Via one of my Facebook friends (language, two small photos potentially NSFW): Storyboards for Michael Bay's "The Great Gatsby," starring Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis from "Armageddon" as Nick and Gatsby, Megan Fox (what's the correct punctuation for a massive eye-roll?) as Daisy and a wolf as Meyer Wolfsheim.
This document is thankfully a joke, but Australian director Baz Luhrmann announced last year he would be adapting Fitzgerald's book yet again for the big screen. (Apparently this is also a plot line on "Entourage" with Martin Scorsese the fictional director; judging by his adaptation of THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, he would be faithful to the book without really capturing its essence. I gave up on "Entourage" ages ago, but if it were true you know Leonardo DiCaprio would be playing Gatsby... yikes.) Luhrmann is a love-it-or-hate-it director, so you already know where you'll fall on his take; you can probably figure out where I stand given that I didn't just call the news "the end of the world as we know it." (Really, Sarvas? ...Really?)
Luhrmann's as well-equipped as anyone to handle it. All three adaptations of "The Great Gatsby" now available on DVD are, to say the least, frustrating. It's been years since I saw the Redford-Farrow-Waterston adaptation, but I remember it being very slow and Mia Farrow being annoying. The 2000 TV version is weighed down with a confusing performance by unknown-to-yours-truly Brit Toby Stephens, although the casting of Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway is a stroke of genius. And then we have "G," the "urban" version set in the P. Diddy White Party Hamptons -- yes, I Netflixed that on purpose, and I tell you it is not worth your time. (A silent version has been completely lost, and no one cares enough about a 1949 Alan Ladd version to get it on DVD.)
GATSBY seems to break the unwritten Hollywood rule that books get just one shot at the big screen. Bookforum wonders why so many Fitzgerald adaptations aren't very well-regarded, and points out rightly that "the problem might have to do less with the chemistry of movie stars and more with a film culture that insists on seeing [his] stories as swooning romances in the first place." (If anything, last year's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" could have used more romance, or at least more emotion.) According to the Bookforum article, Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart actually wrote to Luhrmann begging him not to make this latest version, but he might just be protecting his legacy from working on the Redford version. But none of the adaptations before can touch the book and there's no reason to believe this one will.
9 hours ago
7 comments:
this is the point when I admit that I don't really like Fitzgerald or Gatsby and everyone gasps.
I think Gatsby gets so many go-rounds as a movie, because it is the movie executives White Whale. All these execs were told by their HS English teachers that is was the great American novel. and they all dream of immortality and receiving cultural respect, which could be achieved by making a beautiful, successful version of Gatsby. but it is impossible. Because Gatsby isn't actually that accessible or universal.
I agree with you, 8yearoldsdude!
THE GREAT GATSBY is a book in which not only do I dislike the protagonist, I also dislike every character I meet, which means I don't enjoy reading the book very much.
It fails the what I will from now on call the meteorite test: if I were to turn the page to read, "And then, they were all killed by a meteorite!", would I be upset? If I were reading the THE GREAT GATSBY, no, no I would not.
Blasphemers!! ... but I think you have a point, 8, that could be extended to directors tackling other "classics" with varying degrees of success. I'm thinking of Peter Bogdanovich making "Daisy Miller" (as described in EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS) with then girlfriend Cybill Shepherd, or Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula," or the Scorsese "Age of Innocence" I mentioned. Maybe it's just a cultural resume-filler.
I love The Great Gatsby. Mia Farrow seems at first like the perfect actress to play Daisy, but for some reason her performance doesn't work. A good friend of mine who teaches 11th-grade English at an all-girls high school told me that she showed the Redford/Farrow version to her class and her students referenced Mia Farrow's "GATSBY?????????" line reading everytime they needed to express incredulity for the entire rest of the school year. So it goes.
The best movie adaptations tend to be based on plot-heavy page turners, like The Godfather and Gone With the Wind. Books with first-person narrators are difficult to adapt, as are books like The Great Gatsby, A River Runs Through It, and The Remains of the Day, all of which are light on plot but full of conflicted characters and beautiful descriptive passages.
I agree that Paul Rudd was a stroke of genius, but Nick Carraway is probably an easier character to cast. I never could buy Redford as Gatsby because he was a little too pretty and urbane and immaculately groomed; the 'real' Gatsby was a war veteran and a criminal who once killed a man. In some ways, a young, Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis would have been an almost ideal casting decision. Gatsby isn't a dandy, he's a street kid posing as a gentleman. That's a distinction too many of its adaptors have overlooked.
All I know is that I found the theatrical adaptation of Gatsby that I saw once desperately disappointing.
Also, I didn't actually like the book very much either. But I was 14, and I should probably give it another try one of these days.
Time to start requiring commenters to pass the anti-spambot tests?
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