The Three Film Versions of the Great Gatsby: A Vision Deferred

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Although Fitzgerald himself worked as a screenwriter, and his novels would seem to lend themselves to cinematic adaptations, Fitzgerald has fared badly in the matter of screen versions of his various works. Tender is the Night (made into a film in 1962 by director Henry King, as well as a 1985 miniseries directed by Robert Knights), The Last Tycoon (adapted to film in 1976 by Elia Kazan) and The Great Gatsby have been filmed several times, in the case of Gatsby no less than three times. But to date, not one of Fitzgerald's novels has been brought to the screen with a true sense of fidelity to the original source material. This is a shame, inasmuch as the story structure of Gatsby, in particular, is both suspenseful and highly visual, and given the novel's status as a contemporary classic, one would think that the definitive version would have been produced long ago. But, as this brief survey will document, in all three adaptations of The Great Gatsby, the various screenwriters and directors who translated Fitzgerald's novel to the screen have taken excessive liberties with the work, which all but eliminate the intensity and power of the novel. Sadly, however, one of the filmic versions of the novel has been lost to us forever; and in many respects, it seems that this first version, made in 1926, might have been the most authentic adaptation the novel received.

In 1926, following The Great Gatsby's adaptation into a successful Broadway play, Fitzgerald received $45,000 for the film rights to Gatsby, which a combination of Famous Players/Lasky and Paramount produced as a silent film. This first, silent version of The Great Gatsby was based on Owen Davis's play of Fitzgerald's novel; the play opened at the Ambassador Theatre in New York City on 2 February 1926. The play, but sadly not the film, had the distinction of being directed by George Cukor, whose numerous film credits in the decades to come would include such classic productions as A Star Is Born (1954), Pat and Mike (1952), Adam's Rib (1949), The Philadelphia Story (1940), The Women (1939; ironically, Fitzgerald worked on the screenplay for this film, though he received no screen credit for his work), David Copperfield (1935), and Dinner at Eight (1933). One can only wonder what Cukor might have made of the play if given a chance, but at the time, Cukor was firmly established solely as a stage director, and had yet to make the jump to Hollywood (Schultz 105). So when Paramount decided to film The Great Gatsby in the summer of 1926, they assigned a rather pedestrian contract director, Herbert Brenon, to the project, thus robbing the film of much of its potential for visual vitality.

At a running time of eighty minutes, or 7,296 feet, the film was designed as lightweight entertainment, based on Fitzgerald's then-popular novel, and Owen Davis's stage adaptation, which was both a commercial and critical success. Paramount was clearly hoping for a significant box office return above all other considerations, and as might be expected, played up the party scenes at Gatsby's mansion for all their scandalous potential. It is important, in this light, to remember that this first version of Gatsby was created as a popular film, nothing more. Nevertheless, the film itself has an excellent cast, including Warner Baxter (Gatsby), Lois Wilson (Daisy Buchanan), Neil Hamilton (Nick Carraway), Georgia Hale (Myrtle Wilson), William Powell (George Wilson), Hale Hamilton (Tom Buchanan), and Carmelita Geraghty (Jordan Baker). The screenplay was adapted from Davis's play by Becky Gardiner and Elizabeth Meehan; Leo Tover photographed the film.

The casting of the 1926 version of The Great Gatsby is rather interesting, in view of the later work done by some of the performers in the film. Warner Baxter would go on to star in a number of influential films in the 1930s, such as Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley's 42nd Street (1933), without ever becoming a major star. William Powell would achieve international fame during the early sound era as Nick Charles, the debonair detective in the long-running Thin Man series for MGM. Neil Hamilton, in turn, would toil for decades in obscure "B" films and serials, before achieving some measure of pop celebrity in the last years of his life as Commissioner Gordon on the TV series Batman. All of the leading actors in the film were, in the 1920s, young and vibrant. With Prohibition very much an ongoing concern at the time of the film's production, it is not surprising that this film captured, from all reports, much of the flavor of the period.

However, all commentary on this film must rely upon contemporary reviews of the production, for, sadly, there are no prints of the 1926 version of The Great Gatsby available for viewing, and the negative and all other preprint materials seem lost as well. There is, supposedly, one copy of the 1926 version of The Great Gatsby surviving in an archive in Moscow, but most film scholars dismiss this as merely a fanciful rumor. After a diligent search, I was unable to locate any screening prints in either Los Angeles, New York, the archives of Paramount Pictures, the American Film Institute, the British Film Institute, George Eastman House, or even the National Archives in Washington, DC, where the film was registered for copyright. According to Charles Silver of the Film Study Center at the Museum of Modern Art, the film is officially listed as "lost," and no prints, negatives, or any other materials on the film are known to have survived in any archive, which is a great loss. Paramount Pictures, the film's producer, has no print or negative of the film in its archive, according to Leonard Maltin, who functions as the studio's unofficial archivist in his capacity as film critic for the television program Entertainment Tonight. All that survives are a few stills in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art Film Archives-stills that are no longer available to the public, although I obtained copies of them when the archive was still in operation.

In an interview with Dennis Coleman, Maltin called the 1926 version of The Great Gatsby "one of the great lost films . . . one of those films that everyone hopes will turn up in a private archive some day" (Coleman interview). But because of the lack of viewing prints, this version of Gatsby is something of a phantom figure in Fitzgerald's Hollywood history (Gallo 133), and we must content ourselves with reviews and contemporary commentary to get some impression of the film's relative success and/or failure as a film, and as an adaptation of Fitzgerald's novel. Most reviewers of the period thought that the film itself was quite good, but that it suffered from indifferent and uncinematic direction. In a contemporary review in the New York Times, critic Mordaunt Hall observed of the 1926 version:

The screen version of The Great Gatsby is quite good entertainment, but at the same time it is obvious that it would have benefited from more imaginative direction. Although Mr. Brenon has included the tragic note at the end, he has succumbed to a number of ordinary movie flashes without inculcating much in the way of subtlety. Neither he nor the players have succeeded in fully developing the characters. (22)

Even this highly qualified level of success in the 1926 version of Gatsby is somewhat surprising, given Fitzgerald's reliance on dialogue to create mood and atmosphere. The 1926 version had to rely on intertitles to get across much of the novel's action, which inevitably cut down the immediacy of the film's visual power. At least one critic thought that the intertitles were both excessive and badly written, citing the film's "dialogue" titles as containing "generally bad English [and] inappropriate wording" (Phillips 110). However, another contemporary reviewer found a great film to like in the 1926 version of Fitzgerald's novel. Indeed, Variety found the 1926 version of The Great Gatsby to be:

. . . serviceable film material, a good, interesting, gripping cinema exposition of the type certain to be readily acclaimed by the average fan, with the usual Long Island parties and the rest of those high-hat trimmings thrown in to clinch the argument.

Apparently, "the usual Long Island parties" were on the main attractions of the 1926 version. Variety warned exhibitors against excising the lengthy footage documenting Gatsby's elaborate entertainments, a common practice in the era of silent films, when footage from a film could easily be removed and then reinserted before returning the film to the distributor. Further, Variety's reviewer felt that the author himself would have approved of the final product:

Fitzgerald will certainly have no quarrel with the filmization of his novel. All the niceties and un-niceties of fast Long Island life of the type Fitzgerald dotes on criticizing and exposing are capable of elaborate exposition. And where the exhibitor may look askance at the ovcrlcngth of 80 minutes' running time and be tempted to apply the shears to the swimming pool orgies, etc., it is cautioned against this because for the average layman this footage will be most appealing. The casting is excellent. . . [Warner] Baxter as Gatsby leaves nothing wanting . . . despite the vague uncertainties of Gatsby's illegal fortune from bootlegging . . . the title player has all sympathies with him. . . . From the artistic reviewer's viewpoint, therefore, The Great Gatsby would fetch something akin to a "rave." ("Abel" 14-15)

Lois Wilson, who starred as Daisy Buchanan in the 1926 film, remembered meeting Fitzgerald shortly after the film's release, and described him as "a gentleman, a charming, most attractive man . . . . As far as I know, he approved of the film when it was released" (Phillips 110). Indeed, as Gene Phillips notes, Fitzgerald cut out numerous reviews of the film and pasted them in his personal scrapbook, perhaps tacitly suggesting his approval of the project. Perhaps most intriguingly of all, no less an authority than the novelist John O'Hara, who often took an acerbic view of films based on his own novels, as well as the works of others, found the 1926 version of The Great Gatsby to be a resounding success. Remembering his initial reaction to the film, O'Hara wrote:

Even now I can remember my exultation at the end of the picture when I saw that Paramount had done an honest job, true to the book, true to what Fitzgerald had intended. (Phillips 111)

In view of these intriguing and sometimes contradictory assessments of the film's general qualities as a cinematic work, one is all the more anxious to see the final product. But it seems that unless a forgotten print turns up in an overlooked archive, for the moment, we will have to be content with second-hand accounts of the film's merits and/or defects. All in all, it seems to me that perhaps this film might have been the most authentic of the three filmings of Gatsby; it is a shame that the negative and all prints have seemingly been irretrievably lost.

There is, however, a tantalizing postscript to this sad tale. Against all odds, the trailer for the 1926 Gatsby still exists, and a print is located in the National Archives in Washington, DC. Film historian and archivist James Cozart first located this precious, brief snippet of footage during a routine series of archival chores, as he detailed to me in a series of e-mails during February of 1998. According to Cozart:

Twenty years ago, three reels of film were received from the AFI, with severe nitrate deterioration on the reel that held The Great Gatsby trailer. Initially, the reels were catalogued as "Unidentified Silent Trailers, Tillmany Collection." The Library's goal was to copy [the trailers on to safety film stock] first and ask questions later. There may be an itemization of these trailers in a file somewhere, but that information never made it into cither the card file or the computer. After preservation, one of the three [original] reels of nitrate was lost due to decomposition-the one with Great Gatsby. In 1989, the Dayton nitrate vault staff noticed that there were no title IDs on this series [of reels], and input the titles from the two surviving reels of nitrate and cross-indexed them to the title as-preserved. [In 1997], while searching for some unique trailers to show in Saginaw, we used that show as an excuse to call all three prints in to Dayton and ID'd the missing roll from the preservation. [Thus I found the Gatsby material.] The Gatsby trailer includes several scenes from the film, many more than the average silent trailer. Our preservation is rather contrasty and slightly unsteady. It is far below today's standard, but cannot be reprinted since the nitrate did not wait. (E-mails to author from James Cozart)

Thus, although the film itself has apparently vanished through the twin exigencies of neglect and nitrate decomposition, there are a few tantalizing images that can give the contemporary viewer some hint of what the film might have been. One wonders, particularly, about William Powell's performance as George Wilson, particularly given the striking still of Powell in character that still survives today, and is reprinted here. The other surviving stills are all that we have left of the 1926 Gatsby, but perhaps, given the fact that the trailer for the film has miraculously escaped destruction, some day a print of the entire film may yet come to light.

In 1949 Paramount produced a sound version of The Great Gatsby, with a screenplay by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum, based partly on Fitzgerald's novel, and partly on a play adaptation of the novel written by Owen Davis. Maibaum served as producer, and Elliott Nugent was assigned to direct. Alan Ladd played Gatsby, Betty Field was Daisy; and Barry Sullivan (Tom Buchanan), MacDonald Carey (Nick Carraway), Ruth Hussey (Jordan Baker), Elisha Cook, Jr., (Klipspringer), and Shelley Winters (Myrtle Wilson) performed the supporting roles. This second version of The Great Gatsby was intended primarily as a vehicle for Ladd, and the film concentrated on the Gatsby/Daisy romance almost entirely. The result was a curiously tedious, flat, and unimaginative film, with little visual or thematic resonance.

The film departs seriously from Fitzgerald's novel; inventing sequences in which Gatsby "bumps off rival gang members during a Prohibition shoot-out, and using rather clumsily designed flashbacks to fill in the more shadowy aspects of Gatsby's early life. Alan Ladd's Gatsby is an out-and-out gangster, more like Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar than Fitzgerald's obsessed aesthete. Indeed, in one scene in the film, Ladd's Gatsby actually punches one of his guests during a party to consolidate his reputation as a man of action; nor is this the only deviation from Fitzgerald's intentions in the original novel. In the final script of the 1949 version, everything is explained and nothing is left to the imagination; for example, when Gatsby's car runs down Myrtle Wilson, we are immediately shown that it is Daisy, not Gatsby, who is driving.

The Ladd film suffers most from Elliott Nugent's static direction, coupled with an extremely wordy and digressive screenplay. As a director, Nugent made much the same mistake with this film that producer David Merrick and director Jack Clayton would make in the 1974 Gatsby. Nugent piled on the gloss (particularly in Ladd's close-ups) until it suffocated everything else. Surprisingly, Nugent has admitted publicly that his version of the novel leaves much to be desired, and indeed, that he did not want to be assigned to the project in the first place. In view of his track record as a director on such inconsequential program pictures as Just for You (1952), My Outlaw Brother (1951), Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949), My Favorite Brunette (1947), Nothing But the Truth (1941), and other modest entertainments, it seems that his self-effacement is entirely justified. In a June 1978 interview with Beverly Linet, Nugent spoke of his dissatisfaction with the project:

I felt very unhappy when I was making Gatsby. I thought I shouldn't be doing it and Alan Ladd shouldn't be playing in it. Ladd wasn't quite up to it, but he got away with it. (124)

Thus, it seems that the 1949 version of The Great Gatsby was foredoomed, helmed by a director who by his own admission had little feel for the basic material of the novel, and whose sense of the cinematic was limited in the extreme. Contrary to Nugent's criticisms of Ladd, it seems to me that given a better director (someone like Howard Hawks, for example, who adapted Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not for the screen in 1944 with great commercial and critical success), Ladd could have done extremely well in the part, delivering a confident, polished, and appropriately self-referential interpretation of Gatsby.

But because the film was designed as a vehicle for Ladd, the visual composition of the film centers on endless, languorous close-ups of the star, juxtaposed with equally star-struck close shots of Betty Field as Daisy. Although the 1949 Gatsby does not stretch out the Gatsby/Daisy relationship to the degree the 1974 film does, it still traffics in the kind of "pretty boy" iconography that cheapens the ultimate tragedy of Jay Gatz. The audience is not encouraged to take the romance of Gatsby and Daisy seriously; the whole relationship seems more a caprice on Gatsby's part than anything else. The lighting throughout the 1949 film is flat, standard studio workmanship, lacking in any invention or imagination; only the close-ups are lit with any care. Wide shots are indifferently framed, and one gets the sense that actors were pretty much left to fend for themselves. There seems to be no strong guiding hand in the making of the film, either visually or thematically. Ladd very much wanted to be involved in the project, as a break from his usual tough guy roles in such films as This Gun For Hire and The Glass Key (both 1942), but in Paramount's choice of Nugent as director, Ladd's possible contributions to the project were almost entirely marginalized. To make matters worse, practically the entire film is shot indoors, even the exteriors, which was a common Hollywood practice of the period, in order to avoid the possible delays that location shooting sometimes produced (changes in sunlight, rain, obnoxious tourists cluttering up the set). Then, too, Ladd simply could not be taken away from the studio for location shooting: the actor was then at the height of his popularity, having just returned from service in World War II, and he was invariably "mobbed" whenever he appeared in public. Thus, the 1949 Gatsby is confined to the elegant simulacric prison of an overlit Hollywood sound stage, and thus lacks both visual substance and reality.

Another problem with the film is Betty Field's Daisy. Although a fine actress, Field was far more convincing as a tough, no-nonsense performer, and her essential inner resilience made her characterization of Daisy as a star-struck ingenue all the more unbelievable. Obviously, Daisy is far more than simply a "star-struck ingenue" in the novel, but director Nugent, never known for his literary or thematic perception, instructed Field to play Daisy in a strictly one-dimensional manner, which she certainly did. Macdonald Carey, as Nick Carraway, is also curiously miscast; rather than a sympathetic observer, for most of the film he is portrayed as a censorious bluenose, scandalized by Tom Buchanan's affair with Myrtle Wilson, and also by Gatsby's obsessive desire for Daisy. Only at the end of the film does Carraway exhibit any understanding of what motivates Gatsby both as a person and a fictional construct; in the last moments of the film, Carraway witnesses Gatsby's death, and serves, in an appended flashback at the beginning of the film, as Gatsby's posthumous elegist. In a contemporary review of the 1949 version, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther noted:

. . . most of the tragic implications and bitter ironies of Mr. Fitzgerald's work have gone by the boards in allowing for the generous exhibition of Mr. Ladd. Solemnly representing Gatsby, he gives us a long and lingering look at a patient and saturnine fellow who is plagued by a desperate love. . . . But somehow he does not present us with the picture of a strangely self-made man as the pitiful victim of the times and his own expansive greed. . . . Blame this mostly on a weak script, coupled with dull direction. (Linet 124)

A more astute director could easily have used the "interior/exterior" look of the production to his or her advantage: making the entire world of Gatsby a series of exquisitely designed sets, stylizing the physical look of the film so that the unreality inherent in studio execution worked for the film, rather than against it. Howard Hawks, for example, could make The Big Sleep (1946) almost entirely in the studio (there are, in fact, only two actual exterior shots in the whole film), and use the flexibility of studio lighting to enhance the mood of the piece. The look of The Big Sleep is dark, mysterious, crisscrossed with shadows; and this kind of "waking dream" is, in fact, best reproduced in a studio atmosphere, where every detail can be specified. Other directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, in Rope (1948) and Psycho (1960), or Michael Curtiz in Mildred Pierce (1945), have created believable and supportive visual worlds for their characters to operate in, using the unparalleled control that a studio environment can afford.

In 1974 Paramount Pictures, which still held the rights to Gatsby, agreed to the production of a new version of the novel, primarily because the Ladd version was in black and white and so could not be profitably sold to television. David Merrick, better known for his work as the producer of Hello Dolly, 42nd Street and other lavish Broadway musicals, took on the entire financial burden of the production; Paramount functioned solely as distributor. The film was budgeted at over $6.5 million, a significant figure for the era, and the cast included Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy, Sam Waterston as Nick, Bruce Dern as Tom, and Karen Black as Myrtle Wilson. Most of the film was shot on studio sets erected at Elstree Studios in Britain, but a good deal of location filming was done at Newport, Rhode Island, and Merrick spared no expense to make Gatsby's phantasmal lifestyle at once immediate and accessible.

Director Jack Clayton acquitted himself admirably as a director of The Innocents (1961), Room at the Top (1959) and other classic British films of the late 1950s and early 1960s. But in his direction of Gatsby, Clayton depended solely on the visuals to carry the impact of the story, and perhaps pushed by Merrick, let the film run to 144 minutes, directly in contradiction to the economy and concision of the novel. Jack Clayton knew how to set up and light a beautiful shot, but he seemed surprisingly at a loss with the Hollywood actors the project embraced, all of whom retreated into their various "star personas" with very little variation in their final performances. Redford, particularly, seems both wooden and unreal as Gatsby, lacking entirely any passion or screen presence in his key sequences with Daisy, Tom, and the others. Indeed, he seems more like a men's fashion model than anything else, as he drifts through the film with an air of detachment and unconcern that is at once disquieting and distancing for the production's intended audience. As a result, the film is beautiful, well costumed, beautifully set and emotionally dead at the center. Only Bruce Dern as Tom seems alive and real; Mia Farrow as Daisy is so distracted and evanescent that she almost evaporates in front of the audience, and never feels connected to either the narrative, or the huge expanse of Gatsby's domain.

Francis Ford Coppola's screenplay, which he reportedly took more than fourteen months to complete, is also a problem. The text of the novel is alive with visual impact, and the dialogue does not require extensive mediation in its transfer to the screen. Coppola approached the novel with the feeling that he was tampering with greatness, and his trepidation resulted in a script of pomposity, strained seriousness, and overreliance on Robert Redford's iconic screen presence. Quite obviously, the choice of Redford and Farrow was, in large measure, dictated by their popularity with the movie-going public, rather than any inherent affinity they may have had for their parts. But there was more wrong with the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby than its casting, or the direction, or even the screenplay. While all of these factors constituted serious defects in the finished film, the key problem, once again, was that the film violated most of the key intentions of Fitzgerald's novel.

In point of fact, this production ran counter to every characteristic that makes The Great Gatsby promising for cinematic adaptation. One of the most important problems of the 1974 production was its artificial (languorous) pacing. In the attempt to display a certain reverence for Fitzgerald's novel, the filmmakers produced a film that was "so carefully, ponderously made that it scarcely [had] room to breath" (Kanon 104). The economy of expression and swift pacing of the original novel were unfortunately laid aside: as mentioned above, the completed film ran over two-and-one half hours. Knowing that the Redford/ Farrow relationship was uppermost in the minds of his projected audience, Merrick inserted extensive love scenes into the screenplay, which appear nowhere in the text of the novel. To meet the expectations of the public regarding Gatsby as a prohibition bootlegger, the producer gave this aspect of the novel undue emphasis. For example, in the novel, Nick meets Gatsby during one of his parties at Gatsby's mansion in a casual, offhand fashion. But in the film, Nick goes for the first time to one of Gatsby's parties, is melodramatically accosted by a grim-faced bodyguard, taken upstairs in a private elevator, and finally thrust into Gatsby's study. This attempt to heighten artificially the initial contact between Nick and Gatsby demonstrates an unfortunate reliance upon extremely cliched devices to provide dramatic tension. More importantly the new scene has nothing to do with the spirit of the original, being more Godfather (1971) than Gatsby. Summarizing the shortcomings of the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, Penelope Gilliat wrote in The New Yorker.

The stately film has much kindness and beauty, but some works of art have their truest condensed existence only in the original form, perhaps. Fitzgerald's short novel could only be stretched out into this mistakenly long film by the use of repeated views, shots sometimes held too long for the matter, tracking shots untrue to the terseness of Fitzgerald, and explanations in Fitzgerald's voice-over dialogue of what has already been fully shown in visual, incident. (96)

It seems to me that Gilliat is entirely correct in her assessment of the work. The 1974 film is slow-paced, verbose, and lacking in visual innovation, despite the visual potential inherent in the text of the novel. Thus, the reasons for the artistic failure of the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby have nothing to do with the potential of the novel. In fact, the film violated precisely those features of the novel that were most amenable to filmic adaptation, and it is this fact alone that is responsible for its ultimate downfall.

Thus, while The Great Gatsby has been adapted three times as a feature film, none of the versions produced to date is in any way a clear representation of Fitzgerald's intent as a fictionist. Unfortunately, since none of Fitzgerald's books has had any great success as a film (perhaps because of the poor adaptations and screenplays with which his works have been saddled), none of the versions of The Great Gatsby or any of Fitzgerald's other novels or short stories has achieved resounding financial success at the box office. Fitzgerald's vision is seen as being resolutely noncommercial, despite the initial critical acclaim his early novels received, and as a result, it seems highly unlikely that another adaptation of The Great Gatsby will be forthcoming in the near future. Thus, the best place to discover the world of Jay Gatsby is in the pages of Fitzgerald's novel, a mysterious and resistant text, which has thus far eluded a definitive adaptation to the screen.

[Reference]

Works Cited

"Abel" (pseudonym). "Review of The Great Gattby" Variety 24 Nov. 1926: 14-15.

Bruceoli, Matthew, ed. F. Scon Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. New York: Seribner's, 1994.

Coleman, Dennis. Unpublished interview with Leonard Mallin. 20 Jan. 1998. Los Angeles.

Cozart, James. E-mails to the author on the trailer for The Great Gatsby (1926). 9, 12, and 14 Feb. 1998.

Dardis, Tom. Some Time in the Sun. New York: Seribner's, 1986.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. The Cinematic Vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1986.

Gallo, Rose A. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Boston: Twayne, 1963.

Gilliat, Penelope. "The Current Cinema." The New Yorker 1 Apr. 1974: 96.

Hall, Mordaunt. "Gold and Cocktails." New York Times 11 Dec. 1922: 22.

Kanon, Joseph. "Adapting Gatsby." The Atlantic June 1974: 104.

Latham, Aaron. Crazy Sundays. New York: Viking, 1971.

Linet, Beverly. Ladd: The Life, the Legend, the Legacy of Alan Ladd. New York: Berkeley, 1979.

Phillips, Gene D. Fiction, Film, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Chicago: Loyola UP, 1986.

Phillips, Gene D., and John C. Tibbets. "Scenes from a Hollywood Life: The Novelist as Screenwriter." The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film. John C. Tibbets and James M. Welsh, eds. New York: Facts on File, 1998: 479-84.

Schultz, Paul D. "Scripts Based on Fitzgerald's Works." F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary Exhibition Catalogue. Matthew J.Bruccoli and Arlyn Bruccoli, eds. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996: 105.

Tibbets, John C. "The Great Gatsby" The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film. John C. Tibbets and James M. Welsh, eds. New York: Facts on File, 1998: 157-60.

[Author Affiliation]

Wheeler Winston Dixon

University of Nebraska, Lincoln