Hollywood Comes to St. Paul—while the Fitzgeralds go to Hollywood

"Not to alarm you, but the writers from Z are in the room," the conference cochair Melissa Barker murmured as I hastily grabbed my badge, bag, and program en route to deliver a rather academic critique of the new Amazon series, Z: The Beginning of Everything, to what I presumed would be an audience of sleepy-eyed literary profs and brighter-eyed graduate students. Nine o'clock on a Monday morning in a basement classroom in St. Paul, Minnesota, is not exactly where one expects to meet a Hollywood showrunner. The one great break in an aspiring screenwriter's career is to get two minutes "in the room"—or at least in an elevator—with such folks. Yet in an ironic twist akin to a Garrison Keillor radio tale, Hollywood had come to beautiful downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. The Mountain to Mohammed. The pitch room, to moi. And instead of a rushed two-minute spiel, I was to get my full twelve to seventeen minutes of their undivided attention, thanks to the temporal tyranny of the conference panel format.

Needless to say I was rewriting my presentation on the stairway down.

The 14th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference was "that sorda deal" as they say in Minnesotan, for not one but two showrunning teams. Karl Gajdusek of Z and Christopher Keyser and A. Scott Berg of The Last Tycoon, Amazon's other Fitzgerald-inspired series, joined conferees for a week of free-wheeling panels, plenaries, and informal chats on the facts and fiction of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Keyser told us that Amazon's Global Content chief Roy Price "is obsessed with Fitzgerald," and luckily for us he is putting his company's bulging pocketbook and production slate where his passions lie.

Amidst all this small-screen shoulder-rubbing, Kirk Curnutt (who chronicled his earlier "Brush with Fame" consulting on Z in the 2017 F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter) asked me to review the show for this journal. What follows comes less from my original conference presentation than from reflecting on the vibrant conversations had among Society members and our visiting show-runners during that week in late June 2017, and then rewatching and reassessing the season in light of those conversations.

The first season of Z: The Beginning of Everything has much to commend it. Veteran head writing team Nicole Yorkin and Dawn Prestwich, previously of AMC and Netflix's The Killing, helmed a well-cast and well-paced series of ten half-hour episodes loosely adapted from Therese Anne Fowler's bestseller Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2013). In just under five hours, we are whisked from Zelda and Scott's "meet-cute" in Montgomery, Alabama, at the end of the Great War through their whirlwind marriage and "It Couple" days in Manhattan and Westport, to their return to Alabama three years later jaded by marital infidelity, financial strain, and an unwanted pregnancy. The half-hour episode length is unusual for a dramatic series. But Gajdusek, who has replaced Prestwich and Yorkin as showrunner (i.e., head writer and business manager), appreciates the short format's forced emphasis on the "A" story to the exclusion of subplots, which add complexity but can slow the narrative momentum and emotional intensity.

After watching Z a second time and comparing it with The Last Tycoon (whose episodes run for an hour, typical of a drama series), I am persuaded by Gajdusek's logic. In Z, Zelda's character is being revealed and her relationship with Scott developed in every single scene. In the very rare instance when two minor characters are on screen without Zelda or Scott, it is always in service of the couple's story, such as a heartrending moment in a later episode when Zelda's mother breaks down in her husband's arms, crying "they're gonna use each other up." The Last Tycoon, by contrast, is more ambitious but also more plot-heavy and...