F. Scott Fitzgerald’s finances, for all to see

Less than two weeks before the highly anticipated movie, “The Great Gatsby,” opens in theaters, researchers at the University of South Carolina’s library have made a digital version of author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s handwritten financial ledger available on their website.
The ledger, posted by researchers from the Thomas Cooper Library last week, is being made available to students, readers and scholars for the first time and provides insight into Fitzgerald’s finances and personal life.
“This is a record of everything Fitzgerald wrote, and what he did with it, in his own hand,” director of the Ernest F. Hollings Library and Rare Books Collection Elizabeth Sudduth told the Associated Press.
The original ledger currently sits in the library’s below-ground, rare-book vault but will be on display at the library for about a month starting May 6 in anticipation of the “Gatsby” movie, Suddith said. The library timed the ledger’s online display with the movie’s release in order to call more attention to the collection.
The ledger shows Fitzgerald’s tallies of his earnings for each of his works, including “The Great Gatsby.” The ledger also lists his short stories, other books and film and theater adaptations. In careful columns, Fitzgerald laid out his works, the location they were printed and the income they produced.
Intermingled in the ledger are Fitzgerald’s comments. One comment describes the year 1919 as “the most important year of my life. Every emotion and my life work decided. Miserable and ecstatic but a great success.” In 1919, Fitzgerald’s first novel was accepted for publication and his wife Zelda agreed to marry him.
Suddith said the ledger shows that Fitzgerald was “far more on top of his affairs than people thought.”
"He was keeping a record of his work for the future," Suddeth said. "He kept it, he updated it."
The Thomas Cooper library has the world’s most comprehensive Fitzgerald collection, which includes more than 3,000 publications, manuscripts, letters, books, screenplays and memorabilia. The library houses Fitzgerald’s walking stick, briefcase and engraved silver flask given to him by Zelda.
The library acquired the ledger in 1994 from Matthew Bruccoli, a professor at the University of Southern California and preeminent Fitzgerald scholar, who began to acquire Fitzgerald items in the 1950s. Bruccoli received the ledger from Fitzgerald’s daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald. Bruccoli donated the ledger to the university to be used as a teaching and research tool.
USC English professor Park Bucker told the Associated Press that he is eager to discuss the ledger with his students. Barker said the ledger might be unique among American authors.
“This is going to be an amazing thing for students to pore over and dip into,” Bucker said. “He created his own database. We do it on computers now, but he did it for himself.”
Bucker also pointed out that the ledger shows that Fitzgerald was able to make a living as an author, mostly from his short stories.
In 1925, the ledger shows that Fitzgerald earned less than $2,000 for “The Great Gatsby” — the same amount he earned for a short story published in the “Saturday Evening Post.”
As the years went on, Fitzgerald added more “Gatsby” earnings. He recorded the $16,666 he received for the foreign motion picture rights and the $5,000 he earned when “Gatsby” ran as a play in New York, Chicago and other cities.
Almost a century later, BoxOffice.com predicts that “The Great Gatsby” will make $24 million on opening weekend and a cumulative $73 million. But unfortunately, those figures won’t make it into the ledger.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Was he actually overpaid for his Hollywood work?

The Great Gatsby might be one of the season’s most anticipated Hollywood movies, but F. Scott Fitzgerald’s infamous sojourn to Hollywood was a cruel tragedy that humbled one of the century’s great pens. As Some Like it Hot Director Billy Wilder once said, describing the frustration and futility that Fitzgerald encountered in California, “He made me think of a great sculptor who was hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect the f—ing pipes.”
Entertainment Weekly has a feature in its current issue, “The True Hollywood Story of F. Scott Fitzgerald” by Clark Collis, detailing the author’s sad attempts as a screenwriter, and now, the University of South Carolina’s Matthew Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library has posted Fitzgerald’s detailed financial ledger documenting his year-by-year assignments, with his fees, from 1919-38. For instance, you can learn that he received $2,500 for the Hollywood adaptation of his 1919 short story, “Head and Shoulders.” In 1922, 86 years before David Fincher and Brad Pitt made a movie about it, he was paid a cool grand for his short story about a boy who ages backwards, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” First National paid him $3,500 for his work on a script called Lipstick, which they eventually abandoned, but it was Gatsby that brought him his biggest payday: $16,666 for the movie rights in 1926, one year after he published the novel. (A stage adaptation brought him more than $6,000.) That greater figure might sound like a pittance for something as revered as Gatsby, but that equals about $220,000 in 2013 dollars — not Jay Gatsby money, mind you, but a decent sum for a novel that wasn’t a huge success when it was initially published.
In fact, you could argue that Fitzgerald was actually overpaid for his meager Hollywood work, getting $6,000 for a treatment he wrote for MGM in 1931. Though the ledger doesn’t include mention of Fitzgerald’s compensation for 1938′s Three Comrades, his only solo screenwriting credit, nor his work on the never-produced Infidelity and Gone With the Wind, for which he went without a credit, it does illuminate his unpredictable year-to year finances. In 1924, he wrote a short story for the Saturday Evening Post titled, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” for $1,000. At the time, he was barely making $20,000 and, in fact, he would only surpass $36,000 once during this period, in 1931.
Numbers are relative, but as the numbers begin to pour in on May 10 when Baz Luhrmann’s 3-D adaptation opens in theaters, it’s easy to imagine that F. Scott and Zelda would be boggled by all those zeroes in the box-office grosses. Though he might be even more impressed by a semi-coherent screenplay.

Gatsby may be great, but F Scott Fitzgerald is greater

Baz Luhrmann's film of The Great Gatsby looks set to entertain, but it's Fitzgerald's life story that has to be seen to be believed
You can't open a newspaper these days without finding someone writing about F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I'm not complaining. Gatsby is the novel – almost a prose poem – I reread every year, and I never tire of its backstory. Although everything I've seen about Baz Luhrmann's forthcoming film fills me with anxiety, I'll be among the first to go and see it. Cinema and Fitzgerald could make an ideal marriage. Why shouldn't a movie director re-imagine 1920s West Egg and give us his reinterpretation of what Fitzgerald christened "The Jazz Age"? It can't, or won't, be the novel, but it might capture something of the madness in which Fitzgerald found himself. 
The writer was great that way. A party animal with a line in champagne zingers; endlessly quotable; completely at one with the zeitgeist; a literary artist whose obiter dicta became the soundtrack of his times. For instance: "There are no second acts in American lives." And: "All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." And perhaps most famous of all, the last line of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
We're going to read a lot of Fitzgerald quotations these next few weeks. Fitzgerald's admirers will be delighted that he is getting some long overdue recognition, but sad, too, perhaps. When he died in Hollywood in 1940, Fitzgerald was almost completely forgotten. His funeral was attended by just 30 people, including his editor Maxwell Perkins. Sales of his books had virtually dried up. His publishers, Scribners, still had unsold stock from the first printing of Gatsby. He had lived the American dream, and it had turned into a waking nightmare.
But perhaps Fitzgerald's life and work is compelling precisely because it answers, in an archetypal way, what we, the reading public, expect the career of a genius to look like. Consider the bare bones of his story. Comfortable beginnings in St Paul, Minnesota, the heart of the midwest. His mother reports, appropriately, that the boy's first word was "up". First stirrings of the writer's ambition. He moves into the fast track of his society, pursuing literary goals, and goes to Princeton University. Drops out; falls in love and is rejected; writes a novel that's turned down; goes to the battlefields of France; returns to the USA with no prospects. Then ... 1919-1920: his annus mirabilis. Revises his unpublished work. This Side of Paradise is accepted by Scribner, and is published to huge acclaim. Now his sweetheart, Zelda Sayre, agrees to marriage.
Scott and Zelda lead rock star lives in the Manhattan of the 1920s. Burning with ambition for his art, Fitzgerald completes a book whose many rejected titles include Trimalchio in West Egg, the novel the world knows as The Great Gatsby. There's an added myth about its publication: Gatsby did not flop, as is often claimed; it just didn't do as well as had been hoped. TS Eliot, for one, wrote: "It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James." It was only in comparison with Fitzgerald's astounding debut that it seemed to fail.
Thereafter, Fitzgerald went into a long tunnel of decline, a decade he later described in a controversial sequence of Esquire articles as "The Crack-Up", a rare text recently republished by Capuchin Classics. In search of that elusive "second act", he moved to Hollywood, published Tender Is the Night, a novel that baffled the critics, and began his final unfinished masterpiece, The Last Tycoon. Then dies, aged 44; is forgotten, but lives on through Gatsby. It's a literary life for the ages.
In outline, the F Scott Fitzgerald story is the movie you might want to see. Baz Luhrmann's version will be entertaining. It won't be Gatsby, the novel. But never mind. Many new readers will be inspired to discover the miracle of Fitzgerald's prose, and the strange subtlety of his vision. In 1925, Gatsby was ahead of its time, and almost too prescient. Now, it seems perfectly in harmony with the deepest and darkest chords in American life. That's why, for some, including this writer, it remains the greatest American novel of the 20th century.

Syracuse apartment building where author F. Scott Fitzgerald lived reopens

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of "The Great Gatsby," briefly lived at Kasson Place Apartments on James Street in Syracuse when he was a child. The 115-year-old apartment building reopened this week after a $9 million renovation. (Rick Moriarty | rmoriarty@syracuse.com) 
Syracuse, NY -- The historic Syracuse apartment building where author F. Scott Fitzgerald briefly lived as a child has reopened after an extensive renovation.
Kasson Place Apartments at 622 James St. reopened this week with 28 two-bedroom apartments and two one-bedroom units.
Built in 1898, the seven-story building is one of the oldest apartment buildings in Syracuse. Its most famous tenant was Fitzgerald, considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
"The Great Gatsby" author was 5 years old when his family moved from Buffalo to Syracuse in January 1901. The family lived in Apartment 201 at Kasson and later moved to East Willow Street. The Fitzgeralds moved back to Buffalo in September 1903.
Conifer Realty LLC, of Rochester, bought Kasson Place from the city of Syracuse for $1 in 2011, the same year it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Conifer, which specializes in restoring distressed apartment buildings, began renovating the building last year. The city acquired the building from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which foreclosed on a previous owner and declared the building unfit for tenants.
Sandra Gorie, marketing director for Conifer, said the company preserved the historic character of the building during the year-long restoration.
The bathrooms, kitchens and appliances are all new. But most of the original doors (including door knobs), hardwood floors, woodwork and windows were saved. The building's arched entrance still sports its original ornamental ceiling, tiled floor and marble walls.
"It has so much character," said Gorie. "You get that old, cool charm."
One-bedroom units have 553 square feet of space and rent for $870 a month. The two-bedroom units have from 757 to 1,087 square feet of space and rent from $1,030 a month.
Though the 115-year-old building's historic status has its appeal, Gorie said its proximity to the city's medical centers, including nearby St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center, and to Syracuse University make it an attractive location.
Leases have already been signed for 19 of the 30 apartments, and one tenant has already moved in, she said. Many of the new tenants are resident physicians and other employees of local hospitals, she said.
"This is close to everything," she said. "Syracuse isn't a big city, so you don't have to go far to get to anything."
Conifer also is renovating Leavenworth Apartments directly across the street at 615 James St. Built in 1912, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011, too.
Gorie said the Leavenworth will open by mid-October with 53 apartments. Monthly rents will start at $660 for studio units, $870 for one-bedroom units and $1,015 for two-bedroom units.
Conifer is spending a total of $9 million renovating the two apartment buildings.

The family

What Did F. Scott Fitzgerald Think of The Great Gatsby, the Movie, in 1926? He Walked Out

What did F. Scott Fitzgerald think of the first movie of version of The Great Gatsby? Not much. He didn't stay in the theater to see the end of the only version of the novel made during his lifetime.

Hollywood, January 1927: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were in Los Angeles for the first time. He was excited to be setting to work on an original screenplay for Lipstick, a collegiate fantasy for the actress Constance Talmadge. As soon as there were movies and stars to admire, Fitzgerald's longtime love of the stage had translated quickly to screen -- and, after his last attempt at a play, The Vegetable, had failed so miserably in 1923, perhaps a screenplay would be just the modern thing to redeem his beloved writing of dialogue. Zelda came with him, but they paused on the way to drop their daughter Scottie, who had turned 6 that past autumn, with Zelda's parents in Montgomery, Ala.

Scott figured his screenplay would take only a few weeks to write, but he and Zelda stayed in Los Angeles for two months. Old actor friends they had met in Manhattan, like John Barrymore, were living in the same corridors at the Ambassador Hotel -- and some, like Barrymore, had their children with them. The young Fitzgeralds enjoyed the company and the parties, but missed their daughter. In Zelda's letters to Scottie comes the most complete story of their time in Hollywood -- and lets us know what Fitzgerald thought of the first movie version, and only one made during his lifetime, of The Great Gatsby (1926).

Most of Zelda's letters are full of little stories to Scottie, reassuring her daughter how much both parents love and miss her. They also deal with Scott working -- or trying to. Lady Diana Manners was to come to supper on a Saturday, "if Daddy ever ever ever finishes his work." The hotel bungalows were a swirl of society: "We all know each other and visit around from one room to another all the time, which Daddy does not like as he is working. He says he will never write another picture because it is too hard, but I do not think writers mean what they say about work." The handsome Fitzgerald might have been a movie star instead of a screenwriter, in 1927: "Daddy was offered a job to be a leading man. ... But he wouldn't do it." Fitzgerald did, however, go with Zelda to see The Great Gatsby one evening in L.A.

This movie of Gatsby is lost; all that remains is the trailer. A Paramount Pictures release, it starred Warner Baxter, with Lois Wilson as Daisy and William Powell as George Wilson. The New York Times reviewed the movie middlingly on Nov. 22, 1926, noting that neither the director "nor the players have succeeded in fully developing the characters." Daisy was evidently most memorable for "drinking absinthe. She takes enough of this beverage to render the average person unconscious."

When the movie opened in America, the Fitzgeralds were in France. They saw the movie in Hollywood soon after they arrived -- as we now know from an undated letter of Zelda's to Scottie. Their reaction isn't open to any debate: "We saw 'The Great Gatsby' in the movies. It's ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left." The full capitals of "ROTTEN" are Zelda's.

She and Scott walked out of the first movie made of Gatsby. What might they have thought of the dragging 1949 Gatsby, with Alan Ladd manfully mysterious, and the magnificent Ruth Hussey and Shelley Winters wasted as, respectively, a shallow Jordan Baker and a strident Myrtle Wilson? Or of the 1974 Gatsby, with a gleaming golden Robert Redford, gorgeous Hamptons sets, and an excellent performance by Karen Black as Myrtle? Or of the 2000 made-for-television Gatsby, with a handsome, cross Toby Stephen, accompanied by a shiny-faced Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway and an uncomfortable Mira Sorvino as Daisy?

We don't know. I can only have my own opinions on those film versions, and I think they all fail for the same reason: Fitzgerald's language has already done all the cinematic work for the actors, directors, set designers and producers. The Great Gatsby is an interior book, little concerned with externals. Fitzgerald conjures what he wants to say by way of description with only a few delicate strokes of words: five crates of oranges and lemons turned into pulpless halves; ashes growing like wheat in the valley; silver pepper of stars; "shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue." We use our imaginations to fill out the pictures for ourselves, where a camera cannot.

Baz Luhrmann's new movie may well supersede the earlier film Gatsbys, but can it supersede the novel? If it doesn't try to, but manages to revel in Fitzgerald's language instead, it'll be a winner. The trailers for the new Gatsby, all that have been released to date, are bold and loud, full of action and primary colors, beauty and violence. DiCaprio's Gatsby isn't a passive cipher; he acts out the dangerous qualities of Gatsby deeply suppressed in the novel in Nick Carraway's telling. Tobey Maguire looks as if he will be a more lively, less passive Nick -- the Nick who spent the late nineteen-teens in the trenches of World War I and won't talk about it, even to us; the Nick who kisses a girl in a horse-drawn victoria in Central Park. Carey Mulligan carries with her gracefully the Daisy from Louisville days, making the past seem truly present, young and frail still, with the "dark shining hair" Gatsby first kissed now clearly dyed blonde (a perfect touch). Will the movie be vivid and fresh, culturally contemporary and resonant with the past, well-acted and realized? Or not?

We'll all decide for ourselves next month, but how grand it would be to be able to have Scott and Zelda's reaction, this time, if only we could. I do know this, though: Both Fitzgeralds would be thrilled by the thought of a film version of The Great Gatsby opening the Festival de Cannes, on that sunburned coast where he wrote and revised much of the novel in 1924.

'Going for Baroque': The Great Gatsby 88 Years Later

Eighty-eighty years ago today, on April 10, 1925 in New York City, Charles Scribner’s Sons, i.e., Scribner, published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.

The film world is, of course, abuzz over Baz Luhrmann’s film version, premiering May 10—the fourth attempt since the silent film era to portray Fitzgerald’s classic on the Silver Screen.

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald famously walked out on Famous Players-Lasky Corporation’s 1926 version, co-starring Warner Baxter and Lois Wilson, and William Powell playing the

Charles Scribner III, great-grandson of Fitzgerald’s publisher, who knew great talent when he saw it, noted the glaring contrast between Paramount’s 1974 version directed by Jack Clayton, and written by Francis Ford Coppola—and Luhrmann’s extravaganza 39 years later. That film, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, Scribner said, “was faithful and with impeccable performances, but too stately, like a coronation staged by Ralph Lauren.”

Based on the official trailers he’s seen, including the main one released last week, he liked the “Zeffirellian vision and energy,” quipping, “Can’t wait for summer—go for baroque!”

Another thing in its favor, he said, is, “DiCaprio never disappoints.” Indeed!

Asked about the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby, which the trailer suggests goes further than the book, where it’s largely in Gatsby’s head, Scribner said, “It may be taking some liberties, filling in blanks, but at least it’s not a direct violation of the plot, and the point, as in the film of ‘The End of the Affair’… stay tuned!”

Ah, but it’s impossible to compete with Fitzgerald’s artfully woven story, and the wounding real-life romance that underlies it: “Rich girls don’t marry poor boys,” the father of Ginevra King, who dumped Fitzgerald at age 21 to marry a ‘rich boy,’ said. Scott never quite recovered, as reflected in all his novels.

And, who better to shed light on Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby than the publisher’s great-grandson, who spoke eloquently to these topics last May at The Morgan Library and Museum, as recounted in “Charles Scribner Illuminates F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,” published last June 7, the 90th anniversary of Gatsby’s opening scene:

“Just as his life bridged two centuries,” he said, “so his work has a Janus-like aspect, looking back to the romantic lyricism and expansive dreams of the 19th century, and forward to the syncopated Jazz strains of the 20th.”…

“My whole theory of writing,” Fitzgerald said, “I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”

—“Charles Scribner Illuminates F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,” by Mary Claire Kendall, Forbes, June 7, 2012

And, he might have added all those Hollywood directors who thrill to Fitzgerald’s classic beats.

So, yes, “stay tuned!”