The NYT's Steve Chagollan discusses the F.Scott Fitzgerald film legacy:
But Fitzgerald's real Hollywood legacy was a larger-than-life persona that proved a fatal attraction for producers and studio chiefs. Although he died a faded star in 1940 at the age of 44, Fitzgerald had achieved great fame while still in the flush of his 20's. His booze-fueled escapades with his wife, Zelda, foreshadowed the restless youth appeal of Mick and Marianne, Kurt and Courtney. This modern-day rock-star aura was complemented by the rarefied worlds he conjured in his books, from Princeton University to Great Neck on Long Island, to the French Riviera, where the towns in "Tender Is the Night" sounded like jewels strung along the Côte d'Azure: Nice, Monte Carlo, Juan-les-Pins, Cap d'Antibes.
Fitzgerald even possessed matinee-idol looks: One producer insisted that Scott and Zelda play their fictional alter egos, Amory Blaine and Rosalind Connage, in a never-shot version of "This Side of Paradise." His "theatrically perfect features," as Mr. Schulberg described his Fitzgerald-like hero in his novel "The Disenchanted," prompted the writer to be screen-tested during his first trip to Hollywood in 1927, when he met the actress Lois Moran, the inspiration for Rosemary Hoyt in "Tender Is the Night."
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