Look outJennifer Lawrence,Scarlett Johanssonis also developing her ownZelda Fitzgeraldbiopic. Two of Hollywood’s major young power players have set their sights on bringing the life of the polymath artist and Jazz Age icon to the big screen. And you know what? Good. If it took 70 years after the death of the writer, painter, socialite, and wife/muse ofF. Scott Fitzgeraldto finally make a movie about her fascinating, extraordinary life, then let’s go ahead and make two.
Unfortunately, Zelda is most famously known as her husband’s great muse, but she was also a gifted novelist and artist in her own right. Feeling obscured by her husband’s legendary literary career, Zelda famously struggled to define herself through her own works throughout the course of their rocky, passionate marriage before ultimately falling to her obsessive nature and descending into madness. Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1930 and spent the rest of her days in and out of the sanitarium, always in a creative tango with her F. Scott, until she died in the Highland Hospital fire of 1943.
Last week, we learned thatLawrence is developing an adaptationofNancy Milford’s bestselling novelZeldawithRon Howard. Today,THRreports that Johansson’s vehicle has joined that project on the fast track. TitledThe Beautiful and the Damnedafter celebrated the F. Scott Fitzgerald novelThe Beautiful and Damned– a semi-fictionalized account of his volatile marriage with Zelda, Johansson’s film has backing from Millenium Films with the cooperation of the Fitzgerald estate. The script comes fromHanna Weg(Septembers of Shiraz), and Millenium is still talking to a handful of finalists for the directing gig.
Along with that cooperation comes some newly discovered transcripts from one of the sanitariums where she spent her later years that support the common speculation F. Scott Fitzgerald “misappropriated” Zelda’s ideas and used them as his own. That sort of access to those kinds of primary sources historical documents is a definite leg-up for any biopic.
Here’s what Millennium president Mark Gill had to say about Zelda’s story:
“It was the height of the Jazz Age, so you have all of that glamor and sophistication and living large. But you also have the massive drama of fly high, crash hard,” he said. “She was massively ahead of her time, and she took a beating for it. He stole her ideas and put them in his books. The marriage was a co-dependency from hell with a Jazz Age soundtrack.”
Whatever project hits screens first, Zelda is about to have a big rennaisance and it’s about time. Personally, I’m a little more interested in Johannson’s at this point thanks to those first-hand accounts, but both young women are fine young actresses and industry powerhouses, so it will be interesting to see how these projects unfold.
