America's best essayist is Joseph Epstein. We have a collection of books by Epstein, most of which are collections of his essays. When we find an Epstein essay on-line, especially a new one, we're ecstatic, especially if it's in an area that interests us (which they usually are). Commentary has published on-line a piece by Epstein about today's movie industry, an essay/review of David Thomson's The Whole Equation and Edward Jay Epstein's The Big Picture. Good stuff. Link. Excerpt:
“Product,” the old Hollywood moguls used to call the movies they made. Most of them were main-chance Jewish operator types who ran their studios on the factory model. They were aware that the right actors and actresses were crucial and were what people paid their money to see. Directors who knew how to get the best out of these actors were also important, as were producers with a talent for organization and for keeping all these temperamental characters in line. But without writers there was nothing; the game could not even begin until writers had put the ball in play.
And yet writers, as everyone knows, have always been thought the most dispensable element in the Hollywood equation. “You heard about the ambitious Polish starlet who, hoping to advance her movie career, slept with a screenwriter?” An old joke, but one that nicely describes the powerless state of the Hollywood writer. Powerless, perhaps, with good reason.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, broke, out of print, and out of luck, with a wife in an insane asylum and a drinking problem as big as the Ritz, came to Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1927 in the hope that its money might bail him out. It did not. In 1940, at the age of forty-four, he died of a heart attack, perhaps partially brought on by a broken heart, in an apartment on Hayworth Avenue off Sunset Boulevard.
From all reports, Fitzgerald was treated respectfully in Hollywood–and paid decently, too. But he could not give them quite what they wanted, and he never succeeded there. In The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald gives ample evidence not only that he thoroughly understood the Hollywood system as it then operated–the magnificence of it, and the nightmare, too–but why he himself failed in it.
