TV Reviews : Taking Liberties With F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald continues to haunt Hollywood. The latest reincarnation is ignominious: Fitzgerald as a screenwriter so besotted he can’t remember whether he wrote a screenplay that has his name on it.

“Hollywood Detective” (premiering on A&E; tonight at 10) is film - noir satire about a cynical 1930s gumshoe (Tony Peck) who sells story ideas to famous authors tilling the studio orchards. Future episodes deal with William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway.

The concept sounds clever if you can cope with giants of American literature looking like fools. Factually, Hemingway never worked in Hollywood and Fitzgerald, albeit disenchanted, was not the jerk portrayed in tonight’s episode, “The Muse.”

At least actor Ian Buchanan looks a little like Fitzgerald, but writer W. Reed Moran and director William Tannen squeeze every cliche, creating more torpor than style.

Peck catches the Hammett-like veneer of the tough private eye and his sister, Cecelia Peck, is the doomed heroine forced to go Anglo and don a blonde wig to make it in Hollywood. (Ironically, Tony and Cecelia Peck’s father is Gregory Peck, who portrayed Fitzgerald much better himself in the movie “The Beloved Infidel.”)

The performer who steals the show is a delicious bit player, Britt Sady, whose sultry tipsiness is over the top.