As Susan King points out in the Los Angeles Times, David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that first appeared in Collier's magazine in 1922, represents the latest development in an intense, dysfunctional love affair between Hollywood and Fitzgerald that goes right back to the days when the author was alive and the hottest thing in publishing. King quotes Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor of Fitzgerald's published notebooks and correspondence, as saying that Fitzgerald, who claimed to have come up with the idea of a man born old and growing younger through the years based on a remark by Mark Twain, was "probably attracted to this [fantasy] form by its tension between romanticism and realism, for the challenge of fantasy is to make events convincing." But maybe he was just looking for a fresh spin on the way that youth slips away, which was one of the writer's obsessions for all his short life. Fitzgerald, who from the evidence of those notebooks and letters, had begun complaining that his best years were past him as early as his twenties, was once so great a literary celebrity that he and his wife, Zelda, were given screen tests and offered the chance to star in a silent version of his novel This Side of Paradise. They turned the offer down; Gore Vidal has written that "like so many romantics, then and now, the Fitzgeralds did not want to go through the grim boring business of becoming movie stars. Rather they wanted to live as if they were inside a movie... Each lived long enough and suffered enough to realize that movies of that sort are to be made or seen, not lived. But by then she was in a sanitarium full-time and he was a movie hack."

When Fitzerald returned to Hollywood in the '30s to work as a screenwriter, he was a has-been in need of money; his private life was a mess and his career had begun to slide downward with the commercial failure of his greatest book, The Great Gatsby.

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Baz Luhrmann, seen in the photo at the right maintaining an even strain while trying to fend off the slavering zombie armies who wanted their money back after a screening of his latest epic, Australia, wants you to know that he's not going anywhere, so you might as well just knock it off with the death threats. "We're making people cry," said Luhrmann in defense of his film, a two-hour, forty-six-minute celebration of the complete immobility of Nicole Kidman's facial muscles. (Try anything! Wire her up to jumper cables and run five hundred volts through her. Have Tom Cruise dragged onto the set and let a kangaroo kick him in the nuts. She won't pout and she won't smirk. The woman's a sphinx!) "I know it," he said in defense of the claim about the crying, "because they write to us." (Actually, nobody doubted that the movie is making people cry. We're just open to the possibility that it had something to do with thoughts about what else they could have done with the evening.) "But," he added, "there are those that don't get it. A lot of the film scientists don't get it. And it's not just that that they don't get it, but they hate it and they hate me, and they think I'm the black hole of cinema. They say, 'He shouldn't have made it, and he should die.'" The problem, as Luhrmann sees it, is that the film scientist community tends to be between the ages of 18 and 39 and likes their movies more formulaic than he can supply. "This is not a romantic comedy for 40-year-old women or action movies for 17-year-old boys, and that's not OK with some people. It's not OK for people to come eat at the same table of cinema. But you look at movies like Gone With the Wind and Old Hollywood classics, and they don't fit in any box. Corny Hollywood movies from the '40s freak out (the film scientists)."

To combat this problem, Luhrmann hopes, on his next project, to abandon the corny old '40s and jumpback twenty years: he's planning to film F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

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That Guy! tends to focus on beloved or quirky character actors, but there's a different species of That Guy! who's just as worthy of attention: the so-called "working famous". These are actors and actresses who aren't especially noteworthy for character parts, quirky looks, or distinctive voices; they're normal-looking men and women who seem like they're perfectly capable of filling leading roles, but never quite make it to the upper echelons of stardom and spend long and often rich careers constantly working in Hollywood without ever becoming household names. Scott Wilson, one of our favorite examples of the working famous, seemed like he was destined for superstardom; after taking up acting more or less on whim after hitch-hiking to Los Angeles from his native Georgia, he starred in two groundbreaking films at the age of twenty-five. . .

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