F. Scott Fitzgerald on Silent Film

Paratexts: Before, during, after

“…This book will consider the four Hollywood film adaptations of this novel, the lost 1926 version directed by Herbert Brenon, director Elliott Nugent's 1949version, the 1974 version directed by Jack Clayton and scripted by Francis Ford Coppola, and director Baz Luhrmann's 2013 The Great Gatsby. The lost 1926 version will be examined by means of the surviving, minute-long trailer, which shows numerous highlights of the action, film reviews of the time, and the archival research conducted by scholars such as Gene D Phillips (1986), Dixon (2003) and Mastandrea (2022). The Hollywood adaptations allow comparisons to be made across the film as to their differing approaches and proposed solutions when creating a film adaptation of this novel, whilst choosing films from a similar stable of large studio production allows for some commonality in their contextual origins (notwithstanding inevitable changes in the studio system over time).…”