Hollywood Still Going After Fitzgerald
By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 8/20/2008 3:13:00 PM
Both as a screenwriter and an author, F. Scott Fitzgerald never quite found his place in Hollywood. Although the myriad screenplays he wrote met the same disappointing box office fate as the handful of films adapted from his fiction, the hope that there's a winning movie in his work lives on. In December, audiences will see Brad Pitt and Cate Winslett appear in the David Fincher-helmed adaptation of the author's little-known short story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." And, with Hollywood options on several other Fitzgerald properties, there may soon be a swell of material about, and by, the romantic and doomed Jazz Age writer.
Don Leventhall at Harold Ober, which oversees the Fitzgerald estate, recently renogotiated the option that Fox has on Tender is the Night. He told PW that the deal was in the "healthy six figures." Fitzgerald's The Pat Hobby Stories is also under option, as are Zelda Fitzgerald's life rights. Leventhal also expects to close a deal after Labor Day on another Fitzgerald short story, which he declined to name.
But some of Fitzgerald's better known work is still available. In an interesting twist, the film rights to his last novel, The Last Tycoon, are controlled by Harold Ober as well. As part of a reversion clause in the contract for the 1976 adaptation of the book--the star-studded Elia Kazan film starred a young Robert DeNiro and was a box office flop--film rights reverted back to the Fitzgerald estate upon the death of producer Sam Spiegel. (Spiegel dies in 1985.)
