New Film Adaptation of The Great Gatsby

A new film adaptation of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is slated for release in theaters on December 25, 2012. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan. Baz Luhrmann directed. Other films to his credit are Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge!

The trailer was released this week, and features Jay-Z and Kanye West's No Church in the Wild and Jack White's cover of U2's Love is Blindness.




This is the sixth film adaptation of Gatsby. The first, a silent movie by Herbert Brenon stars Warner Baxter, Lois Wilson, and William Powell. Reviews suggest that it may have been the most faithful adaptation of the novel, but a trailer of the film at National Archives is all that is known to exist. The 1974 version by Jack Clayton is the most famous screen version (so far) which stars Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway, Mia Farrow as Daisy, and Robert Redford as Gatsby. The script was done by Francis Ford Coppola.

Francis Cugat was commissioned to illustrate the cover of Gatsby. It has become one of the most celebrated jacket art in American literature. Fitzgerald was still writing the novel at the time, but he liked the cover so darn much, that he wrote it into the story. But there are differing views on where it is written in. It has been alleged that Fitzgerald's symbolic billboard eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg derived from the cover. An alternative recently proposed is Nick Carraway's image of Daisy as the "girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs" of New York at night which appears at the close of chapter four.

Have you read Gatsby? What did you think of it?

If you'd like to, you can download the free ebook here.

Have a terrific weekend.
Happy reading,
Angela