By Gwen Ihnat@gwenemarie
Stewart O’Nan’s recent
well-received volume West Of Sunset offered a fictionalized look at F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s final years in Hollywood. Now that book is on track to become a
movie as Deadline Hollywood reports that director James Ponsoldt (The
Spectacular Now, Smashed) is optioning it to adapt and direct.
As the book describes,
Fitzgerald was in a bad place by the time he moved to Hollywood. After
garnering much praise for his three novels and short stories in the ’20s,
culminating with 1925’s The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald took nine years to write
his next novel, the less-well-received Tender Is The Night, published in 1934.
In 1937, he moved to Hollywood to try for a career in screenwriting and write
his final novel (the unfinished The Last Tycoon, now renamed with Fitzgerald’s
reported preferred title, The Love Of The Last Tycoon). By this point, his wife
Zelda had been committed to an insane asylum, he was running low on money, and
he was in the final stages of his devastating alcoholism. O’Nan’s book offers
appearances from other writers in Fitzgerald’s era who were also trying to make
it in Hollywood, like Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, as well as
silver-screen actors like Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. No casting
prospects have been tossed around yet, but this will undoubtedly be a desirable
part. (Fitzgerald was only 44 when he died in Hollywood in 1940.)
After his intimate,
relationship-based films, this will be Ponsoldt’s second biopic in a row. His
David Foster Wallace film starring Jason Segel, The End Of The Tour,comes out
this summer.
