I just read the six-page article in the November 16th, 2009, New Yorker by Arthur Krystal titled Slow Fade: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. Reading about the famous American author who took the literary world by storm with The Great Gatsby and other stories, only to find himself at the bottom of the food chain in Hollywood brought to my mind images of Barton Fink (which touched on Faulkner’s Hollywood experience). It’s recommended reading for TCM fans and I’ll further whet their appetite by providing the following quiz based on what I’ve learned from reading Krystal’s piece. Answers will appear at bottom.

Before we begin this ten-question quiz, here are a couple choice quotes from Fitzgerald to get you into the groove:

“I am now considered a success in Hollywood because something which I did not write is going on under my name, and something which I did write has been quietly buried without any fuss or row – not even a squeak from me. The change from regarding this as a potential art to looking at it as a cynical business has begun. But I still think that some time during my stay out here I will be able to get something of my own on the screen that I can ask my friends to see.”

Or, short and sweet (or rather bitter) here’s a message Fitzgerald sent to his agent, Harold Ober, written in 1935 and in regards to Hollywood:  “I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred.” Five years later in 1940 would see scant improvement on Fitzgerald’s assessment of the area, writing to a friend that “Isn’t Hollywood a dump, in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.” And on that cheery note, let’s go on to the quiz!

1) In 1937, Fitzgerald was living in a bungalow on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood called:

A) The Garden of Allah. B) The Hollywood Hawaiian C) The L.A. Overlook D) The Banana Bungalow.

2) Name the other literary figures that lived there as well:

A) Dorothy Parker. B) Robert Benchley C) S.J. Perelman. D) Ogden Nash. E) All the above.

3) Fitzgerald lasted 18 months at M-G-M, during which time he:

A) “… drank Coca-Cola from 8am – 4pm in a Culver City writer’s building.” B) “…made contributions in script dialogue to The Life of Emile Zola and Captains Courageous.” C) “…worked on five scripts, wrote another one more or less from scratch, and generated a pile of notes and memos.” D) “…worked on projects that would earn him three screen credits, one of which was a shared billing.”

4) Fitzgerald’s output at M-G-M resulted in an archive of “around two thousand pages, some in pencilled longhand.” They were salvaged by:

A) Billy Wilder. B) Martin Kraegel. C) Anita Loos. D) Irving Thalberg.

5) Fitzgeral’s M-G-M output was sold for $475,00.00 to the University of South Carolina, with the proceeds going to:

A) M-G-M. B) Turner Broadcasting System. C) Time Warner. D) The Fitzgerald Estate.

6) Which of these other famous literary luminaries also gave Hollywood a shot?

A) William Faulkner. B) Anthony Powell. C) P.G. Wodehose. D) Aldous Huxley. E) Raymond Chandler. F) All the above.

7) True or False:

Fitzgerald “commanded between three thousand dollars for a short story as late as 1930 (and) was forgotten by the reading public six years later; in 1936, his total book royalties amounted to just over eighty dollars.”

8) Speaking of money, when M-G-M hired Fitzgerald for his first six month contract, what do you suppose he was earning per week? (And, remember, this was the late 1930′s.)

A) $200 B) $500 C) $1,000 D) $5,000 E) $10,000

9) To put things in financial perspective, how much was contemporary script-writer Josh Friedman paid to do a re-write on Sahara, a film starring Matthew McConaughey that was released in 2005?

A) $20,000 B) $50,000 C) $100,000 D) $250,000 E) Half a million dollars.

10) After leaving M-G-M, Fitzgerald teamed up with Budd Schulberg to work on a collegiate romance set in Dartmouth but, really, all they did was drink up a storm before being fired from the project. How did Fitzgerald top off this experience in the spring of 1939?

A) Drink more. B) Fight with his lover, the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. C) Take a chaotic trip to Cuba with his wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. D) Spend a week on the David Niven film Raffles. E) All of the above.

Answers:

1) The Garden of Allah. 2) Yup, it was like an L.A. re-union of the Algonquin Table – or “all of the above.” 3) “A” would have, technically, been correct – Fitzgerald didn’t just drink a lot of Coca-Cola, he also “carefully arranged the empties around the room.” But he wasn’t really a morning person and his eight-hour day was from 10am – 6pm, thus leaving “C” as the correct answer. Also: while he did not work on either of the two films mentioned, it should be noted that he “was lent out to David O. Selznick for a polish on Gone With the Wind in 1939.” Furthermore: “Fitzgerald began trying to write for the movies as early as 1922, and yet, for all his efforts, he earned exactly one screen credit: a shared billing on Three Comrades.” 4) Yay for Kraegel! He was an employee at M-G-M who sat on these documents for three decades and thus saved them for posterity. 5) The  answer is “Time Warner, which had bought Turner Broadcasting System in 1996, which, in turn, had owned M-G-M’s film library since 1986.” 6) All the above – and more. 7) True. 8) $1,000 a week. Today that would be about $15,000 a week. 9) Friedman was awarded a half million dollars for doing nips and tucks on Sahara – and Clive Cussler, the author of the book, was none to happy about it either, further scrawling on the cover page that: “This dialogue is so trite it defies comment… This Josh Friedman should have his keyboard shoved up his anal canal.” Friedman was ultimately fired from the project and another screenwriter, John Richards, was hired for a rewrite to the tune of $700,000. Quite a few others ended up having a screenwriting credit on this particular mess – so quite the cash cow for many working writers. 10) All of the above, of course, and it should be added that during Fitzgerald’s trip to Cuba he also got “beaten up for trying to stop a cockfight.”