Robert De Niro at Work by Adam Ganz & Steven Price

Author:Adam Ganz & Steven Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030479602
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Working with a Literary Text

Fitzgerald was part of the canon, as arguably was Pinter; for the first time De Niro was working on a film adapted from what might be called a ‘literary’ text, as opposed to a popular bestseller like Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, or an original screenplay like Taxi Driver. The Last Tycoon was also the first occasion on which De Niro would be working on a full-blown Hollywood production of the post-classical era, with everything that went along with it, including a package of perhaps irreconcilable talents and the demands of a role that required him—again for the first time—to play a character who was not just a serious, introspective film producer but also the romantic leading man. Despite De Niro’s best efforts, Kazan was ultimately unable satisfactorily to bring either of these two aspects of the character or the story fully to life.

This is partly a condition of Fitzgerald’s novel, which keeps prompting the thought that the characters and the world they inhabit are somehow not fully alive, but already victims of the past. In the last line of The Great Gatsby the narrator Nick Carraway had reflected: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’.15 The film critic David Thomson detects a similar note in The Last Tycoon:The Great Gatsby takes place in 1925, and something central has gone wrong. American energy is betrayed already. The past has been lost, or escaped. But that liberty is a greater loss. Imagine that tone of voice drawing the covers up over the bodies of The Last Tycoon—imagine it a woman’s voice, dry and tough, but broken—and you see how it might have been an extraordinary novel. The notes that Fitzgerald left for the book have Cecilia telling the rest of the story as she dies in a tuberculosis sanitarium, with Stahr dead and her father remarried.16

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