Throughout F. Scott Fitzgerald's courtship of Zelda Fitzgerald, the 1918-1920 Spanish Flu raged in the United States. About 28% of the 105 million U.S. population became infected, and nearly 1 million Americans died. This pandemic and mass quarantines disrupted the couple's romance and hampered their ability to see one another. Most cinematic depictions of the Fitzgeralds' courtship ignore these historical events as well as omit any reference to the violent race riots convulsing cities in the Deep South, including Montgomery, Alabama, during the Red Summer of 1919.
Most biographical films about Zelda Fitzgerald obscure or elide her obsession with the Confederate States of America and her Lost Cause beliefs. As an adult, Zelda often attended weekly meetings of the Daughters of the Confederacy. According to Nancy Milford's 1970 biography, Zelda became increasingly reactionary and extreme in her beliefs as she aged. Much like Ernest Hemingway's second wife Pauline Pfeiffer, Zelda Fitzgerald became "taken with the idea of fascism as a way of holding everything together, of ordering the masses." When an acquaintance visited Zelda in March 1947, she declared that fascism served "to keep things from falling apart and to keep the finer things from being lost or extinguished."
Circa 2014, both Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson were reportedly involved in separate biographical film projects about Zelda Fitzgerald. However, when a social media backlash occurred over Zelda's neo-Confederate and Lost Cause beliefs amid the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, those two film projects were either delayed or abandoned.