"Poor Scott Fitzgerald," as Hemingway famously called him, wasn't poor at all, of course: Two of his novels are considered defining works of American literature; his three "Crack-up" essays, originally published in Esquire, are harrowing models of artistic introspection; and many of his stories are rightly considered milestones in the evolution of American short fiction.

But during his life, and in the years since his death in 1940, Hollywood has pretty much remained the unreachable green light across the water. Before "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," based on an early story and opening this week, there have been other adaptations of Fitzgerald works, and a couple have done moderately well at the box office. But with one all-but-forgotten exception - Joan Micklin Silver's 1976 TV adaptation of "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" - Hollywood has yet to figure out how to make the words of one of America's greatest writers work onscreen.

Looking back on his life and how much his career was driven by his conflicted feelings about fame and celebrity, it was almost inevitable that Fitzgerald would find his way to Hollywood at some point. That's where he died, on the morning of Dec. 21, 1940, in the apartment he shared with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, but it's also where he lived again after the commercial failure of his masterpiece, "Tender Is the Night," and the hospitalization of his troubled wife/muse/nemesis, Zelda. He'd been to Hollywood before, in the '20s, but at that time he was still hopeful about his literary career. Actually, he was always hopeful about it, but by the '30s, making money was even more important, not only to pay Zelda's medical costs but also to pay for the boarding school of his daughter, Scotty.

Like fellow writer Nathanael West (who was killed in a car crash a day after Fitzgerald's death), Fitzgerald was "on" to Hollywood, but that didn't prevent him from being seduced by it as well. That he was still a name in the book world and his stories were still appearing in publications such as the Saturday Evening Post at first made him a commodity in Hollywood. But, like other novelists sucked into the then-thriving studio system, Fitzgerald found it hard to adapt to the collaborative method of writing screenplays - especially when he didn't even know that the studios often had other writers working on the same films at the same time. Fitzgerald reported to work at MGM, holed up in the writers' building and drank bottle after bottle of Coca-Cola, lining the empties around the room as he tried in vain to adapt to the system.


Fitzgerald worked on a number of films but received only a single screenwriting credit, for the Franchot Tone-Robert Taylor vehicle "Three Comrades" in 1938, the story of three young German soldiers after World War I. MGM, worrying that Fitzgerald's script was too political and would offend conservatives, watered it down. It didn't matter: The fact that it portrayed the young Germans sympathetically didn't click with film audiences at a time when Hitler setting his sights on Europe and the United States was concerned about being drawn into another world war.

Among his other uncredited work ("Red-Headed Woman," "The Women," "Honeymoon in Bali"), his contribution is perhaps most evident in the Robert Taylor film "A Yank at Oxford," for which he wrote the original treatment.

Otherwise, his most famous film work was "Winter Carnival" (1939), only because he went to New Hampshire for location shots at Dartmouth, got roaring drunk, made a mess of things and was unceremoniously fired from the film. A co-writer on the project, a kid named Budd Schulberg, the son of the former head of Paramount, didn't know that Fitzgerald was an alcoholic until it was too late to stop him. The incident became the basis for Schulberg's novel "The Disenchanted," published in 1950, and did much to add to the popular but overly simplistic notion that Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was a tragic, broken figure by the time he moved West.

Although he never really gave up trying to make a go of writing for the movies, Fitzgerald had to make a living somehow. Until he began work on his final project, the unfinished novel he called "The Love of the Last Tycoon," Fitzgerald turned to writing stories for magazines. He wasn't the name he was in the old days and often had to beg magazine editors to publish his work, but he kept on writing. And since he was in Hollywood and observing the gold heart of the American dream machine churning away, it was only natural for Fitzgerald to use that experience as the basis for a series of stories that became known as the Pat Hobby stories. Today, these tales of a hack screenwriter trying to find artistic integrity in a business where integrity is measured only in dollars are considered to be among Fitzgerald's finest work. At the time, they were primarily a way to pay the bills, but that isn't to suggest that Fitzgerald just tossed them off.

The Pat Hobby stories, and the correctly assembled "Love of the Last Tycoon" (as opposed to the first posthumous version titled "The Last Tycoon" and misassembled by Edmund Wilson), are not only valued for the truths, ugly and otherwise, they tell about Hollywood but also as evidence that Fitzgerald's talent was still very much intact in his later years. Battling life had taken its toll, though. The glittering romanticism of his early fiction was permanently tarnished. But in its stead, Fitzgerald's personal and artistic understanding of what he called "the real dark night of the soul," of the frailty of hope and ambition, is made even more visible and undeniable in what was, after all, a grand finale to an extraordinary career.

Hollywood didn't get him when he was alive and, for the most part, they haven't gotten him since. But "poor Scott Fitzgerald"? No. Just poor Hollywood.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (PG-13) opens Thursday at Bay Area theaters.

Van Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor in 1954's "The Last Time I Saw Paris," based on "Babylon Revisited," by F. Scott Fitzgerald, right.

-- For more Fitzgerald adaptations, see Page E8.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood: A viewers' guide

Some previous adaptations of Fitzgerald works may be passable films, but as far as reflecting the complexity of the original material, most fall pretty short. Here's a checklist of some of the better-known adaptations:

"The Last Tycoon"

1976, starring Robert De Niro, written by Harold Pinter, directed by Elia Kazan. Scorecard: More of a travesty than even Edmund Wilson committed when he assembled the pieces of the unfinished novel as he wanted them to be, not as Fitzgerald intended them to be. De Niro is fine, but he's not Fitzgerald's Monroe Stahr. Fitzgerald based the character on Irving Thalberg, an MGM wunderkind who was able to see the literary potential of film. I like the climactic scene in the uncompleted house.

"Bernice Bobs Her Hair"

1976, written and directed for TV by Joan Micklin Silver, starring Shelley Duvall. Scorecard: The one time Fitzgerald's sensibility was correctly honored in a film or TV adaptation. The original story is the quintessential tale of the Jazz Age, about a shy young woman who decides to get with the times.

"The Great Gatsby"

1974, starring Robert Redford, Sam Waterston and Mia Farrow; directed by Jack Clayton; screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola. Scorecard: "Gatsby" should be the easier of the two Fitzgerald masterpieces to adapt, but no one ever gets it right, especially in this big, expensive production. Redford looked the part but never captured the haunted, hollow soul of the former Jay Gatz, Farrow wasn't Daisy even if you'd never read the book, and Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker was just sinful.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald and 'The Last of the Belles' "

1974, directed for TV by George Schaefer, written by James Costigan. Scorecard: If this TV biopic isn't terrible, you can thank whoever was smart enough to class up the film by casting Blythe Danner as Zelda to Richard Chamberlain's unspeakably bad Scott Fitzgerald. Danner is such a good actress that she makes the film watchable and gives some insight into Zelda's manic character.

"Tender Is the Night"

1962, starring Jason Robards and Jennifer Jones, directed by Henry King. Scorecard: The title and the names of the characters may be familiar to Fitzgerald readers, but the rest is pure Hollywood hokum. None of the psychological nuance of characterization that made the novel Fitzgerald's greatest work is evident in this film.

"The Last Time I Saw Paris"

1954, starring Elizabeth Taylor, directed by Richard Brooks. Scorecard: Based on Fitzgerald's story "Babylon Revisited," the film was turned into a tearjerker vehicle for Taylor with little relation to the original story. She's very beautiful in the film, but that's the only reason to see it.