F Scott Fitzgerald Classic Works
Keesha Ondieki
F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is widely recognized as a literary masterwork. Yet as even the book's editor, Maxwell Perkins, said to Fitzgerald about a draft of the 1925 novel, the title character "is somewhat vague."
Hazy doesn't work in cinema, so when director Baz Luhrmann decided to bring "Gatsby" to the screen, he and his creative team went on the filmmaking equivalent of an anthropological dig. The goal: unearth what was left unsaid in Fitzgerald's slender tale of Jay Gatsby, a millionaire bootlegger, and his unrequited love for a married socialite, Daisy Buchanan.
The film, opening Friday, overflows with all the touches you'd expect from the director of "Moulin Rouge!" -- elaborate production and costume design, modern music in a period setting, theatrical acting -- while hitting the seminal scenes and lines in Fitzgerald's classic.
But Luhrmann recognized the danger of missing "Gatsby's" emotional forest for all of the novel's expositional trees. So he, co-screenwriter Craig Pearce and a cast headed by Leonardo DiCaprio (who plays Gatsby), Carey Mulligan (Daisy) and Tobey Maguire (narrator Nick Carraway) looked for clues wherever they could be found -- and then came to their own storytelling conclusions.
Luhrmann delved into Fitzgerald's life, letters and other writings, ultimately relying heavily on "Trimalchio" -- an early draft of "Gatsby" -- and biographies of his wife, Zelda, whom the novelist described as the first American flapper. One of Daisy's lines comes from a note the novelist sent to his early love, Ginevra King.
When the source material left some questions unanswered, Luhrmann followed his own hunches. A case in point: The novel suggests that Gatsby, a former soldier, penned a heartbreaking letter to Daisy on her wedding day. The book never reveals the contents, but its impact on Daisy is profound.
Luhrmann and his team decided that the missive was Gatsby's confession of undying love in a relationship doomed by his poverty and set out his thoughts to Daisy. "You see my uniform hid the truth that I was poor," the letter reads in the film's imagination, its lines meticulously inked with a turn-of-the-century fountain pen on vintage paper (in handwriting that mimicked Fitzgerald's, no less).
The full note never appears on screen, but the fact that Luhrmann felt compelled to create it in such detail speaks to the director's attention to detail and the intricacies of his creative embellishments.
"I have one duty -- to the best of my ability to captain the storytelling team, and to tell and reveal the story," said the 50-year-old Luhrmann, who followed his Oscar-nominated "Moulin Rouge!" with the critical and commercial disappointment "Australia." "I set out to reveal 'The Great Gatsby,' but I also set out to do a movie of it."
While Gatsby's famous bashes are even more excessive in Luhrmann's imagination than in the novel, with fireworks choreographed to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," the director said he labored to keep the story intimate and immersive.
He filmed several sequences in long takes, as if "The Great Gatsby" were live theater, and shot it in 3-D; the stereoscopic technology, Luhrmann said, heightens the film's emotions, moving the audience from spectators to participants. "It was our poetic glue," the director said of 3-D.
The director briefly needed his own adhesive to keep the project from falling apart. Worried about its budget, Sony Pictures backed out (the film was ultimately co-produced by Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow), and numerous production delays, some tied to weather, postponed the film's release from last fall to May.
Luhrmann began to consider adapting the novel after listening to it as a recorded book while traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway after finishing 2001's "Moulin Rouge!" But it took a while to figure out how to translate it into a cinematic language that preserved Fitzgerald's voice.
His answer, and one of the film's most notable departures from the novel, is revealed as soon as the movie starts. Traumatized by all he has witnessed, Nick is convalescing in a sanitarium. A doctor prescribes that he write about what happened in West and East Egg, the respective New York homes of Gatsby and Daisy, and Nick's recollections become the movie's framing device.
That hurdle behind him, Luhrmann and his team turned their attention to the film's supporting characters: Daisy's husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton); Tom's mistress, Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher); Myrtle's husband, George (Jason Clarke); and Daisy's friend and accomplished golfer Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki). The task, as DiCaprio said, was tying to sort out "the choose-your-own interpretation of who these people are." "What makes 'Gatsby' the book that it is," the actor said, "is that people still have conversations about it."
Luhrmann said that adapting any well-known text will raise someone's dander. And it may not just be his telling of the story that is faulted -- his unconventional musical choices may prove polarizing.
Just as he used songs by Elton John, David Bowie and U2's Bono in "Moulin Rouge!," Luhrmann infused "The Great Gatsby" with tracks from an array of modern musicians -- Florence Welch and Lana Del Rey, plus Kanye West and the husband-and-wife duo of Beyonce and Jay-Z (the last serves as an executive producer).
Not all are rejoicing, however, as publishers and descendants of the writers and artists have come forward with concerns that this will negatively impact the legacies and esteemed quality of these classic works.
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Think Tarzan and the Golden Lion needed a different ending?Perhaps you want to adapt Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet into a graphic novel.Or maybe you want to have a go at incorporating Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" into a virtual choir piece, as composer Eric Whitacre once did before encountering a copyright snag that killed the project.
Novik says that the impulse to re-imagine art is innate. "That kind of process of imagination is just something that our brains do. It doesn't matter what law you put around it, our brains are still going to do it," she says.
Inevitably, the spring of adaptations will bring about bad versions of these classic works. As Blake Hazard, great-granddaughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald, told The New York Times, "I hope people maybe will be energized to do something original with the work, but of course the fear is that there will be some degradation of the text."Miller, who adapted Homer, does worry about the possibility of betraying the texts. But as she was working on Circe, she says, "I came to the understanding that I can't hurt Homer. He's fine. Whatever I do, that's just my response to him. But the original text will be just fine."Besides, she adds, bad versions and good versions of art tend to compel fans to check out what inspired the work in the first place. "I feel like retellings always point you back to the original. You want to listen to both parts of the conversation," Miller says. "All boats rise."
Novik says the opportunity to adapt is necessary for art to advance. "Nobody wakes up and writes a classic work of literature as the first thing they ever set their pen to paper," she says. "You have to make bad art before you can make good art."
An epic portrait of the 19th century American upper class that earned its author a Pulitzer Prize. Newland Archer has it all - he is a lawyer from one of the most respected families in New York, and has a highly desirable marriage with the beautiful May Welland. When May's cousin Ellen, rumoured to have just broken off her marriage with a Polish count, returns to town, Newland finds himself questioning his future. At first, he is simply concerned about the taint that Ellen's scandal might bring upon him - but then he finds himself falling for her, and questioning everything he thought he wanted from life. Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.
The national epic of Ancient Rome, presented here in the John Dryden translation. The Aeneid picks up at the end of The Iliad. Aeneas, a survivor of Troy, flees with a group of Trojans. It has been foretold that he will lead them to a new home, to what will become Rome. Aeneas finds himself caught up in the scheming and machinations of the Gods, and is torn between his duty and his heart. If he is to fulfill his destiny, he must stay focused and determined - but at what cost? Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you high quality, classic works of literature in e-book form. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.
The classic boy-hero of American literature.Impish, daring young Tom Sawyer is the bane of the old, the hero of the young. There were some in his dusty old Mississippi town who believed he would be President, if he escaped a hanging. For wherever there is mischief or adventure, Tom is at the heart of it. During one hot summer, Tom witnesses a murder, runs away to be a pirate, attends his own funeral, rescues an innocent man from the gallows, searches for treasure in a haunted house, foils a devilish plot and discovers a box of gold. But can he escape his nemesis, the villainous Injun Joe?
Sail down the Mississippi with rascally Huck Finn! Huck Finn spits, swears, smokes a pipe and never goes to school. With his too-big clothes and battered straw hat, Huck is in need of 'civilising', and the Widow Douglas is determined to take him in hand. And wouldn't you know, Huck's no-good Pap is also after him and he locks Huck up in his cabin in the woods. But Huck won't stand too much of this, and after a daring escape, he takes off down the Mississppi on a raft with a runaway slave called Jim. But plenty of dangers wait for them along the river -- will they survive and win their freedom?
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