The Fitzgerald family on a liner's deck in 1925, just before Gatsby was published. (Getty Images)
Everyone has gone mad, 1920s style, with Baz Luhrmann's new 3-D Gatsby extravaganza about to hit the big screen. Below, some things you may not know about F. Scott Fitzgerald, his novel, and the other film adaptations that have butchered his written word!
- Before Fitzgerald was a novelist, he was an ad man just like Don Draper. He worked at the Barron Collier agency in Manhattan, making $90/month. According to The New Yorker, "eventually he caught the public’s eye, with a pithy slogan for a steam laundry in Muscatine, Iowa: 'We keep you clean in Muscatine.'"
- During this time, F. Scott lived in a single room at 200 Claremont Avenue.
- Fitzgerald wrote in My Lost City: "One by one my great dreams of New York became tainted. I wandered through the town of 127th Street, resenting its vibrant life; or else I bought cheap theatre seats at Gray’s drugstore and tried to lose myself for a few hours in my old passion for Broadway. I was a failure—mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home."
- F. Scott married Zelda one week after the publication of his first book, This Side of Paradise, on April 3rd, 1920. The two married in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.
- Dorothy Parker, after seeing the couple riding on top of a cab down 5th Avenue, wrote, "They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun. Their youth was striking. Everyone wanted to meet them."
- Following their marriage, in 1920 F. Scott and Zelda rented this home in Westport, CT. Some say West Egg was based on Westport or Weston, and East Egg on nearby Easton.
- An article in The New Yorker from 1996 added to that theory, suggesting that "the road signs in Westport for Easton and Weston were echoed in East Egg and West Egg, and that Jay Gatsby himself may have been modeled on a millionaire/eccentric who lived near the Fitzgeralds in 1920 and was renowned for lavish Gatsby-style parties."
The Fitzgeralds in front of their home in Westport.
- But Connecticut isn't where he wrote Gatsby—following the publication of his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, the Fitzgeralds moved to France, and F. Scott wrote The Great Gatsby there "during the summer and fall [of 1924] in Valescure near St. Raphael."
- Here is what the handwritten first page of The Great Gastby looks like.
- The novel was almost called something else—Fitzgerald had been throwing around various titles, including: Trimalchio, Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, The High-Bouncing Lover, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, Gatsby, On the Road to West Egg, Incident at West Egg, and Trimalchio in West Egg.
- In 1925, the NY Times reviewed The Great Gatsby, calling it "a curious book, a mystical, glamourous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been enjoyed by Mr. Fitzgerald." They added that the author "writes well—he always has—for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected."
A book with so many covers
- Roger Ebert panned the 1974 adaptation.
- But some say the director of the movie, Jack Clayton, "was certainly better versed in the novel than the American executives around him who tried desperately to get the fifty-year-old Marlon Brando to play Gatsby." Other possibilities to fill the role were Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Steve McQueen.
- The original screenplay was written by Truman Capote, but the studio rejected it. He discussed the process during a Q&A, saying, “[Paramount] asked me to do the screenplay. I agreed because I love the book, though I hadn't read it for many years. I did complete a script that was faithful to Fitzgerald and fast-paced. There were three producers on the picture and finally one of them told me, ‘The difficulty is your script is The Great Gastby. It’s just too literal.’ I said that in that case they should get someone else to do it. They did so and you know what happened.”
- In Capote's version, "Nick was a homosexual and Jordan Baker a vindictive lesbian."
- Following the rejection of Capote's script, Francis Ford Coppola finished his draft in three weeks.
- While F. Scott Fitzgerald was a Brooks Brothers man, the wardrobe for the 1974 film was created by a young, upcoming designer: Ralph Lauren.
- In his ledger, Fitzgerald noted he received a $3,939 advance for his in-progress novel, The Great Gatsby.
- He made $16,666 off the movie rights for Gatsby.
- F. Scott hated the first movie adaptation (a silent film that came out in 1926) so much that he walked out of the theater.
- The ledger, which covers 1919 through 1938, was recently digitized, and you can comb through it here.
