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The Last Tycoon: A Last for Kazan and Fitzgerald
In Harold Pinter's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, the visceral director, Elia Kazan poured his own psyche as finale. Cerebral spaces of Robert De Niro's Monroe Stahr structure Kazan's Mise en scène as ample dais for culminated personal themes. As a theatrical foundation in Kazan's early life he wrote in his autobiography that his "work would be to turn the inner events of the psyche into a choreography of external life, {A Life}. The inner events of Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon are concerned most with what Kazan said was the "tragic decline and fall of his central character," {Fiction, Film & Fitzgerald}. The producer persona of Monroe Stahr (Robert De Niro) illuminates the center of a story that deconstructs the bad seeds of a classical Hollywood system. The film was made at a time when, as producer David Brown said about the seventies, "Hollywood's future was questionable." An industry dependant on artistic innovation always has a questionable future, but it can be savored by nostalgia. Harold Pinter's script embraced nostalgic status of a tycoon such as Stahr like it was a guided tour of tinsel town travesty. Stahr's name is first mentioned showing a sequestered office space in the far left hand corner of the frame. Kazan immediately positions the relationship visually of the audience as tourists in the protagonist's ego, kept sacred atop the studio substratum. With the infrastructure laid bare in the next scene the tourist group is placed in the frame overwhelmed by a massive, empty studio lot. Here the use of space and darkness swallow the tourists into a framed void. They become the only subject lit on screen and thus the only group of characters to identify with from the onset. This film was made for the ghosts and patriarchs of Hollywood; a caste totally alienated from a tourist group crowd and this shot is Kazan's way of saying that. Read the rest of this essay at the links provided.
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Contributor's Note
When the past meets future for Jason, the moment is fueled by a creative background in music, writing, film and philosophy providing a nexus of the complex world to come. He is currently a freelance writer and ghostwriter of books, articles and screenplays.
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The Last Tycoon
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