Love of the Last Tycoon: The Authorized Text (No Series) by F. Scott Fitzgerald Page A

always—or the structure would melt down like gradual butter.
    Another hour passed. Dreams hung in fragments at the far end of the room, suffered analysis, passed—to be dreamed in crowds, or else discarded. The end was signalled by two tests, a character man and a girl. After the rushes, which had a tense rhythm of their own, the tests were smooth and finished; the observers settled in their chairs; Stahr’s foot slipped to the floor. Opinions were welcome. One of the technical men let it be known that he would willingly cohabit with the girl; the rest were indifferent.
    “Somebody sent up a test of that girl two years ago. She must be getting around—but she isn’t getting any better. But the man’s good. Can’t we use him as the old Russian Prince in Steppes ?”
    “He is an old Russian Prince,” said the casting director, “but he’s ashamed of it. He’s a Red. And that’s one part he says he wouldn’t play.”
    “It’s the only part he could play,” said Stahr.
    The lights went on. Stahr rolled his gum into its wrapper and put it in an ash-tray. He turned questioningly to his secretary.
    “The processes on Stage 2,” she said.
     
    He looked in briefly at the processes, moving pictures taken against a background of other moving pictures by an ingenious device. There was a meeting in Marcus’ office on the subject of Manon with a happy ending, and Stahr had his say on that as he had had before—it had been making money without a happy ending for a century and a half. He was obdurate—at this time in the afternoon he was at his most fluent and the opposition faded into another subject: they would lend a dozen stars to the benefit for those the quake had made homeless at Long Beach. In a sudden burst of giving, five of them all at once made up a purse of twenty-five thousand dollars. They gave well, but not as poor men give. It was not charity.
    At his office there was word from the oculist to whom he had sent Pete Zavras that the camera man’s eyes were 19-20: approximately perfect. He had written a letter that Zavras was having photostated. Stahr walked around his office cockily while Miss Doolan admired him. Prince Agge had dropped in to thank him for his afternoon on the sets, and while they talked, a cryptic word came from a supervisor that some writers named Tarleton had “found out” and were about to quit.
    “These are good writers,” Stahr explained to Prince Agge, “and we don’t have good writers out here.”
    “Why, you can hire anyone!” exclaimed his visitor in surprise.
    “Oh, we hire them, but when they get out here, they’re not good writers—so we have to work with the material we have.”
    “Such as what?”
    “Anybody that’ll accept the system and stay decently sober—we have all sorts of people—disappointed poets, one-hit playwrights—college girls—we put them on an idea in pairs, and if it slows down, we put two more writers working behind them. I’ve had as many as three pairs working independently on the same idea.”
    “Do they like that?”
    “Not if they know about it. They’re not geniuses—none of them could make as much any other way. But these Tarletons are a husband and wife team from the East—pretty good playwrights. They’ve just found out they’re not alone on the story and it shocks them—shocks their sense of unity—that’s the word they’ll use.”
    “But what does make the—the unity?”
    Stahr hesitated—his face was grim except that his eyes twinkled.
    “I’m the unity,” he said. “Come and see us again.”
    He saw the Tarletons. He told them he liked their work, looking at Mrs. Tarleton as if he could read her handwriting through the typescript. He told them kindly that he was taking them from the picture and putting them on another, where there was less pressure, more time. As he had half expected, they begged to stay on the first picture, seeing a quicker credit, even though it was shared with others. The system was