Captain Phillips and The Hunger Games screenwriter Billy Ray is set to adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final and unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, into a series for HBO. The 1930s story, inspired by the life of film producer Irving Thalberg, follows a studio exec rising to power who soon has to face his own mentor — a character Fitzgerald originally based on MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer. This isn’t the first time The Last Tycoon has been adapted for screen: A 1976 movie written by Nobel Prize–winning playwright Harold Pinter starred Robert De Niro.
