The film Genius arrives in theaters this month after an exceptionally long gestation. It started life nearly half a century ago as A. Scott Berg’s 1971 Princeton undergraduate thesis, about the book editor Max Perkins (played by Colin Firth, who leads an all-star cast that also includes Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Guy Pearce, and Laura Linney,), who championed F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, among other literary lions. Says Berg, “Before Perkins, book editors had largely mechanical jobs: signing the book and preparing the manuscript for the printer. This one person changed the course of great American literature by working closely with authors to shape their manuscripts.”
As an undergrad, Berg achieved fast fame in Princeton literary circles as “this Fitzgerald freak going through all the Fitzgerald stuff in the library,” and became fixated on Perkins. He approached English professor and Ernest Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker, who unlocked a drawer filled with Hemingway-Perkins correspondence, while warning, “If [the writer’s widow] Mary Hemingway ever hears about this, I will kill you.”
Another academic windfall followed: the Scribner publishing family gave most of their office archives to the Princeton library. It contained letters Max Perkins sent to his authors, which ultimately inspired Berg’s thesis.
One of Berg’s professors suggested, “This isn’t really a thesis. This is the first draft of a book.” So, after graduation, Berg moved in with his parents in Los Angeles and spent seven years “blitzing away” on a Smith Corona portable typewriter writing a full-scale biography.
When Berg’s father, TV producer Dick Berg, had dinner with then Doubleday editor Tom Congdon, he mentioned that his son was working on a biography of a person no one’s heard of: Max Perkins. Congdon slammed his fist on the table, exclaiming, “Max Perkins is the reason I became a book editor!” He went straight from dinner to the Berg residence, burst into Scott’s room, and told him he was going to bring his Max Perkins book to life, which turned out to be a wise move. Published by Dutton in 1978, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius became a best-seller and won a National Book Award.
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A biography of a book editor was still hardly an obvious choice for Hollywood. But that did not deter playwright and screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator, Skyfall) who, after he sold his first screenplay, for Any Given Sunday, spent all of that money on Berg’s book. “It was never about fame, it was never about money—it was about taking a risk on something so unlikely, but I had to do it,” says Logan, who thought “the relationship between Perkins and Wolfe was one of the most compelling dances of death I had ever read.”
“They became so close,” Berg says, “that Perkins’s marriage began to suffer, and Wolfe’s love affair with Aline Bernstein fell apart.” In a way, it was as if the editing of books were a secondary part of the editor-writer relationship.
“It would just be such an act of bad faith to create something that Scott wasn’t proud of,” Logan says, reflecting on the 15 years he spent toiling with Berg to create a story and script that satisfied them both. “Scott was very patient with his time. He was in the middle of writing [his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography] Lindbergh, but he always took the time to sit down with me. That generosity of spirit is something that’s very Perkins-like.”
Berg says the experience of going on set was downright surreal. “They were doing one of my favorite scenes in the movie: Guy Pearce as F. Scott Fitzgerald coming to Perkins’s office asking for some money. Perkins has to explain to him that Gatsby didn’t sell and Scribner’s just can’t give him any more money. Max Perkins just quietly writes him a personal check and hands it to him. Watching them film it was the strangest and most wonderful sensation. My heart was just pounding.”
