[Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977]
There’s nothing very remarkable in the fact that some habitually pretentious Television Artists—Herbert Brodkin, James Costigan, Anthony Page—have gone and made a bad, turgid, opportunistic, narratively trite and historically slipshod TV-movie about Scott Fitzgerald’s Hollywood experiences. What is rather remarkable is that they made such a stupid movie, and made it at this particular moment in cultural history. The film is couched in the sort of self-congratulatory antagonism toward Hollywood that long ago died of shame (or so I had naïvely assumed) everywhere save the most icebound corners of certain backwoods English departments and the cocktail party circuit where people are still foolish enough to talk to and get quoted by Pauline Kael.