Beginning in the late 1920s, MGM usurped Paramount’s position as the most profitable and prestigious studio, largely as a result of the oversight of wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg. Thalberg helped develop the corporate personality of MGM – the MGM “Idea” – comprising a glamorous and slick house style, the prioritization of stars, and a system of scriptwriting that involved assigning multiple writers to work on the same project yet often unbeknownst to each other. It is in response to this last phenomenon that authors of very disparate sensibilities – F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon [1941]), Aldous Huxley (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [1939]), and William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom! [1936]) – crafted narratives in a form I call “MGM Modernism”: an aestheticized and self-conscious naturalism developed in part from contact with and subordination to a corporate author.

Popular accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contact with the film industry often spin a tale of professional decline. But rather than ruining his talent, time spent in Hollywood benefited Fitzgerald by providing the financial and creative resources he needed during a complex moment in American cultural life. Furthermore, rather than being revenge tracts, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood fiction and his unfinished novel offer some of the early examples of American film theory by carefully examining studio culture and the writer's place within it. While it is true that Fitzgerald had his share of troubles as a screenwriter, many of these difficulties were of his own devising. Fitzgerald was heavily invested in the notion of the artist as a solitary man of genius. His collaborators often resented his claims to superior taste and judgment, especially since his scripts often weren’t filmic enough. But from the beginning of his career he was a hard-working professional writer who was savvy about making money – especially from the film industry – on the commodities he produced. Hollywood wasn't the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed second act; it was part of the same successful performance.