F. Scott Fitzgerald was born just eighteen months after the Lumière Brothers created their pioneering 1895 film Sortie de l’Usine Lumière de Lyon, which laid the foundations for modern cinema. He was fascinated by the movies throughout his youth, and despite his irrepressible passion for musical theatre, film was a pervasive influence on Fitzgerald. Alan Margolies recounts how a young Fitzgerald met with director D. W. Griffith at his Mamaroneck, New York, studios and unsuccessfully submitted script suggestions to Griffith as well as to David O. Selznick, although Fitzgerald did go on to write intertitles for a 1923 Paramount picture and the scenario for a Clara Bow vehicle, Grit, released in 1924. Far from turning to Hollywood as a last resort, Fitzgerald had been interested in the movie industry from the very outset of his career, and he spent brief periods in Hollywood working on screenwriting projects in early 1927 and late 1931. These forays into the industry were described by him as ‘failures’ in 1937, when he was on the train to Hollywood for his third and final screenwriting stint, which was to affect him, and his work, profoundly. Contrary to the stereotype of the alcoholic Hollywood hack, Fitzgerald's final days in Hollywood were spent in productive work on his final, unfinished, novel, which was to have been an exploration of the inner workings of the film industry – both decent and sordid.

In April 1925, Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his Princeton contemporary, John Peale Bishop, in which he asserted that ‘I’m too much of an egoist and not enough of a diplomat ever to succeed in the movies.’ As early as 1925, Fitzgerald was already conscious of the emerging studio system's lack of democracy – he was aware that his temperament as an artist would not be happily reconciled with the Taylorian mass-production line in which contributions were valued only in so far as they formed part of a process, with little (if any) individual ownership of the created product for the vast majority of contributors. This must have been disheartening advice for Bishop, who was undertaking a stint at Paramount Pictures in New York at the time. But despite knowing this in April 1925, Fitzgerald still took screenwriting jobs in Hollywood on multiple occasions. Unsuited to collaborative authorship, Fitzgerald inevitably struggled with the demands placed upon him as an author in Hollywood.