F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the great writers of the twentieth century, and his debut novel, written while he was still in college, made him an instant celebrity. But by the end of his life he'd left the high-flying transatlantic literary life of New York and Paris for Hollywood. Despite contributions to Marie Antoinette and Gone With the Wind, when he died at the age of 44, he had just a single screen credit, for a long forgotten film.

His years in Hollywood weren't wasted. His unfinished novel, first released as The Last Tycoon, was a fascinating portrait of studio-era Hollywood, and his collection of Pat Hobby stories, about a Hollywood hack on the fringes of the business, are a great time capsule, not to mention they suggest a lot about how Fitzgerald felt about his last years.

Of his four completed novels, two are bona fide masterpieces, and between them and his dozens of short stories more than 20 films have been inspired by his writing and life. But even high-profile, big-budget attempts to adapt Fitzgerald have mostly fallen flat.

A 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and scripted by Francis Ford Coppola bombed despite massive hype (now, it feels ponderous and dated -- not to the twenties, which would at least have been appropriate, but to the seventies). Elia Kazan's last movie, a 1976 adaptation of The Last Tycoon starring Robert De Niro, was ignored by critics, awards committees, and audiences alike. To be fair, 1954's The Last Time I Saw Paris, loosely based on Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" and starring a young Elizabeth Taylor and Donna Reed, was a soapy success. But like the writer himself, his stories and characters have never been a good fit with Hollywood.

And now The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a lesser story from an era when he was cranking out magazine pieces for money while focusing his greater talents on his novels, is getting the full superstar treatment, and looks to be the first Fitzgerald adaptation to have a shot at being nominated for Best Picture. But to become a prestige project, it had to abandon most of the original story.

There are a host of changes, from meddling and minor (Button's wife Hildegarde is now named Daisy, Baltimore is now New Orleans) to substantial. In Fitzgerald's story, Hildegard, whom he doted on as a young beauty but finds tiresome in her old age, moves to Italy while he's at Harvard. That's it -- not another line is spent on her, and the rest of the story focuses on Benjamin's strained relationship with his son, as he becomes an adolescent and then a child. In the film, Daisy and Benjamin's romance stretches from childhood into old age (or the other way around), and Benjamin leaves Daisy for the sake of their daughter Caroline. Deathbed reunion and weepy postcards to his daughter -- all added. Fitzgerald's slight tale of magical realism is not a love story; the film is nothing but.

So if it does work, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is both a hit and an artistic triumph, it still won't quite be Fitzgerald's triumph, it'll be someone else's. And that may be the final sad coda to his Hollywood misadventure. Until the next time, of course; Baz Luhrmann recently bought the rights to try The Great Gatsby again.

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