Despite his enthusiasm (or perhaps because of it) he just cannot seem to make any producer or distributor understand that it’s not about Jay Gatsby. It’s not about the glamor. It’s about love and loss.

The hero is Nick Carraway, the narrator, the writer. It’s his story. Gatsby is the illusion that America will become. And the green light at the end of the dock? That’s what America will never be.

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Let him know how it reads.

The constant, restless flicker and ceaseless glints of light on the city’s shining, metallic surfaces.

The flicker of electric light off a car, the flicker of an image as a movie film clatters through a projector, the flicker of the distracted modern consciousness.

It was one of those tragic loves doomed for lack of money, and one day the girl closed it out on the basis of common sense. During a long summer of despair he wrote a novel instead of letters.

The friend with the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class. He hated what he thought he loved. He would never be happy.

Fitzgerald had never been able to stop wondering where his friends’ money came from, nor stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them his girl.

As a writer Fitzgerald would worry about the fate of the novel.

He saw the novel – once the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another – becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, is capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion.

He would worry that film was becoming an art where in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration.

When he was trying not to think he would write lists. One after the other and tear them up. Hundreds of lists. Of cavalry leaders and football players and cities, and popular tunes and pitchers, and happy times, and hobbies and houses lived in and how many suits since he left the army and how many pairs of shoes (although he didn’t count the suit he bought in Sorrento that shrank, nor the pumps and dress shirt and collar that he carried around for years and never wore, because the pumps got damp and grainy and the shirt and collar got yellow and starch-rotted).

Fitzgerald kept writing lists. The longest were of women he’d liked, and of the times he had let himself be snubbed by people who had not been his betters in character or ability.

- careless wealth

- dried voices

- hollow people

- empty men