Fitzgerald biography pbs tv

Filmmaker DeWitt Sage answers questions about directing American Masters – F. Scott Fitzgerald: Winter Dreams.

Q: Do you agree with the several end-of-millennium surveys that rank F.

Scott Fitzgerald as the most important or one of the most important American writers of the 20th century?

DeWitt Sage: No, I personally don’t for the simple reason that I have not read the competition thoroughly enough.

Certainly I think that F. Scott is a great writer from two major standpoints. First, he had the talent as a writer and editor of his own writing to make the reader feel the mood, the emotional and physical atmosphere of any place.

He could literally make you feel the air of a city, a room, a relationship. That takes enormous talent, in my opinion, and furthermore he had an innate sense of the musicality of language which evokes the setting or the emotional landscape poetically, often visually.

Q: Visually?

Like a screenplay?

D