Monroe Stahr, the young hero of Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, is meant to represent the last of a breed; he's an individualistic artist-businessman who runs his movie studio like a small grocery store…. [As] Fitzgerald sees him, Stahr has the heart and soul of an artist without the crazy weaknesses of artists. (p. 216)

Harold Pinter is said to have spent a year and a half working on the script [for "The Last Tycoon"]—presumably in reverent noodling, since he has rearranged the book's dialogue and hasn't added much. Kazan has been quoted as saying, "I didn't change any of Pinter's words." This is reverence piled upon reverence. If the movie is, as I think, a tragedy—a series of disastrous mistakes by intelligent, gifted, well-meaning people—probably the first mistake was to approach the book cap in hand, and the next was to hire Pinter. (p. 217-...