Considering that he's been dead for 70 years, F. Scott Fitzgerald's career is going pretty well. His short story was the inspiration for Best Picture nominee The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Baz Luhrmann is currently preparing a big-budget version of his most famous work, The Great Gatsby and Keira Knightley will star as his wife Zelda in an upcoming biopic of the couple. Throw in Martin Scorsese's upcoming Gatsby remake starring Vincent Chase, and the movie career of this great writer has never been hotter.

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"I've committed myself to the following of a grail, E."

Which is a problem, since there was one time when it should have been: 1937-1940, when he was trying to earn a living as a Hollywood scriptwriter. There had been a early stint in 1927, when United Artists paid him a $3500 advance (about $65,000,000 in 2009 money) to write an ultimately unproduced flapper comedy, but this was when he and Zelda were still the Jazz Age darlings who made bathtub gin and sat on flagpoles with Charles Lindbergh. A 1931 stay led to nothing but more arguments and rejected scripts.

When he returned to Hollywood in 1937, he really needed the work. Zelda was in the mental ward and Fitzgerald (or "F" as we like to call him) had suffered a series of "Crack-Ups," highlighted in a 1936 Joaquin Phoenixesque New York Post interview that includes the line, "His face twitched. 'Successful authors!' he cried. 'Oh, my God, successful authors!' He stumbled over to the highboy and poured himself another drink."

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Seen here, in a rare moment of not-being-crazy.

Had TMZ been around in 1936, they would have been staking out his home Britney-style. Meanwhile, his record in Hollywood reads a bit like Michael Jordan's baseball stats. His IMDb credits for this period include eight "Uncredited" listings, compared with one actual screen credit for a 1938 adaptation of the novel Three Comrades (for which his dialogue was heavily rewritten). Uncredited sounds okay, but in Fitzgerald's case it's essentially a euphemism for "His script sucked, but he sure is famous." The IMDb page also doesn't list his piles of unproduced screenplays, or rejected dialogue for numerous movies, including Gone With the Wind.