centers Dick, and this section, which presents Nicole’s consciousness. Fitzgerald makes numerous stylistic choices in this four-page montage (Bilton 42). The first is his lack of quotation marks that would typically differentiate a character’s dialogue from the narrator’s voice. Rather, they are written without signifiers on the page, and instead surrounded by many sets of ellipses. The montage importantly comes after Nicole’s mental diagnosis is revealed as a “Divided Personality” (Fitzgerald 1934, 128). So, the montage may be understood as an overlapping series of versions of Nicole’s mono- or dialogic statements flooding her brain, that on screen could be edited as literally stacked on top of each other to depict this mental descent that even on the page increases in speed and chaos. The ellipses also serve to cut out the inclusion of any other voices, emphasizing Nicole’s isolation. Then at the end of the montage, a new chapter is started in the Book, beginning, again, with “Doctor Richard Diver” (Fitzgerald 1934, 162), as though he is continually, cyclically reintroduced– his “take two.”
[3.6] Another of the primary techniques woven throughout the novel is Fitzgerald’s calling back to a repeated quote, which occurs seven times: “—Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?,” followed three of those times by “—Please do it’s too light in here” (Fitzgerald 1934, 88, 89, 167). The curtain is a symbol of the performative nature of these scenes. In its totality, the line is used as a masking of Collis Clay’s sexual acts with Rosemary, with the curtain being able to shield their relationship from the variety of audiences, including Nicole, Dick, and even the reader. “It’s too light in here,” too, relates to the concept of the spotlight that is consistently on Rosemary, yet in these moments causes her discomfort. She is crafted as the center of attention by her introduction and fame in the novel, something she is not necessarily ashamed of, but follows her as though a parasite; she is always being watched. When the curtain is up, the characters are performing versions of themselves, and when the curtain is down, they are somewhat free from the constraints of their constructed alter egos. Dick caught wind of the phrase during its first utterance and obsesses over it throughout the novel. When Dick knows that what he’s looking to do with Rosemary is wrong, as it would be disloyal to his relationship with Nicole, he recalls the line as a metaphor to take her out of the spotlight, to “close the curtain” on their performances and strip them down, literally, to their truest form. Fitzgerald’s use of the em-dash here signals both the phrase’s repetition and its extraction from the play’s main narrative; these are lines that the characters repeat verbatim– in his head– as though scripted.
[3.7] “Flashing back,” the beginning of Book I is also where Fitzgerald first incorporates the idea of a film within the novel, or a story-within-a-story, which Mrs. McKisco in Tender Is the Night refers to as “‘the plot’” (Fitzgerald 1934, 7). “The plot,” it appears, encompasses the sequence of a summer in the French Riviera, such that if one were to “‘stay all summer,’” they could “‘watch the plot unfold’” (Fitzgerald 1934, 8). The concept of plot alludes to the idea that the sequences of that summer, like Dick’s introduction, are cyclical. It’s something that begins in June and by the end of the season reaches its conclusion. It’s as if the plot, which I’ll move to call “the film,” repeats yearly; every summer the scene starts over “from the top,” and the characters have little memory of the events of its previous occurrence, at least not enough to make a significant change. The characters, too, are not very conscious of what the plot is and who is involved in it. It serves as a form of social exclusion– everyone knows when they’re not in the plot, but are at the same time unsure of who is. “‘[W]e don’t know… We’re not in it. We’re the gallery’” (Fitzgerald 1934, 8). The “plot” being discussed here likely refers to the actions of Dick and Nicole Diver, as presented just before the McKisco conversation:
[3.8] Beyond her was a fine man in a jockey cap and red-striped tights… After a while she realized that the man in the jockey cap was giving a quiet little performance for this group; he moved gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held in suspension by his grave face…Even those who, like herself, were too far away to hear, sent out antennæ of attention until the only person on the beach not caught up in it was the young woman with the string of pearls. (Fitzgerald 1934, 6)
[3.9] The man in the jockey cap is Dick, performing an “esoteric burlesque”– an imitation or parody with the intent of reception as comedy, meant only to be understood by a certain in-group audience. The young woman with the string of pearls is Nicole, who is the only one absent or uninvolved in the performance; she consistently exists outside of Dick’s fantasy. The concept of an esoteric burlesque, an exaggeration of character only recognizable by some, can be identified throughout the novel as well, relating to the characters’ performances in interpersonal/everyday interactions. For example, based on who he perceives is watching, Dick plays the role of both “father” and “lover” to Nicole and Rosemary. On her birthday, as Rosemary is confessing her love for Dick, he begins to say “‘When you smile’” before he is abruptly paused by Fitzgerald’s signature em-dash (Fitzgerald 1934, 64). At this moment, Fitzgerald narrates, Dick “recovered his paternal attitude,” the role of moral advisor he upholds in his characterized form, “perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity.” He then attempts to conclude with a rather endearing, fatherly statement of “‘I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth’” (Fitzgerald 1934, 64). This is not a real thought from Dick, but rather what he would say if talking to his daughter; it seems like a scripted, cliche line used to deflect his initial sentiment. Dick takes on the paternal character since his role as Rosemary’s lover is one that Nicole is already skeptical of and wouldn’t be hidden by esotericism. Nicole is clued in again to the idea of Dick as an actor, even in their intimate relationship, when receiving a letter from one of his previous lovers, written with the idea that Nicole could “learn what her husband was ‘really like’” (Fitzgerald 1934, 187). Though he attempts to dispute the letter, Nicole is clear in her disbelief in the somewhat perfect character Dick attempts to inhabit; she sees right through him like plastic (Chamberlain 96).
[3.10] The entire novel is constructed in episodes, such as the “man in the jockey cap” scene, the duel between Albert McKisco and Tommy Barban with its “‘One—two—three [action]!’” from Abe (Fitzgerald 1934, 49), and Dick’s parties, which he orchestrates as though a director. As Rosemary watches one of the parties, characters’ entrances are formulaic as though planned and written into the novel as stage directions: “Then came Dick, with his arms full of the slack he had taken up from others, deeply merged in his own party. Then her mother, forever perfect. Then Barban talking to her mother with an urbane fluency that made Rosemary like him again. Then Nicole…” (Fitzgerald 1934, 33). Rosemary is watching a processional of carefully-calculated entrances, as if being cued in by a director following a screenplay precisely.
[3.11] The parties also continue the idea of social exclusion or hierarchy (Irwin 110); “[T]o be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while,” or invited to one of his parties, “was a remarkable experience” (Fitzgerald 1934, 27). The passage continues, “So long as they [the partygoers] subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all-inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done” (Fitzgerald 1934, 28). Being brought into his fantasy, his plot, or the “film” that Dick is at the helm of is a status symbol. However, the second someone in his inner circle disrupts the social order he created, they are outcast from it. A connection can be made here to Fitzgerald’s own experience in Hollywood. Dick may be written as representing the film executives that somewhat abjected him by not accepting his screenplays–he was contracted as a writer, yet not allowed to see his projects come to fruition and forced to effectively start over (Bruccoli ix-xi). Dick, and by extension Hollywood, care a lot about their people until something breaks loose or falls short, such as a less-than-perfect screenplay submission.
[3.12] Fitzgerald’s style in the novel is not just cinematic as though a screenplay, but as though he’s pitching that screenplay to an executive, hoping for it to be successful in the very film industry he critiques. The novel is aware of its own movements that might be distracting from the main narrative, so Fitzgerald brings the audience back with lines such as “To resume Rosemary’s point of view it should be said that…” (Fitzgerald 1934, 28), or even “You know how conversations are in cars late at night…” (Fitzgerald 1934, 43). He is asking the theoretical Hollywood-executive audience to relate to the situations, drawing them into his story by centering their wide appeal, hoping to provide explanation enough to be welcomed into the business.
[4] Conclusion & Application
[4.1] Tender Is the Night is written almost as a film, but with the dialogic moments and scenic directions condensed together in a more traditional narrative. The novel, then, has two intended audiences: a Hollywood executive who would finally recognize Fitzgerald’s screenplay abilities, and his literary audience, to whom he presents a warning against the film industry’s inauthentic shallowness. The Hollywood executive would recognize the cinematic writing style that includes in-depth scenic exposition, character descriptions, and blocking, while the more general readership would be invited to appreciate the two-sidedness of the characters’ real and performed personas.
[4.2] Fitzgerald's construction of personas, or the idea of characters as actors, was prevalent also in The Great Gatsby, especially with the character of James Gatz/Jay Gatsby. He’s written as a fantastical, somewhat fictionally-crafted character that is different from his “true self,” as Fitzgerald would call it in Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald 1934, 292). To compare Gatsby to Dick, the pair orchestrated parties and gatherings, both serving as directors of their own manufactured lives and creating social exclusivity based on who they wanted to “act” in the events. However, The Great Gatsby predates this novel. Tender Is the Night was Fitzgerald’s last official literary publication, followed only by the posthumously-completed manuscript of The Last Tycoon in 1941, based on film executive and Fitzgerald’s close personal friend Irving Thalberg (Bruccoli xxii; Donaldson 208-9).
[4.3] Fitzgerald also wrote and completed Three Comrades (1937), his only screenplay credit, a few years later, though he assisted on the production of other screenplays and films throughout the remainder of his life, continuing his work with MGM, Universal, and Twentieth Century-Fox (Bruccoli ix-xi). Three Comrades, though crafted by Fitzgerald, was edited and finalized by Joe Mankiewicz, much to his dismay. Donaldson explains that Fitzgerald thought that “Mankiewicz had removed ‘all shadows and rhythm,’” giving it a “polishing” that served to remove the style that gave Fitzgerald’s novels their esteem (Donaldson 206). His rejections, therefore, may be attributed to the depth of prose Fitzgerald sought to create in his writing and the lack of depth that was of interest to the film industry; a contrast exposed in Tender Is the Night.
[4.4] Fitzgerald persisted in serving both of his passions. He ultimately succeeded in his quest to become involved in the film industry and also went on to write a novel about his experiences and relationships while working there. But the film industry ultimately broke the authorial Fitzgerald. His one accepted screenplay was modified to be, frankly, less “Fitzgerald-y,” which further promotes Tender Is the Night as a screenplay in the form that still allows Fitzgerald to shine.
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Bruccoli, Matthew J. 1993. The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Whitehead, Lee M. 1969. “Tender Is the Night and George Herbert Mead: an ‘Actor’s Tragedy.’”
Tender Is the Night: Essays in Criticism, edited by Marvin J. LaHood, IN: Indiana University Press: 165-178.