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Entertainment October 26, 2016
Two of Hollywood’s leading ladies are racing against each other to complete their rivaling biopics from the Jazz Age. A-listers Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lawrence are about to be thrown into a comparison battle, as the two stars are set to portray the late Zelda Fitzgerald in dueling films centered on the jazz icon’s life, schizophrenia and career.
With these two powerful women, it’s no doubt that these movies will garner lots of attention. Both Lawrence and Johansson made it on Forbes’ 2016 list of highest-earning female movie stars. For the second year in a row, the girl on fire has topped the list as the world’s highest-paid actress with $46 million, which is largely thanks to her starring role in “The Hunger Games.” Johansson placed at number three with $25 million, behind Melissa McCarthy.
Lawrence’s project, titled “Zelda,” has snagged Oscar-winning director Ron Howard and producer Allison Shearmur, the former Lionsgate executive behind the “The Hunger Games” series. The screenplay was written by “The White Queen” writer, Emma Frost, and was adapted from Nancy Milford’s best-selling biography of the same name. Milford’s biography chronicles Zelda’s experience being married to a famous novelist and her desire to define herself through her art.
Johansson’s project, on the other hand, is titled “The Beautiful and the Damned,” based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald classic of the same name, which is a chronicle of his marriage to Zelda. Although the film has yet to snag a director, Millennium Films (the film’s financer) has managed to secure the cooperation of the Fitzgerald estate, says The Hollywood Reporter. It will also incorporate newly discovered transcripts from a sanatorium Zelda Fitzgerald was confined in, claiming that her husband misappropriated her ideas as his own.
Although it has been decades since Zelda Fitzgerald’s passing, “the first American Flapper” has been all the rage in Hollywood. Aside from the competing films fronted by Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson, Amazon also has its own series, “Z: The Beginning of Everything,” starring Christina Ricci.
Until today, Zelda remains an enduring and compelling figure because she represents various personas, says Millennium president Mark Gill.
While many people know Zelda Fitzgerald as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s muse, Zelda had her own life as a flapper. However, after having her first and only child at 21, Zelda’s influence on her husband’s writing had become less positive. The couple grew distant so Zelda sought for fulfillment in other venues. In 1928, she trained to be a professional ballerina, but after a few years of intense ballet work, her health declined.
According to PBS, this is when she suffered her first mental breakdown, which was diagnosed as “nervous exhaustion” in 1930. She was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and ended up spending the rest of her life in and out of hospitals, where she sought relief through various forms of artistic expression. She wrote novels like “Save Me the Waltz” and also painted vibrantly colored, fantastical pieces.
Throughout her life, Zelda Fitzgerald was not only an icon of the Jazz Age as a flapper, she also aimed to create various identities independent from her husband and the societal constraints placed on her. And as Mark Gill says, “She was massively ahead of her time, and she took a beating for it. He stole her ideas and put them in his books. The marriage was a co-dependency from hell with a Jazz Age soundtrack.”
