Syd Field Screenplay

- What Is a Screenplay?
"Suppose you're in your office. ... A pretty stenographer you've seen before comes into the room and you watch her. . . . She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on the table.... She has two dimes and a nickel—and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove. .. . Just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello—listens—and says deliberately into the phone, "I've never owned a pair of black gloves in my life." She hangs up ... and you glance around very suddenly and see another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes . . . ." "Go on," said Boxley smiling. "What happens?" "I don't know," said Stahr. "I was just makingpictures." —The Last Tycoon F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the summer of 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald, drinking far too much, deeply in debt, and drowning in the suffocating well of despair, moved to Hollywood seeking new beginnings, hoping to nin reinvent himself by writing for the movies. The author of The Ten Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, and the Las uncompleted The Last Tycoon,perhaps America's greatest pu, novelist, was, as one friend put it, seeking redemption.

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—SCREENPLAY—

During the two and a half years he spent in Hollywood, he took the craft of screenwriting "very seriously," says one noted Fitzgerald authority: "It's heartbreaking to see how much effort he put into it." Fitzgerald approached every screenplay as if it were a novel and often wrote longbackstories for each of the main characters before putting one word of dialogue down on paper. Despite all the preparation he put into each assignment, he was obsessed with finding the answer to a question that haunted him continuously: What makes a good screenplay? Billy Wilder once compared Fitzgerald to "a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect thepipes so the water could flow." Throughout his Hollywood years, he was always trying to find the "balance" between the words spoken and the pictures seen. During this time, he received only one screen credit, adapting the novel Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque (starring Robert Taylor and Margaret Sullavan), but Joseph L. Mankiewicz eventually rewrote his script. He worked on rewrites forseveral other movies, including a disastrous week on Gone With the Wind (he was forbidden to use any words that did not appear in Margaret Mitchell's novel), but after Three Comrades, all of his projects ended in failure. One, a script for Joan Crawford called Infidelity, was left uncompleted, canceled because it dealt with the theme of adultery. Fitzgerald died in 1941, working on his last, unfinishednovel, The
Last Tycoon.

He died believing himself to be a failure. I've always been intrigued by the journey of F. Scott Fitzgerald. What resonates with me the most is that he was constantly searching for the answer to what made a good screenplay. His overwhelming external circumstances—his wife Zelda's institutionalization, his unmanageable debts and lifestyle, his excessive drinking—all fedinto his insecurities about the craft of screenwriting. And make no mistake: Screenwriting is a craft, a craft that can be learned. Even though he worked excessively hard, and was disciplined and responsible, he failed to achieve the results he was so desperately striving for. Why?

— WHAT IS A SCREENPLAY?—

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I don't think there's any one answer. But reading his books and writings andletters from this period, it seems clear that he was never exactly sure what a screenplay was; he always wondered whether he was "doing it right," whether there were certain rules he had to follow in order to write a successful screenplay. When I was studying at the University of California, Berkeley, as an English lit major, I read the first and second editions of Tender Is the Night for one of...