Winnipeg Public Library Catalogue

This documentary was produced to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby on April 10th, 1925. "Midnight in Manhattan" explores the dark, turbulent life and creative spirit of "Gatsby"'s writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. It covers his college days at Princeton where he wrote rather than doing coursework and ended up as a dropout.. His unsucessful marriage to Zelda Sayre who eventually was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to multiple hospitals is also addressed. The documentary explores the difficult friendship between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, which was strained by the mutual dislike between Hemingway and Zelda as well as Hemingway's disgust with how Fitzgerald often changed and twisted his stories to sell to magazines for cash. His final days were effected by this need for cash. He remained married to Zelda despite her residence mental hospitals, and he was often trying to earn money for her medical bills and to support his alcholism which had grown worse and made him increasingly more ill. This exposure of the desperate nature of his last years, living with his mistress and suffering multiple heart attacks, dispels the mythology created by Fitzgerald which glamorized the Jazz-Age and his alcoholism. The program includes contributions by the author's granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan, and writers Hunter S. Thompson, George Plimpton and Jay McInerney. It presents a fascinating portrait of this most enduring and complex of American icons.