New Gatsby Project Announced!

If you don’t know that I like Baz Luhrman… then you don’t know me at all. I’m a huge fan of his red curtain’s series and a big follower of his artistic directing style. He’s a rather lavish director who is drawn to dramatically doomed dramas so it’s no wonder that he’s chosen The Great Gatsby as his next big project!

(I’m also a HUGE F. Scott Fitzgerald fan so as you can imagine I’m running around my house calling everyone I know).

Now, while I am looking forward to this endeavor, I am somewhat apprehensive about a studio trying to once again translate Fitzgerald’s heartbreaking tale of love and loss into a film media. The book, while well written and entertaining, has never really translated well into a film, no matter how skilled the director. My main theory behind this phenomenon is that it’s due to the way information is revealed about Gatsby in the novel.

Fitzgerald tells the tragic story of Gatsby and Daisy through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a young Yale graduate and new neighbor to Gatsby. While this is an affective method of story telling through a text media I don’t think it will translate (or has translated) well on screen. The story is told through Nick’s eyes and what he sees, hears, and experiences, but he doesn’t really participate in any of the story’s actual action which could render him, in the eyes of the audience, as a useless, eerie, voyeuristic neighbor who meddles in other people’s business.

The ultimate successes of the story’s interpretation will rely both on the talents of the director and writing staff as well as the audience’s ability to participate in Nick’s “voyeurism” without questioning it.

Until the opening date… I’ll just have to try and contain my excitement.

Here’s a link to a video interview with Baz discussing Gatsby:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI


Here’s a link to the 1974 movie starring Robert Redford:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI

There was also a movie made in 2000 staring Mira Sorvino as Daisy and Toby Stevens as Gatsby that I think is worth mentioning but I couldn’t find a trailer of the film online.