The Romantic Imagination Of F.Scott Fitzgerald

Here is the trailer to David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. It looks superb. Having read the short story from Tales of The Jazz Age, I’m sure Fincher will do an amazing job and should have people talking Oscar.

I heard about Benjamin Button around early 2007. As I was adapting F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, I found it synchronicity that Fincher had chosen a Fitzgerald story to adapt.

More than one person at the Stockholm Film Festival in 1999 (and afterwards) commented and compared Fight Club to my Pearls Before Swine, in tone, subject matter and, shall we say, proto-fascist mood. Of course, Pearls was the low budget bastard to the highly polished Fight Club. But, I too think the films are connected. A zeitgeist thing.

Fitzgerald too is a logical choice now. Fitzgerald stands at beginning of the modernist era. The last great romantic, reckless high flier and documenter of the lives and loves of the rich, important and talented. His work now is more alive than ever. The Romantic Imagination of Fitzgerald is boundless and to me he even transcends Hemingway and his dated machismo. Strange in 80 years he should out shine his old rival, who he thought had surpassed him in his own life time. But like Benjamin Button, Fitzgerald has aged backwards, until now he is youthful and golden again. Like Gatsby reborn, Fitzgerald is facing the 21st century and the possibility of returning to the orgiastic future of the green light.

It was a honor to adapt his novel. I will premiering my adaptation of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned at the 2008 Melbourne Underground Film Festival in October. It will be playing other festivals around the world after that.