Movies

F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby, is a sacred scroll of twentieth-century America. Millions of people, from young to old will say that this is their favorite book. The author, and his brilliant and eventually insane wife, Zelda, are known as well as if they were not only still alive, but living amongst us. In Europe and the United States, they dwelt among the famous, people like Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Lillian Hellman, and all of these writers went on to write about the Fitzgeralds. Scott and Zelda, and the creatures who inhabit GATSBY, THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED and other Fitzgerald works, are the Twenties Fitzgerald was the man who named it the Jazz Age and our most colorful images of that flamboyant and wealthy era are derived directly from its writings.

Paramount Pictures' new movie of THE GREAT GATSBY is clearly treading on hallowed ground. It is achingly difficult to make a movie from a novel, and no matter how it is done there are bound to be complaints that the written work has been defiled. The two media are so wholly different that of course changes must be made, but when dealing with truly great stories like this, the changes must be made with the ultimate of care. A novel suggests, but a movie must show. The overwhelming response of movie critics has been that GATSBY has been ruined, bastardized into a cheap and insulting nostalgia piece.

Perhaps it is foul play but I could not resist re-reading GATSBY the morning before I went to the movie. It has been ten years since I read it with great admiration and wonder as a book-füled teenager. This time I was filled again with marvel at the accomplishments of the book. GATSBY, as Fitzgerald tells it, is really one of the not only fantastic and unequaled novels, it is one of the greatest of love stories. It says that people often love not the object of their desires, but more deeply desire what that person represents. If your partner is a Queen, you will be a King.

Gatsby's intense fascination for the elusive and wealthy Daisy Buchanan is not simply love. He has wanted Daisy for years, and waited, and built up a millionaire's existence for her because he thinks she is all he really wants out of life. But his devotion to the woman whose voice sounds like money is something quite unlike love. Daisy ís the American aristocracy, that self-contained and removed class which Gatsby has wanted to be a part of all his life. If he gets Daisy, he will be a member of that class. Because he is not born into it, he must acquire wealth through his own devices, and the only way in America to make a lot of money very quickly is through crime. Gatsby is a polite bootlegger, though he will not admit it, and his illegitimate wealth is unacceptable to Daisy and her class, so he does not win her, and he dies as a result of his efforts.

That is briefly the story and Fitzgerald's novel tells it with a selection of words that is absolutely awesome. Everything fits together so perfectly that to cut out any words, events or to trim the remarkable series of characters reduces the story to banal romanticism. The movie, of course, could not be the book, so judgment of the film rests on what alterations were made and whether they were correct.

Fitzgerald worked in Hollywood three times during his life, and each journey to the movie world of the Twenties and Thirties resulted in some form of failure. Each time he went because he needed the money. Each time he learned more about the difference between the telling of his novels, and the necessity to show for his screenplays. He spent the last three years of his life there, and died there in 1940, partially through with the manuscript of THE LAST TYCOON and deeply frustrated by the movie executives' rejection of his work.

By that time they were paying him $1,250 a week to rewrite screenplays. in all those years he got only one screen credit-for THREE COMRADES, written from Erich Maria Remarque's book. The film was cited as 1938's "Ten Best". He worked on MADAME CURIE, RED-HEADED WOMAN, GONE WITH THE WIND, and many others but they would not accept his work, either because it was too subtle in characterization or because he broke the rules of censorship by writing about infidelity.

It is deeply ironic that Hollywood is now making millions off the novel of a man who was rejected and insulted by the movie industry. The whole situation and the movie of GATSBY simply says too much about the American film industry. If Fitzgerald were alive today he would be, I guarantee, completely repulsed.

I certainly do not want to discourage anyone from seeing THE GREAT GATSBY. The movie does tell that magnificent story and is worth it for that. The screenplay was written by Francis Ford Coppola, a young screenwriter, and director, an honest and talented young man who directed PATTON. He says that GATSBY is "terrible." He blamed director Jack Clayton for failing to "catch the spirit" of Fitzgerald. The mistake was in Clayton's decisions on how to set the words to images. Coppola said ". . . in the movie Clayton posed the actors in beautiful costumes and had them recite their lines. It wasn't personal at all," and "it was overly romantically photographed to the point of being silly."

The major Hollywood-style mistake of GATSBY is its emphasis on the capture of nostalgia. It makes much of Fitzgerald's insights. Paramount Pictures is using GATSBY as its chief means of making a lot of money off America's current fascination with its own past. Paramount's capitalization on GATSBY reaches the grotesque. Paramount's vice-president Charles O. Glenn said, "It struck us immediately that never before has a picture been so ripe for promotion. Mentally and emotionally, we are seeking a refuge in time that wasn't pockmarked by Watergate. fuel shortages and food crises. People are anticipating that for 2.5 hours they can experience again this time in America when we had no great trouble when America was characterized instead by innocence, wealth, youth and frivolity."

The promotion includes a heavy dosage of advertising and publicity, plus efforts at creating "a third awareness" by commercial tie-ins. All around you, though you may not have known, efforts have been made to make the public think of the twenties, and GATSBY as their closest touch with the era. Four large corporations have collectively pledged $6,000,000 to promote their producís in a Gatsby-like manner. 

E.l. DuPont de Nemours and Company has pledged a million to promote their new white Teflon cookware. The advertising campaign is called "Teflon Goes Classic White in the Tradition of THE GREAT GATSBY." The men's clothing manufacturer Robert Bruce has pledged its money to promote Gatsby-style clothes. Glemby International Hairdressers are now at work in beauty shops around the country where they are turning American women into recreations of Daisy. Ballantine's Scotch is sold on an advertising campaign rooted in nostalgia, and now specifically in the twenties of Gatsby. Paramount Studios claims that dozens of corporations asked to tie into the Gatsby advertising campaigns. You can see it everywhere- blatant commercialization of the twenties. Turn on the radio and listen to the ads for Detroit's hippest and smoothest men's store- Lewis The Hatter.

What would Scott and Zelda say about this? What would they think of Robert Redford, who tries to interpret the mysterious Gatsby and comes across like a stony hulk? What would Scott think of the movie's emphasis upon setting and clothes, rather than the intricacies of character? What would he think about the omissions, deletions, and insertions, particularly the insistence upon showing the love affair of Gatsby and Daisy, rather than simply letting it be understood, as he had written it? Read the book, think about the insights and the means Fitzgerald had of capturing tragedy, and then see the movie.  -Ellen Frank