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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