Two vaunted pieces of NYC culture are the 1972 movie The Godfather and the 1996 Broadway musical Rent. This year Rent celebrated its 25th anniversary and, next year, The Godfather will celebrate its 50th.
One is about the mafia in the 1940s and '50s; the other is about young people in the 1990s. While both works couldn't be more different, they remain beloved classics since they are brilliantly crafted stories about the city as a place of great opportunity and great danger. In short, both stories are about NYC as a place where the American dream thrives -- if it doesn't kill you first.
There is a new genre of info-tainment that's becoming more popular: books, documentaries, podcasts, and movies about the creation of classic works of entertainment. Sometimes, even not that classic.
And this year is no different. There is a new movie coming soon about Jonathan Larson, the creator of Rent, based on a meta-musical he wrote about the making of Rent called tick ... tick ... Boom. It's directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Also, there is a new book called Leave the Gun, Take the Cannolis about the making of The Godfather. You should read this fascinating excerpt about how Marlon Brando came to play -- and discover -- the character of Don Vito Corleone, one of the most iconic performances in cinema history.
Whenever you encounter a masterpiece, a perfectly realized work of art, it's easy to believe that it somehow grew out of the earth, emerged complete from the ground, like some kind of beautiful plant. But no. There was time when their creators would struggling, working hard, putting the pieces together, re-working and re-writing and re-doing it all, probably fighting feelings of failure and doubt, doing their level best to create something good -- and they had no idea at the time that they were creating something that would resonate across time. They just wanted to get it done and get it done as best they could. History would take it from there.
Last year saw the release of two movies based on musicals -- In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and tick ... tick ... BOOM!by Jonathan Larson (the movie of which was actually directed Miranda) -- that would never have been made had their respective creators not then, for their next shows, created arguably the two greatest musicals of the last 25 years -- Rent and Hamilton.
Call them precursors, forerunners, warm-up-acts, playing in the minors before the majors, what have you -- the small things that came before the big things, the good things before the truly GREAT things. Their first shows got them attention and acclaim. Their next shows vaulted them into cultural history.
Think Reservoir Dogs before Pulp Fiction, War of the Worlds before Citizen Kane, Llewyn Davis playing before Bob Dylan at the Gaslight, you get the idea. Before something really great, you have to have something pretty good -- but the pretty good won't get remembered unless followed by something really great.
Got it?
Between 1919 and 1941, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote four novels (plus one uncompleted one) and numerous short stories. The voice of his generation, doyen of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald would be remembered today as a talented writer who was a product of his era had he not written what is arguably the greatest American novel of the 20th century -- The Great Gatsby. Gatsby's legacy towers over American literature, it's themes of the emptiness of the American dream, the false promise of wealth buying love and happiness, and how we can never recreate our idealized pasts even though we are haunted by them have made it truly timeless.
Every time I read Gatsby I'm just amazed by what a perfect, gorgeous, and powerful story it is -- and how its creation was nothing short of a miracle.
So what came before it? Even Fitzgerald had to have his own warm up act -- in this case, two novels: his youthful 1919 debut, This Side of Paradise, and his 1922 dark satire The Beautiful and Damned.
When Gatsby turns 100 in 2025, there will doubtless be myriad articles, documentaries, think pieces celebrating its greatness. It'll be a Gatsby melee. There will probably be a deluge of analysis of this seminal American work, this forever masterpiece. As well there should be!
But The Beautiful and Damned is being, no surprise, critically overlooked, ignored, on its 100th anniversary. It's like the ugly sibling being slighted for the gorgeous one.
Thus it's left to yours truly to celebrate the 100 anniversary of Gatsby's precursor -- call it the Great Precursor -- The Beautiful and Damned, the novel you read constantly thinking, "And right after this book, he wrote The Great Gatsby!"
The novel is about married couple living a dissolute life in nineteen-teens NYC. Although Fitzgerald is mostly associated with the 1920s (and this novel was published in March, 1922), it's story is set between 1913 and 1921, bookending the First World War. The orphaned Anthony Patch is the grandson of a wealthy, irascible industrialist who spends his days sleeping and his evening partying -- and waiting for his grandfather to die so that he will inherit tens of millions of dollars (essentially the equivalent of a billion or more today). Anthony meets, through his friends, a debutante named Gloria from Kansas City. They marry and, together, they spend their days drinking and spending money they don't really have, alienating people and getting into trouble -- before Anthony is drafted and heads south for basic training for the First World War. Adultery and hangovers ensue, and a couple ugly twists rob Anthony of his inheritance -- and sanity. The ending is a real shock.
It's an ugly, tragic tale but it's also a darkly funny book. Where Gatsby is elegiac, Beautiful and Damned is nasty. Fitzgerald does not get sentimental or deep here -- it's almost documentary like in showing and mocking the bad behavior of the ideal, mindless rich (who are never as rich as they think).
When I read this book in college, my professor said, "It's a very bad book." That took me by surprise since, in school, we're supposed to read the great works by the masters -- not one of their minor, or even bad, works. I didn't think the book bad at all -- it's entertaining, amusing, and quite appealing to the sarcastic mind, but it's also overlong and overwritten, clearly the work of a young writer trying to prove himself, favoring verbosity over restraint.
Still, I recommend reading The Beautiful and Damned on its centenary year since, while it's a product of its time, it's a time that reverberates today -- and, yes, because it's the one that came BEFORE, the Great Precursor to The Great Gatsby, the seeds of the timeless greatness that flowered afterwards.
P.S. I hesitated making this comparison earlier but here goes now: another way to put it is, The Beautiful and Damned is like the person you seriously dated before you met your spouse. Barack Obama, who lived in NYC during law school before making his career in Chicago, once called our city "The great love of your life that you never married."
