Ready or Not, Here comes Gatsby

(2 of 9)

One thing Paramount can count on to pull crowds into the theaters is the enduring nostalgia for the '20s and the deep affection that Americans feel for Fitzgerald. It is comforting in a somewhat diminished era of inflation and fuel shortages to savor the Jazz Age as Fitzgerald saw it, racing "along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money." Though no longer the cult figure he was for a time in the '50s, Fitzgerald remains an ineffably romantic figure, the brilliant American novelist doomed by flawed ambition, a prodigal thirst for alcohol and a compulsion to act out the excesses of an extravagant era in American life.

Old Magnates. He would be a prince in Hollywood now. In addition to Gatsby, Paramount plans to make The Last Tycoon, his last, unfinished novel, next year, and is contemplating a film of Zelda, the Nancy Milford biography of his glittering, mad wife. This season has also seen two major dramatizations of Fitzgerald's life, one on television and one on the New York stage.

Fitzgerald, who died in 1940 at 44, spent the last four years of his life working unsuccessfully in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's stable of writers. The late '30s represented perhaps the apogee of studio supremacy in movie production. The film industry has gone through a series of declines and rebirths since then. Hollywood today is discussed in terms the old magnates would not even recognize: independent productions, runaway productions, marketing packages, made-for-TV movies. The old generation would be aghast too at the kind of business-school, risk-minimizing maneuvers that Paramount has made with Gatsby, like selling $1.5 million of the movie's $6.4 million cost to outside investors.

Although they would not have used the word, the tycoons who fascinated Fitzgerald would certainly recognize the meaning and value of "hype." The "New Hollywood" is annunciated almost annually by this image-conscious town, but the current version is in some ways like the Old Hollywood. The late '60s saw a period when the big studios looked for "a formula" while independents turned out Easy Riders. That was when Robert Evans, already at Paramount, was making $15 million disasters like Darling Lili. Then, three years ago, Fox made The French Connection, opening up the rich vein of the cop genre. Shortly before, with Love Story, Evans had hit on a couple of formulas of his own. In that film he learned the value of romance and romanticizing; in The Godfather and Gatsby he added nostalgia to his equation. At the same time, he discovered the super-package, the art of the supersell, laid on before a filmgoer ever saw a frame in a theater. With Gatsby, the art has been tuned to a perfect pitchman's dream. As a result, the selling of The Great Gatsby makes an instructive case history of modern studio merchandising.