May 29, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
While Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby trailer is on everyone’s lips, it’s far from the first time F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel has been captured on celluloid. Everyone remembers the 1974 Robert Redford vehicle, but there was also the 1949 adaptation and, before that, a silent 1926 version scripted by Fitzgerald himself. All that survives—to anyone’s knowledge—is the footage that follows.
[...] Lurmann had better watch out. This silent version of The Great Gatsby from 1926 looks pretty [...]
[...] Watch: ‘The Great Gatsby’, 1926 (theparisreview.org) [...]
[...] you know that Fitzgerald scripted a silent version of The Great Gatsby in 1926? You do now. This footage is all that now remains of [...]
[...] Cinema: The Great Gatsby, 1926, atriz de O Senhor dos Anéis viverá Elizabeth Bishop nos cinemas e trailer da nova adaptação de Os Miseráveis. [...]
[...] postlude: The only footage from the mostly-lost first adaptation of The Great [...]
[...] the record, there was a 1926 version of The Great Gatsby, a silent film that, like so many of the silent films, has been lost with no [...]
Anne Daniel | May 29, 2012 at 8:44 pm
Scott Fitzgerald didn’t write the script for this. It’s based on the stage version of “Gatsby” — also 1926, by Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright Owen Davis — which is awful. The trailer’s been up on YouTube for a year or so. I do wish more of the film survived; Lois Wilson was meant to be a wonderful actress, forgotten today.
Sam Kirshaw | May 30, 2012 at 3:50 am
One will always wonder how the script was transposed for the silent era. Dialogue in Fitzgerald is so important. It was, of course, aimed at the popular end of the film spectrum, so one doesn’t have much hope beyond melodrama.