The Great Gatsby (1926 film)

Infobox Film
name = The Great Gatsby


image_size =
caption =
director = Herbert Brenon
producer = Jesse L. Lasky
Adolph Zukor
writer =
narrator =
starring = Warner Baxter
Lois Wilson
Neil Hamilton
Georgia Hale
William Powell
music =
cinematography =
editing =
distributor = Famous Players-Lasky Corporation
Paramount Pictures
released = 1926
runtime = 80 minutes
country = USA
language = Silent film
English intertitles
budget =
preceded_by =
followed_by =
website =
amg_id =
imdb_id = 16938

"The Great Gatsby" is a 1926 silent film adaptation of the novel "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was made by the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation and Paramount Pictures, directed by Herbert Brenon and produced by Jesse L. Lasky and Adolph Zukor. The film is a famous example of a lost film.cite journal |last=Winston Dixon |first=Wheeler |year=2003 |title=The Three Film Versions of The Great Gatsby: A Vision Deferred |journal=Literature Film Quarterly |url=http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200301/ai_n9219407 |accessdate= 2008-03-11 ]

Background and production

This was the first filmed version of the novel. Two more films, in 1949 and 1974, and a television adaptation, in 2000, were to follow.

This version was based on the stage play by Owen Davis, adapted from the novel, which was directed by George Cukor and opened on Broadway at the Ambassador Theatre on Feb 2, 1926. F. Scott Fitzgerald received US $45,000 for the film rights. The film was entrusted to a contract Paramount director, Herbert Brenon, and the screenplay to Becky Gardiner and Elizabeth Meehan, who supplied the adaptation.

The cast featured Warner Baxter as Jay Gatsby, Lois Wilson as Daisy Buchanan, Neil Hamilton as Nick Carraway, Georgia Hale as Myrtle Wilson, and William Powell as George Wilson.

The film had a running time of eighty minutes, or 7,296 feet and was designed as lightweight, popular entertainment, playing up the party scenes at Gatsby's mansion and emphasizing their scandalous elements.

No copies of the film are known to have survived.

Lost film

Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon, James Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln made extensive but unsuccessful attempts to find a copy. Dixon noted that there rumors that a copy survived in an unknown archive in Moscow but dismissed these rumors as unfounded.

It appears, however, that the trailer has survived and is one of the 50 films in the 3-disk boxed DVD set called "More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894-1931" (2004), compiled by the National Film Preservation Foundation from 5 American film archives. It is preserved by the Library of Congress (AFI/Jack Tillmany collection) and has a running time of 1 minute.

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