Beschreibung:

FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT. Typed contract signed ("F. Scott Fitzgerald"), an agreement between Fitzgerald and Metro Pictures Corp. in which the movie studio buys the right for $2500 to the story "Head and Shoulders," [New York], 25 February 1920. 6 pages, folio, double-spaced, carbon copy on onion skin paper, two punch holes at top of each margin, the blue back laid in loose, signed by Fitzgerald and the president of the studio. FITZGERALD'S FIRST SALE TO THE MOVIES This contact marks the young author's first sale of his writings to the motion picture industry. Metro agrees to use "Head and Shoulders," which had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post just four days earlier (his first story in the magazine), only in a film and within three years or they would lose the rights and the $2500 paid to Fitzgerald. The movie was released in 1920 under the title The Chorus Girl's Romance ; the story was collected in Flappers and Philosophers (September 1920). This sale took place before Fitzgerald's first book, This Side of Paradise , was published (26 March) and before his marriage to Zelda (3 April). "His first movie sale encouraged him to expect that such windfalls would continue. New York was the right place to be a winner, and Fitzgerald fueled the intoxication of success with bootleg liquor. He flashed large bills and spent them carelessly...Fitzgerald responded to money by showing contempt for it...it seemed to him during his first success that more money would always be forthcoming" (M.J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life Of F. Scott Fitzgerald , New York, 1993, p. 132).