In an interview on Hollywood

Tell me about the Fitzgerald.

It’s about a studio executive called Monroe Stahr. Stahr is based on Irving Thalberg, who was the right-hand man to Louis B Meyer at MGM and brought Fitzgerald out to write for him. Fitzgerald never really did make anything much at the movies, but he wrote this wonderful book which is his last and, though it’s sadly unfinished, I think would have been maybe his best. Fitzgerald went out to Hollywood in the way all the bright writers did. If you’d had a big hit on the East Coast then they’d get you out to write for the movies. It never really worked – but it was a part of Hollywood’s desperate need to prove itself. It was like a status symbol: one doesn’t read the novel, one buys the novelist.

The narrator of the book is a young ingenue, the daughter of a studio head (possibly based on Meyer’s daughter), who says there’s only six or seven men in the history of movies who’ve been able to hold the whole equation of pictures in their head at the same time, and Monroe Stahr was one of them. It’s this idea that it’s not just the people out there in the dark, but it’s about taste and staying ahead. Thalberg was one of those incredibly gifted people who was able to see the public taste and capture it and work its levers about six months before it happened. There’s a great chapter in the book where she just outlines the producer’s day, which is a real insight into that time. It’s not insidery: it manages to be a story that everybody can understand, and I suppose we’re all fascinated by the movies. Certainly everybody was in those times, and the way Fitzgerald writes about it you can’t not be. These days it’s not so easy to be fascinated by Jennifer Aniston movies, but it wasn’t very difficult to get like that about Lana Turner movies.