Product Description

American Masters presents an unparalleled portrait of the literary icon, providing an in-depth look at the writer's life and work. 90 minutes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #96006 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-02-19
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.com
This American Masters documentary takes a solemn look at F. Scott Fitzgerald's life and literary legacy. While acknowledging his demons (alcoholism, his wife Zelda's mental illness), it only glancingly refers to his and Zelda's infamous antics and notorious partying. Instead, this 85-minute biography looks at the influence of his St. Paul, Minnesota, childhood, where he was the poorest in a well-to-do neighborhood, and the driving ambition that sent him to Princeton, where he never felt he measured up to his wealthier classmates. This obsession with class and money drove his writing and his marriage to Zelda, a socially prominent Southern belle. Weighing in are such literary luminaries as biographer A. Scott Berg and novelists E.L. Doctorow and Ward Just, as well as the usual host of scholars. These experts are balanced nicely with the reminiscences of those who knew the Fitzgeralds more intimately, including former neighbors and Zelda's childhood friends. --Kimberly Heinrichs

Customer Reviews

The Romantic Egoist.
I just viewed this documentary last night and loved it. I must admit that I have not read Fitzgerald's books for many years but treasured the memories which were recirculated by this film. I read Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" not too long ago and it renewed some of my fascination with this literary master. His writing style is the envy of many and the best thing that can be said about "Winter Dreams" is that it showcases the way in which his life became the material of his stories. It is a pity that he died before realizing the success he would have after 1950, but then, perhaps he would not have had it any other way as the triumphs of his life made him lonelier than his failures.

PRICE OVERBOARD!
As much I enjoy buying dvds and books at Amazon with great prices,but who in their right mind would pay nearly three grand for a new dvd or pay nearly two hundred for a used one stupid dvd! even Donald Trump wouldn't pay that much! you're pricing a 90 min program like its some kind of rare object ,whoever priced this dvd should be ashamed of themselves if someone really want this excellent program. I suggest shop at PBS or channel Thirteen.org The insane prices of these dvds should a house payment or in the bank not on one dvd! please stop with this really bad joke that Amazon or someone else who priced these dvds!

A lofty appreciation
I expected this DVD to have some choice observations about Saint Paul, Minnesota, where the father of some beautiful rich girl (her name and picture are in this DVD, but it was so long ago) told the young F. Scott Fitzgerald that wealthy people like the Summit Avenue crowd did not expect their daughters to marry anyone who was as poor as F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is funny now, in the `if that really happened, how famous would that be?' kind of way, particularly if it happened to someone who is now as famous as F. Scott Fitzgerald, a great writer who was also smart enough to call Hemingway the real thing. Whatever F. Scott Fitzgerald was doing when he went to Princeton, he was not kept there long. Some great schools might have had much greater dropout rates than we are used to now, as a big law school at that time could be expected to flunk out a third of the entering students.

Zelda was from Montgomery, Alabama, where F. Scott Fitzgerald was a young army officer preparing for World War One. People who knew Zelda still remember those days, things they did, a song they sang, that Zelda's father was a judge and called her a hussy when she came home at 2 a.m. while she was still in high school. Waltzing through life was her main interest, but she was wild enough that she would be considered crazy after she became a mother. This DVD has a lot of music and dancing to try to capture the character of those times. Two of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels have been turned into movies, and scenes from "The Great Gatsby" and "The Last Tycoon" are used to illustrate aspects of his life as well as the content of his writing.

My favorite time in his life is during a trip to Paris in 1924, when he wrote to his publisher that he had been pondering Gatsby as a character and thought he had found a way to capture him in a book that would be quite elegant. There are literature professors on the DVD who maintain their belief in F. Scott Fitzgerald's genius in spite of the difficulties of his life. It just magnifies whatever humiliation he was sensitive to, and the clips from the movie "The Great Gatsby" of the gas station at the junk yard on Long Island, New York, is so desolate that the question, "Your wife wants to move out West?" sounds like a personal problem that is obviously understandable. Then as now, the big money in entertainment was in Hollywood, and the clip from "The Last Tycoon" shows a writer being humiliated by a studio boss who knows that going to the movies is what everybody else does all the time. The great irony at the end is F. Scott Fitzgerald trying to write about Hollywood as if the people who knew how to make great amounts of money there were just as laughable at as the great rich hierarchies of the Midwest and East Coast. He was not healthy, and I think the DVD wraps up his life with a heart attack at the age of 44 in 1940 that came before Scott was finished with "The Last Tycoon." His attitude was strangely manifested in emitting an anatomy of his own desires, and millions of copies of his books were printed and might still be read before the readers of the world are finished with him.