Ready or Not, Here comes Gatsby

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The Gatsbyization of America was hardly what Ah' MacGraw had in mind when the project began. A true Fitzgerald freak, she dreamed of playing Daisy, the elegant, money-voiced heroine of Gatsby. Evans set out to secure Gatsby as a present for his bride.

The film rights had reverted to Fitzgerald's daughter. In 1970, Evans and MacGraw approached Producer David Merrick. "Bob said to me," recounts Merrick, " 1 want to do this picture for Ali, and I think you have the class to do it properly. And, of course,' he added, 'you are a friend of Scottie's.' " Bare Bones. Evans had hoped to buy the rights for $130,000, but by the time Merrick got to Mrs. Smith there was a sudden spate of competitive bidders, including Robert Redford and Producer Ray Stark. It took Merrick a year and a half to close the deal for $350,000 plus a generous percentage.

In both Love Story and The Godfather, the studio was working with solidly presold properties, recent bestseller-list books with strong, clearly defined plots. (Love Story, of course, was a screenplay before it was a book. Evans talked Author Erich Segal into writing a novel from his original screenplay, and then spent $10,000—including cash doled out to studio employees to buy it in their local bookstores—to boost the book onto the bestseller lists. Only then did Paramount release the film.)

Gatsby presents a different problem. The valuable 20s ambience is there to be tapped, but in practical adaptation terms, the bare bones of the book's plot .are slender. It concerns the tragedy that follows when Jay Gatsby, a mysterious bootlegger, tries to use his money to revive a wartime romance with the rich, spoiled Daisy, who has since married even richer. Their crossed purposes are refracted in the lives of those near them: Daisy's philandering husband Tom, his mistress and her husband. At the end Tom and Daisy retreat into their "vast carelessness"; the others are all dead. The story is secondary to the novel's brilliant crystallization of the pace and mood of the '20s and to what Fitzgerald himself called "blankets of beautiful prose." Deprived of that prose, a writer is in the position of "the poor devil of a screenwriter," in Fitzgerald's short story, Financing Finnegan. After trying to adapt "a distinguished author's novel," he says, "it's all beautiful when you read it, but when you write it down plain it's like a week in the nuthouse."

First choice for an adapter was Truman Capote, but Paramount found his treatment "unacceptable." Godfather Director and Academy Award-Winning Screenwriter (for Patton) Francis Ford Coppola was brought in, and he turned in the script in three weeks.

The next step was the casting of Gatsby and the hiring of a director. Ideally, of course, the director and principal actors of a blockbuster should also be presold. But finding suitably lustrous names for Gatsby was far from easy.