SOURCE: Hudgins, Christopher C. “The Last Tycoon: Elia Kazan's and Harold Pinter's Unsentimental Hollywood Romance.” In Hollywood on Stage: Playwrights Evaluate the Culture Industry, edited by Kimball King, pp. 158-83. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1997.

In the following essay, Hudgins presents an analysis of Pinter's script for The Last Tycoon, characterizing it as an effective study of the Hollywood film industry as revealed through the life of its main character.

Early in the first chapter of The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes these lines for his narrator, Cecilia: “You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt which we reserve for what we don't understand. It can be understood, too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads. And perhaps the closest...