F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, took on themes of Hollywood and the film industry, pointing out its glitz, glamour and tragedy in equal measure. In the 1930s, the film industry began a transition from the artistic experimentation of its early days to the greater commercialism of Hollywood; Fitzgerald’s novel explores this transition in very intriguing ways. Telling the story of Monroe Stahr, a character loosely based on MGM’s golden boy Irving Thalberg, Fitzgerald paints Hollywood and the film business as an incredibly complex and inscrutable place, with its own politics and a relentless desire to eat its unsuspecting visitors alive. The Love of the Last Tycoon depicts Hollywood as a place that values money over the pursuit of art, with only the savviest and self-sacrificing producers (like Monroe Stahr) able to overcome these boundaries to create films that are both good and profitable.
The Love of the Last Tycoon’s version of Hollywood is a topsy-turvy, funhouse mirror version of America and the way it is meant to work. Hollywood is vibrant and alive in a way the rest of America is implied to lack, with buildings full of secretaries, executives, actors and filmmakers all working tirelessly to make a million little pieces fit together in just the right way to create films. This is not without its own complications, as filmmaking is shown to be a rigorous process that requires incredible, careful precision to be usable. For example, when Monroe supervises a scene in a film featuring Claudette Colbert, he scraps an entire take because the camera was not centered. His sarcastic remark, “That’s just what we want, isn’t it? That’s just what people go to see – the top of a beautiful girl’s head,” solidifies Hollywood’s prioritizing of showing glitz and glamour with mechanistic precision (Fitzgerald 53). All elements have to come together absolutely perfectly to make a film work, Fitzgerald depicting Hollywood an industry full of perfectionists.
Because of this perfectionism, the industry places incredible pressure on filmmakers and producers alike to create films that are both incredibly compelling stories and financially viable in the national market. Hollywood is shown to have a life of its own, likened to the grunion that Monroe and Kathleen see on the beach: “They came in twos and threes and platoons and companies, relentlessly and exalted and scornful around the great bare feet of the intruders, as they had come before Sir Francis Drake had nailed his plaque to the boulder on the shore" (Fitzgerald 93). Just like these fish, people come to Hollywood endlessly hoping to expend their energy in the pursuit of fame, fortune and art. Sometimes, this manifests itself in the destruction of failed artists: Cecelia’s meeting with Schwartz on the plane shows her the effect that Hollywood’s rigorous expectations and pressures can have on film producers. For Schwartz, Hollywood is such a stressful place that it literally drives him to suicide.
Despite the cynicism of the shareholders and executives in Hollywood who pressure filmmakers to make commercially successful works, The Love of the Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald seems to still hold out hope and optimism for Hollywood as an industry. Cecilia, for example, holds Hollywood in high esteem, and begins the novel thinking dimly of the people who are dismissive of its artistic and financial merit: "You can take Hollywood for granted, like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand” (Fitzgerald 3). In this respect, Fitzgerald notes that the complexity and vision of Hollywood is a new and exciting frontier that cannot be truly understood by those who are deeply entrenched in the elitist worlds of literature and academia. From the start, Fitzgerald paints a positive picture of Hollywood as a place of opportunity, provided that people have the skills and understanding necessary to take it on and succeed.
Fitzgerald’s book points out that, because of this rigorous emphasis on perfection and marketability, Hollywood stories often showcase a lack of nuance or depth. This is exemplified by Monroe’s dismissal of complicated or dark stories in favor of the candy-coated films he believes bring success to the industry. Near the end of the novel, Monroe dismisses Wylie’s screenplay as being too dark and dull, highlighting his thesis for the quintessential Hollywood film:
"This is not the kind of story I want. The story we bought had shine and glow - it was a happy story. This is all full of doubt and hesitation. The hero and heroine stop loving each other over trifles - then they start up again over trifles. After the first sequence you don't care if she never sees him again or he her” (Fitzgerald 39).
This depiction of the Hollywood filmmaking process reveals one of the most important elements of The Love of the Last Tycoon – Hollywood as an inherently commercial place, valuing commerce over art. While Cecilia’s refrain at the beginning of the novel that elitists wrongly turn their nose up at Hollywood still feels earnest, Fitzgerald is not immune to understanding the commercial interests of Hollywood producers. Things must be profitable before they are a good story, and the back-room dealings and negotiations demonstrated in The Love of the Last Tycoon provide a stellar portrait of this version of Tinseltown.
Fitzgerald paints Hollywood as a business first and a breaking ground for artistic endeavors second, particularly in his depiction of Monroe Stahr as ‘businessman-hero.’ Stahr’s great ability is not in his artistic vision, but in his capacity to make a great number of moving pieces fit together in effective ways. This is not something that necessarily endears him to many people, except those who benefit financially from his acumen, but it is a character trait that Fitzgerald treats very seriously. That being said, Fitzgerald has no illusions about the mythic nature of Hollywood, which he sees as fading; in the world of the novel, this transition from art to commerce is just beginning, and the ruthless business ethic that Monroe thrives in is slowly but surely becoming the norm in the film industry in this novel.
Much of the novel coincides with Fitzgerald’s own attempts to break into Hollywood in the 1930s, leading to a portrait of Hollywood and the film industry that is at once full of awe and deeply cynical. In his character of Monroe Stahr, Fitzgerald provides a physically weak, but very clever, protagonist whose ability to get pictures made contrasts deeply with his own fragility. However, apart from his incredible drive to succeed, there are few flaws provided to the character. Monroe is a self-made man, an employer to many, managing virtually every detail in his film studio despite not having much education. This depiction paints Monroe as the idealized Hollywood producer - an arbiter of Fitzgerald’s positive, but complicated, view of Hollywood. Characters remark on the uncanny ability of Hollywood producers like Monroe to juggle all of the elements involved in film production: "Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads" (Fitzgerald 3). Unlike the vast majority of Hollywood executives and business people depicted in the novel, Monroe is shown to be a golden boy, a man who can get things done in a rare but incredibly profitable way.
However, Monroe is not without faults, as he is so wrapped up in his work on films that it affects his personal life. Monroe’s own zeal to complete pictures often takes a tremendous physical toll on him, as he is constantly tired. However, he seems to love this, as he chases the rush of his work in Hollywood: “Fatigue was a drug as well as a poison, and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from working lightheaded with weariness” (Fitzgerald 60). Stahr survives the pressures of Hollywood in a way that Schwartz was unable to; in contrasting the two characters, Fitzgerald seems to paint a singular picture of Hollywood film production as something that only the best can survive. In that context, Schwartz’s suicide is not an indictment of Hollywood’s incredibly stressful lifestyle, but an indictment of Schwartz for not being as strong and savvy as Monroe Stahr.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hollywood world in The Love of the Last Tycoon is incredibly complicated and rife with unique contradictions. His protagonist, Monroe Stahr, is at once a perfect golden boy who can achieve anything and a frail ball of stress and anxiety that allows his film producing career to threaten his destruction. The process of filmmaking is shown to be a lengthy process of negotiations, stroking of egos, and juggling of millions of elements that only the few can truly handle. The pressures and politics of the industry are great, but not insurmountable; however, commercialism is king in the world of film, as works of art are treated as products first and foremost. With these elements and more, Fitzgerald shows a lachrymose but sympathetic portrayal of Hollywood in The Love of the Last Tycoon, understanding its complications without condemning it as a failed art form.
Works Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Love of the Last Tycoon. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941.
