put it, unlike Yasujiro Ozu, "Huston wouldn't think of cutting away from Sam Spade and

Brigid O' Shaughnessy to a shot of the coat-rack in the corner of the office unless the hats

on it have] some [narrative] significance" (qtd. in Luhr, "Tracking" 162). And yet, when

the telephone-bell rings in darkness, the camera does not cut to Spade. Even though the

scene has been choreographed, it has a cinephiliac appeal. In that moment, the narrative

fades, and the stuff of cinema takes the foreground.

 "What Was the Nickel for?"

 On December 21, 1940, a forty-four-year-old unemployed screenwriter died of a

heart attack. Hollywood had not been good for him. Like many others who preceded him,

he said he "came to Hollywood with the resignation of a ghost assigned to a haunted

house" (Zollo xii). And like the countless others who would surely follow, he was a

failure, an embarrassment-especially so since he had been quite successful as a novelist

before taking the train out to Hollywood. But unlike all the others, he had the unique

opportunity to return from the dead to paint an episodic, albeit incomplete, portrait of the

studio system. Nearly a year after his untimely death, around the time of The Maltese

Falcon's release, his college friend published his unfinished novel, which offers an

insider's perspective on Hollywood. But while The Love of the Last Tycoon may be one

of the finest novels about Hollywood, it is certainly not its complete tale. Projected as a

series of episodes, F. Scott Fitzgerald's sketch of the studio system is composed of

several quick snapshots that do not add up to a linear narrative. Due to their brevity, the

tale is told "only dimly and in flashes" (3). In Fitzgerald's view of Hollywood, moments

are more significant than the plot that contains them. When we zoom in, "the whole