The Great Gatsby (Part 2 - The Movies): Everything You Didn't Know - Too Much Information

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone,
and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the
show that brings you the secret histories and little known
facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more.
We are your green lights of granularity, your disgruntled gas

(00:23):
station attendance of apocrypha. You're all seeing eyes of ephemera.
You're beautiful bulls of facts. My name is Jordan run
Tag and I'm Alex Heigel. And today we are back
for the second installment in our exploration of f Scott
Fitzgerald's fabled commenting on the false promise of the American Dream.
In part one, we examined how the book The Great

(00:45):
Gatsby was born from Scott's upbringing as a poor interloper
in a rich man's world and the insecurities and heartbreaks
that it caused. Today, we're going to explore Scott's truly
tragic end as maybe the ultimate exam apple of a
future icon who died broke in obscurity. And then after
we talk about how this man told his own teenage

(01:08):
daughter that he was a failure and his wife was
burned alive in a mental hospital following her psychological collapse.
We'll pick it up with a little movie magic. We're
going to the movies, folks.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
I love to do movies. Jesus, I forgot about Zelda's
horrible death.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yes, yes, yes, yes. So
we'll turn things around by discussing the often tortured productions
of the cinematic adaptations, from Boz Luhrman's Lurd Extravaganza to
the seventies classic with Robert Refford, Ama Farrow and one
in the forties that nobody remembers and they lost silent
version that Scott and Zelda loathed. Higel, I know you're

(01:48):
not the Gatsby head that I am the Gat's head,
as we're known in the community. Did last episode change
your take on the story at all?

Speaker 3 (01:57):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:57):
I mean yes, I like, I don't, I don't. I
don't hate Great Gatsby. I just I am advancing my
idea that f. Scott fitzgro was a secret idiot or
a savant at least, because I do think it's funny
that he wrote the same story seventeen times and met
with obscurity each and every like failure each and every time,
and yet continued to do it so I game recognize

(02:20):
his game essentially.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Well, no, the first time it worked, and then it
worked less and less. Yes, yeah, and that's how they
get you. That is indeed, the first one is free, yeah,
et cetera. Yeah, well, Scott, actually he would agree with you,
because I was thinking about how we were kind of
dunking on him for writing just what was immediately in

(02:42):
his line of sight, over and over again forever. But
I actually found a quote about it. Oh go on,
he said. Mostly we authors must repeat ourselves. That's the truth.
We have two or three great and moving experiences in
our lives. Experience is so great and moving that, but
it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been
so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished

(03:06):
and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded
and humbled in just that way ever before. Then, we
learn our trade well or less well, and we tell
our two or three stories each time in a new disguise,
maybe ten times, maybe one hundred, as long as people
will listen.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, I mean tell that to Joyce, Carol Oates or
Stephen King or like anybody else. Like Hemingway was right there.
He had more than one idea for many stories. As
I'm told, well, Scott was.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
Less prolific than Papa Hemingway. I think he only finished
four novels, I want to say, in his lifetime, so
those I kind of a better handle on Hemingway. I
feel like, though you could distill it down to kind
of the same well, three or four stories. Right. Well,
man is sad and drinks in the rain.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Sometimes it's dry, okay, correct, No, I mean he's for
like most well known ones are this is like the
Old Man in the Sea, which is man against fish.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
Never cared for that one.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
And obviously like farewell to Arms and sun also rises.
But then I think the most anthologized ones are hills
like White Elephants, which is yes, held up as like
a sort of er text of like the quiet part.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Loud writing.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
And in a clean, well lighted place, which is actually
one of my favorites. So I'm gonna disagree with you
on that one, as I believe Joyce Carroll Oates would like,
or anybody who's written about more than one thing in
their life. Sorry, f a boy f.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
He did kind of get stuck in the past A
lot didn't our boy f.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yeah, well, you know those boats they be getting born ceaselessly,
ceaseless baby, big beautiful boats. They're ceaselessly being born, the
greatest boats. It's in the I don't have a trump
reading the past is beautiful, past is beautiful China.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
I don't know, make America the past again. Oh God,
I mean.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
All right, move on quickly, we got to get this
out of Come ons off, Come on, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
It's funny. I remember when I was in a writing
class in high school. We were doing like peer reviews,
which I mean, I don't think I've ever received an
ego body slam quite like peer reviews in high school
writing classes.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
I mean, if anybody critiqued my writing in high school,
I would have insulted them so badly they would have,
I don't know, become a racist cop or nurse faster
like the dullards in my high school. Respectfully, I know
some of you do.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Listen. I had the valedictorian read some deeply emotional thing
I wrote, and his sole comment upon handing it back
was you write about feelings as if you're the first
person to ever feel them. And he did not mean
that as a comment. But I feel like that seems
like something that Fitzgerald would have been guilty of.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Yeah, but also that guy, as a teenager in high
school gonna tell another teenager of art like sorry, unless
you're like a child prodigy. Legitimately i'd be like you.
The only thing we have in common is in area code.
Don't tell me about my art, you mean.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
I always remember that. And the other comment that always
stuck with me was again, I had like a fifteen
page It was supposed to be like a two page thing,
and I was fifteen pages, of course as per tradition.
And the only thing he wrote on up at the
top you scrawled too many commas.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
And it's stuck with me. Well, that is a very
real thing. But again not for somebody like Pinsion or
you know, the Russians. So that guy anyway, Well.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
What's enough about literature. Let's talk about the movies.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
You know.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
The thing I actually like about the Gasby adaptations, which
I've met with mixed reviews over the years, is that
it really offers a chance to show the cool structure
Fitzgerald has in place for building up the suspense before
you meet Gatsby, because you're introduced first to the world
of Gatsby before you meet him, this whole spectacle of
this mysterious man, the house, the parties, the car, and

(07:20):
I've heard it been described as like a long driveway
approaching a mansion, you know, in those old Gilded age
Jarah Holmes. You get the long drive of the house
far away in the distance, and you expect something great
at the end. That's kind of the way that Fitzgerald
teases Gatsby until he's introduced relatively far into the book. Yeah.

(07:42):
I thought that was cool, and they do that really
well in the movies, not so much the Baz Luhrman one.
I think that's one of the big changes that he made,
where like Leo kind of just appears in the middle
of the party, like on a pyramid made of champagne
glasses or something.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
But in the Redford one, Yeah, I believe we covered
bads on or my thoughts on baths on the pod before.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
So excited for this one. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Have
you seen any of these adaptations? I forget.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
I've seen the seventies one, and I have seen enough
of the Leo one to know.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
I saw it in theaters. I was so excited. I
bet you were, like, we dressed up too, I know,
I know, all right, Bud, All right, folks, this is
like forty pages collectively, so no fact teesus. We're gonna
dive right in bang. Here is everything you didn't know
about the Great Gatsby's film adaptations, which plural? Is it?

(08:46):
The Great Scatsby, the Great Scatsbies, the Greatest s Gatsby,
only the greatest Scatsby For our listeners, it's actually only
a Great Gatsby if it's made in West egg.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
They were.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
Otherwise, we're sparkling Gatsby. Ah low hanging fruit. Wow, wow,
all right. When The Great Gatsby was published on April tenth,
nineteen twenty five, fifty five years before the Beatles were
officially broken up, right, Yes, and f Scott Fitzgerald was

(09:24):
just shy of thirty years old. That's depressing. Though he
believed it to be his most passionate and accomplished work,
the novel was not well received in its time. In fact,
it was something of a flop compared to the success
of his previous novels. This Side of Paradise and The
Beautiful and Damned Gatsby was this worst performing book. Fitzgerald

(09:45):
had hoped it would sell seventy five thousand copies, but
by October of that year, sales stalled under twenty thousand,
which was barely enough for his publisher, Charles Scribner and
Sons to earn their money back. Fitzgerald's sense of disappointment
was acute. Shortly after publication, he cabled his editor Maxwell Perkins,
asking for an update any news. The reply from Perkins

(10:08):
was cautiously optimistic, sales situation doubtful, but excellent reviews, he wrote.
Fitzgerald was disheartened. He replied a few days later, closing
his letter with the now famous phrase, yours in great depression.
Stocked financially, the book brought him very little. Scott had

(10:28):
turned down a ten thousand dollars offer for serial rights
to ensure that the book could be published quickly, instead
accepting a four thousand dollars advance in nineteen twenty three
and collecting about two thousand dollars in royalties. That's about
thirty six thousand dollars today. So one of the greatest
works of literature of the twentieth century netted him the

(10:48):
equivalent of a Honda Civic. Like I don't know that's
not bad. I don't know. Thirty six grand is you know, No,
that's today, that's today dollars. Despite the public indifference, Fitzgerald
did receive praise from a few literary contemporaries. Nice letters
came in from Willa Cather don't know them, Edith Wharton,

(11:09):
and T. S. Elliott, commending the novel T. S. Eliot
responsible for Cats my least favorite production.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
I was gonna say, he gives it two scuttling claws
along the ocean floor. Up, a pair of dragon claws.
Two ragon claws scuttling across the ocean floor.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
Up. God, I hate it so much.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Oh, I like I like Wasteland. That was one of
the first big pieces of like literature.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
I h no, I mean Cats. Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. And now over to a section called reviews
or Variety declines to call it boffo. Boffo was a
is like a a positive term. I thought I thought

(11:55):
buffo was their word for ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
And I don't know it's it's a good thing.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Oh to be is thing? Yeah, okay. I didn't realize that.
Despite earning the praise of Scott's literary peers, Gatsby failed
to earn glowing reviews during its initial pressing. Two days
after its publication, The New York World published this unambiguous headline,
f Scott Fitzgerald's latest a dud. Critic Ruth Snyder declared

(12:20):
that the editors of her newspaper were quote quite convinced
after reading The Great Gatsby that mister Fitzgerald is not
one of the great American writers of to day. Ouch
that does heurt? Yes, that's a mean thing to say. Yeah,
it feels very personal. In the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the
reviewer claims she could not detect quote one chemical trace

(12:43):
of magic, life, irony, romance, or mysticism in the entire book,
and suggested that Fitzgerald, whom she referred to as the boy,
was quote just puttering around. She continued. Why Fitzgerald should
be called an author, or why any of us should
behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained

(13:06):
to me. Damn. So people not only were not all
that into Gatsby, they seemed to hate it enough that
it seemed to undo all of his prior success in
their eyes, which is kind of crazy. That's out. That's
a uniquely vicious. Yes. The New York Herald Tribune was
more creative in its dismissal, likening the book to quote
a literary lemon meringue, airy, ornamental, and unsubstantial, Though it

(13:31):
acknowledged Fitzgerald's quote nice little touches of contemporary observation. The
criticism extended beyond New York. Ralph Coughlin of the Saint
Louis Post Dispatch labeled the novel quote an inconsequential performance
from a once promising author who had, in his view,
become bored and cynical. John McClure of The Times picka
Yune called the story quote painfully forced and implausible, while

(13:56):
The Baltimore Evening Sun deemed it quote no more than
a glorified anecdote and not too probable at that. Not
all feedback was negative. The New York Times, in a
review by Edmond Clark, called the novel Quote a mystical
and glamorous tale of the jazz age, and praised its
depiction of wealth and yearning. Lillian c. Ford of the

(14:18):
Los Angeles Times subscribed it as a revelatory work that
quote leaves the reader in a mood of chastened wonder hmmm, chastened?

Speaker 2 (14:27):
Wonder you say?

Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah. Your former colleagues at The New York Post praise
Fitzgerald's prose as quote scintillating and genuinely brilliant, but these
positive takes were far outnumbered by confusion, condescension, or outright hostility.
Even reviewers who admired aspects of the book often saw

(14:48):
it as a step down from Fitzgerald's earlier work. Critics
compared it unfavorably to his prior books This Side of
Paradise and The Beautiful m Damned, suggesting Fitzgerald had peaked early.
Harvey Eagleton of the Dallas Morning News predicted that the
novel marked the end of Fitzgerald's artistic success. As you
might expect FITSI took.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
This personally, Yeah, jesus, I mean, like, did they have
to say it was that he's done improbable?

Speaker 3 (15:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (15:20):
Probable. It's like that's the part that really makes me nuts.
It's like, is it?

Speaker 2 (15:25):
Did you know that this is just what he wanted
to happen and much of his life?

Speaker 1 (15:30):
Did you know that the Fitzgerald's in capable of making things up?
Be nice to him. He's a secret idiot. Yes, these
reviews were devastating to poor sweet angel Baby Fitsy. He
felt that his defining artistic statement had been completely misunderstood
by critics, and to a certain extent, he was right.

(15:51):
Many interpreted the novel primarily is a crime story melodrama
about a bootlegger who gets gunned down, and found it
underwhelming in that genre. They missed its deeper themes of illusion, disillusionment,
and the myth making of self. As Fitzgerald would later lament,
of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one

(16:11):
had the slightest idea what the book was actually about.
He also deeply resented the criticism that the plot was implausible,
because he never meant it to be realistic. The Great
Gatsby was designed as a scenic, symbolic novel, almost dreamlike
in structure. The surreal romantic quality was the point, not
the problem, but few critics in nineteen twenty five noticed

(16:33):
or cared. Scott was especially hurt by reviewers failure to
notice the biographical parallels between himself and Jay Gatsby, both
men who had constructed mythic versions of themselves and attempted
to live up to those self created myths. Scott had
written a novel about the illusion of greatness, about longing
for a future that never arrives, and in the cruelest

(16:55):
twist of all, he found himself caught in that very
same story. Piece was released, reviewed, reviled, and dismissed. Fitzgerald
blamed the book's commercial failure on several factors. Chief among
them was the title, which he'd always felt was lackluster.
As a recall from our last episode, he struggled with

(17:15):
the title mightily and had lots of potentials kicking around
that were somehow worse than the one he landed on.
More significantly, he believed the novel's character driven plot, which
was populated by morally bankrupt individuals, especially the women in
his plot, alienated the largely female readership that drove the
fiction market of the time. Although Days He Began In

(17:36):
is the central love interest and is featured on the
novel's iconic cover, she's not exactly depicted in a flattering
light or given any kind of a redemptive arc much.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
Yeah, yeah, well yeah, there are women out there. Excuse me,
there are people are out there, people out there.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
This lack of a strong, likable female protagonist Fitzgerald felt
made the book a hard sell. Others have speculated that
it's focus on extreme wealth and decadence may have just
been off putting to anyone who wasn't spectacularly wealthy.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
I guess that's fair. It was kind of a read
the room moment, right. Well, this is before the Depression though,
but like the Gilded Age was still marked by massive
income inequality. Sure, oh yeah, it's America. Okay, So gats
be met with its greatest success on Broadway?

Speaker 1 (18:34):
Though, When you're on Broadway?

Speaker 2 (18:38):
Where do you go when different song?

Speaker 1 (18:42):
Oh Broadway?

Speaker 2 (18:46):
I don't know why that's making me laugh? So where
do you go when the critics getting you down Broadway?

Speaker 1 (18:55):
Anyway?

Speaker 2 (18:55):
Uh? One year after its publication, the book was adapted
as one act play I Pull Zer Prize winner Owen
Davis not related to Miles and Just Now I'm just
now learning or Lewin or Jim the creator of Garfield,
directed by George Kukor, who later won the Oscar for

(19:17):
My Fair Lady. After opening in nineteen twenty six, it
ran for respectable one hundred and twelve performances at the
Ambassador Theater, where it was well received by critics and
most crucially, helped Scott recoup some badly needed cash. The
success of the show, which gave Gatsby its first true
international recognition, helped pave the way for the first cinematic

(19:37):
adaptation later that same year.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
This is also what happened to Dracula. Did you know that?

Speaker 2 (19:42):
No, that, like Bella Legosi, had been doing Dracula on
Broadway or on stage before the universal film ever came out.
It was like a huge hit.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
I had no idea that was a stage show.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
Wow, I know, it's really crazy anything with Dracula, just
like him coming out with a guitar like Bruce springs
Steen and be talking about his dad and the children
of the Night. Count Dracula's America stage by David Byrne.

Speaker 1 (20:13):
It's like Judy at Cardial.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
It's like a sequin the sixty eight Dracula Comeback Special.
Scott got sixteen thousand, six hundred and sixty six dollars
sick from Paramount Pictures for the film rights, which is
a decent figure. It's three hundred thousand today, and the
Sixes may have jinxed him. By many accounts, the film

(20:36):
was terrible. It was silent era, so you know, not
a talkie starring Warner Baxter, who later won an Academy
Award for his performance in The Cisco Kid as Gatsby,
and Lois Wilson as Daisy. Now, Wilson is not a
big name today, but she was a prolific silent film
actress who worked on one hundred and fifty films during
her career. Most of them are, of course now considered lost,

(20:59):
and this for Scatsby adaptation is among them. About a
minute of footage that served as the trailer survives, but
people are not generally mourning it's lost. The Fitzgeraldes reportedly
walked out of the screening. Scott's wife Zelda, would later
call it rotten and awful and terrible in a letter
to a friend, capitalizing rotten.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
It's crazy how many films have been lost. I mean
it's like dizzle rot a century early, like people's entire careers.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah, it's awful, and like I'm worried about it because
people are not taking care of their quickly. Oh like
do you know, I mean not that he's like everybody's
cup of tea, but like all of Scherenberg's archives were
like destroyed in the Palisades fires.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
So that's just like one of the architects of twentieth
century music that like now we just don't have a
massive quantity of his work around if it wasn't digitized,
and I don't know how much of it was. And
like you know, there's obviously stuff inherent to the early
film's medium that made them prone to catching on fire spontaneously.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
Oh the celluloid Yeah, and then it's yeah integrate anyway, Yeah,
well that was that's the vinegar syndrome that people talk about,
where it does indeed, they do start to degrade into
something that smells like straight pissed vinegar.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
But you know, this just happens because of corporate negligence,
like the universal backlot fire that like now there's no
master versions of like many albums by people of people
iconic names.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
You know, God did they bury that for the longest time,
Like we didn't know the extent to which stuff had
been I believe that is. Yeah, yeah, the fire was
in like O eight and I want to say it
was like twenty thirteen or fourteen. It was a big
New York Times.

Speaker 2 (22:47):
Yes, that's correct, Yeah, Times Jesus Christ Scott continued to flounder.
I don't know why I find that funny and cod
and scraw od. You got some weird fishes up in
New England, don't you?

Speaker 1 (23:03):
Yeah, we do.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
Following the Great Gatsby's publication, he hoped to write a
weighty social novel. It was to center on a murder,
specifically a mattress side. The plot was believed to be
inspired by the famous Leopold and Loob case, which involved
the Chicago murder of a little boy by two adolescents.
You're addendum here is again Scott had no good car ideas.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
I read this thing today.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, Leopold Lobe was also rope the Hitchcock movie. That
was one of the one of the long take pioneers,
right right, great film, great film. Rear Windows my favorite,
but that one's up there. Who doesn't love seeing Jimmy
Stewart flop sweat around, although in this one he's actually
supposed to be like an erudite boarding school professor, which

(23:53):
is kind of funny because he's, you know, it's Jimmy Stewart.
This whole thing has been like a corn every man,
you know, lanky cornfred everyman who doesn't want to have
sex with the most beautiful woman in the world in
rear window. I'm still mad about that. The entire plot

(24:13):
of that hinges on him, like wanting to spy on neighbors.
Princess Grace is sitting there begging to have sex with him. Hilarious, hilarious,
variously called the boy who killed his mother.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
He really needed help with his titles.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
The World's Fair and our simply our type two others.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
What do you mean by our type?

Speaker 2 (24:44):
By what do you mean by type FITZI Fitzgerald only
wrote four chapters of that, so what a tragedy. Persistent
financial needs kept him churning out short stories which provided quick,
short bursts of cash. Then he had to contend with
the psychological breakdown of his wife, Zelda. As we just

(25:06):
spoke of last episode, Zelda was displaying signs of what
we now probably call bipolar disorder, although at the time
it was given the catch all diagnosis of schizophrenia. She
became obsessed with becoming a professional ballet dancer at the
age of twenty nine, which is like retirement age for
some dancers, but still practiced eight hours a day, maniacally

(25:30):
training and punishing herself past the point of physical exhaustion
and injury. She wrote a novel called Save Me the
Waltz around this period, and again, like her husband, the
heroine was a thinly disguised version of herself who was
quote consumed by a longing to succeed as a dancer.
It seemed to her that reaching her goal, she would
drive the devils that had driven her, that she would,

(25:52):
through the medium of dance, be able to summon love
or pity or happiness at will, marking up the wrong tree. There,
Zelda only through.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
My marie.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
Mimism, miming, mimetic clowning, only through the art of the
noble art of clownery, certainly not music or writing anything else.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
Really.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
This obsessive behavior culminated in a collapse. One evening in
April of nineteen thirty, Scott returned home to find an
exhausted Zelda seated on the floor, entranced with a pile
of sand for Brian Wilson moment. When he asked her
what she was doing, she could not speak. He summoned
a physician who examined Zelda and informed him that your
wife is mad. Do this cocaine about it? She was

(26:42):
in and out of sanitariums for the next few years.
Friends would recall that Scott would always light up when
she'd return home. His underlying hope was this time she'll
be different. We can still make her part of the family.
We don't have to give her up. Well he has
one up on the Kennedy's. Oh google Rosemary Kennedy Life

(27:06):
for more. Zelda continued, despite these best intentions to struggle.
She wrote to Scott for one of these homecomings, I'm
sorry there shall be nothing to greet you but an
empty shell. I want you to be happy. If there
were any justice, you would be happy. I love you anyway,
even if there isn't any me, or any love or
even my life.

Speaker 1 (27:26):
I love you.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
Oh ah.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
Woo.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, that's a real get up and pace around the
room one.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
I'll be right back. Oh it keeps going.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Go buckle down, buckle down.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
Shovel my friend, because we are digging deeper.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
Despite this, Zelda had moments of clarity, which is kind.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
Of worse that she would sometimes come back, but no,
it was like Flowers for Algernon moment where she kind
of knew that she was being sucked back down.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
Well, they call that, They literally call that insight. There's
a separate psychological term or psychiatric term for being aware
of your own and they grade it now, especially with
like psychosis, like you're more reality altering disorders. You're ugraded
as to what level of insight you have into how

(28:28):
these are affecting you and your ability to monitor them
or at least be aware of them. Wow, so that's depressing.
Despite this, she had moments of clarity. Her book included
flashes of literary brilliance, including this description of a man
who is a thinly disguised version of Scott.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
This makes me want to cry, that this woman is
describing her husband this way, in this state. Please continue.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder
blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension,
as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to but was
walking as a compromise to convention. Zelda's psychological disintegration was
a tragedy from which neither would ever recover. Scott's secretary

(29:12):
of Francis kroll Ring, later said Scott was a romantic.
He had illusions about life and the sense of remembering
what it was, and would never be again was pretty
horrendous to somebody like Scott. Scott Stemens were his love life.
Here he had this incredibly romantic woman with whom he
fell deeply in love, not expecting or recognizing that untamed
wildness in her as an illness until it was too late, really,

(29:35):
and I think he never quite got over that shh.
It was early mid thirties, when America was in the
grip of the Great Depression, and Scott's literary stock had
fallen and Zelda's grasp on reality was slipping. One could
think of this era as the Twilight of the jazz Age.
Hundreds of flagpolesitters were coaxed down and flown at half

(29:58):
mast back to the sad stuff. There's a famous story
around this time where Scott threw a tea dance for
his daughter. He proceeded to drink heavily during it, and
as everyone was heading home, he paid the band to
play another hour just for him. Guests filed out as
Scott sat in a chair in the middle of an
otherwise empty ballroom, bottle of gin at his feet, listening

(30:20):
to the band plays songs from the Height of the
jazz Age, a name he'd popularized a decade before Poignant Image,
he'd become an object of pity among his friends. His
confidante Ernest Hemingway wrote to the Shared editor Maxwell Perkins,
poor old Scott, he should have swapped Zelda when she

(30:40):
was at the craziest but still saleable five or six
years ago.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
Sorry for laughing in the middle back, but.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
Oh Arnest had a boy papa before she was diagnosed
as nutty. He is the great tragedy of talent in
our bloody generation.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
Hemingway famously advised his friend Scott in a letter during
this period, you especially have to hurt like hell before
you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt,
use it. And that's essentially what Scott did. Though he
was heartbroken, he recognized that his life was good material.
He used his experience with Zelda as a catalyst for

(31:22):
finishing his long gestating novel, Tender as the Night Said
in the French rivier during the Twilight of the jazz Age.
The nineteen thirty four novel chronicles the rise and fall
of Why Did He give him this name? Dick Diver,
a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife Nicole, who used

(31:45):
to be one of his patients, which is a definite
breach of ethics there.

Speaker 2 (31:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
The story mirrors the events in the Fitzgerald's lives, as
Dick starts his descent into alcoholism and the Cole struggles
with mental illness, believed to be the fallout from an
incestuous relationship with her father as a young woman. It's
been theorized that Zelda was sexually abused by her father
as a child. Dot dot dot. Scott spent much of

(32:15):
his time in this era writing short stories and essays
for magazines. One of these, written for Esquire in nineteen
thirty six, is called The Crack Up. Are you familiar
with this?

Speaker 3 (32:26):
I'm not.

Speaker 1 (32:27):
It's a stark, unflinching account of his own psychological and
emotional collapse during a period of personal and professional decline.
Ninety years later, it's still a harrowing read. Gone is
the romantic idealist of the jazz Age in his place
as a man hollled out by disillusionment, regret, and exhaustion.

(32:51):
Fitzgerald recounts a moment of clarity when he realized that
he had quote cracked, was no longer able to rely
on the emotional reserves that had once fueled his creativity
and sense of purpose. He admitted to feeling nothing, not joy,
not pain, not even the desire to continue pretending. The
essay marks a turning point in his philosophy, as he

(33:14):
rejects the myths he once believed in, emotional nobility, artistic heroism,
and the idea that one could persevere through sheer force
of will. Instead, he embraces a colder, more cynical survival
strategy based on emotional detachment. Okay, I'm not reading that one.
I had only been a mediocre caretaker of most of

(33:34):
the things left in my hands, even of my talent,
he writes, in one of many confessions that shocked readers
for their raw honesty. Unlike other personal essays of the time,
the Crack Up offers no redemptive arc or uplifting conclusion.
Fitzgerald doesn't pretend he's on the mend. He simply observes
the wreckage. In doing so, he dismantles the myth of

(33:56):
the ever triumphant American artist and replaces it with something darker,
more human, but also more enduring, the image of a
man who has stopped hoping for recovery, but continues on
stripped bare. Another insight into his psyche is from Sleeping
and Waking, published around the same period, also in Esquire.

(34:18):
I'd like to quote it, not quite in full, but
near enough. When some years ago I read a piece
by Ernest Hemingway called Now I Lay Me, I thought
there wasn't much further to say about insomnia. I see
now that that is because I'd never had much. It
appears that every man's insomnia is as different from his
neighbors as are their daytime hopes and aspirations. Now, if

(34:40):
insomnia is going to be one of your naturals, it
begins to appear. In the late thirties, Those seven precious
hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if
one's lucky, the first sweet sleep of the night and
the last deep sleep of the morning. But between the
two appears a sinister, ever widening interval. A typical night

(35:04):
comes after a particularly sedentary work and cigarette day. It ends, say,
without any relaxing interval. At the time for going to bed,
all is prepared, the books, the glass of water, the
extra pajamas lest I awaken, rivulets of sweat, the illuminol
pills in the little round two sleeping pills, the notebook
and pencil in case of a night thought worth recording.

(35:28):
Few have been. I turn in, perhaps with a nightcap,
and read till drowsy on a last cigarette. At the
yawning point, I snapped the book on a marker, the
cigarette at the hearth, the button on the lamp. I
turned first on the left side for that. So I've
heard slows the heart, and then coma So far, so good.

(35:51):
From midnight until two thirty, peace in the room. Then
suddenly I'm awake, harnessed by one of the ills or
functions of the body, to vivid dream, a change in
the weather for warm or cold, the real night, the
darkest hour has begun. Horror and waste, waste and horror.

(36:12):
What I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable.
I could have acted thus refrained from this, been bold
where I was timid, cautious, where I was rash. I
need not have heard her like that, nor said this
to him, nor broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable.

(36:34):
The horror has come now like a storm. What if
this night prefigured the night after death? What if all
thereafter was an eternal, quivering on the edge of an abyss,
with everything base and vicious in oneself urging one forward,
and the baseness and viciousness of the world just ahead.
No choice, no road, no hope, only the endless repetition

(36:58):
of the sordid and the semi tragic. Or to stand forever,
perhaps on the threshold of life, unable to pass it
and return to it. I am a ghost now. As
the clock strikes four on the side of the bed,
I put my head in my hands. Then silence, silence,
and suddenly, or so it seems in retrospect, suddenly I

(37:20):
am asleep. Sleep, real sleep, the dear cherished one, the lullaby,
so deep and warm, the bed and the pillow enfolding me,
letting me sink into peace nothingness. My dreams now after
the Catharsis of the dark hours, are of young and
lovely people doing young, lovely things, the girls I once knew,

(37:41):
with big brown eyes, real yellow hair. Life was like that,
after all. My spirit soars in the moment of its oblivion.
Then down, down, deep in the pillow, irresistible, iridescent. Here
is Aurora, Here is another day. Your thoughts fuck.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
The man could write yeah, yes, ouch.

Speaker 1 (38:19):
Ouch. He not only wrote that, he published that in
Esquire magazine. Just say what you will about self obsession,
self pity, whatever that thanks guts.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean that's that's Is that as
grim as this gets? Or are we going further?

Speaker 1 (38:41):
I mean a woman's burned alive in a couple of pages?

Speaker 2 (38:44):
Oh right, yeah yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
But I think that that might be around the bottom. Yeah,
we're hovering, We're hovering around the bottom. Yeah yeah. There
were many, including Scott's own friends, who felt that these
exceedingly raw essays were a little much unseemly display of

(39:07):
the soul, so to speak. Even Hemingway took a shot
at his friend Scott in a short story also an
Esquire called The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Papa h wrote he
remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald in his romantic awe and how
he had started a story once that began the richard
different from you and me, And how someone had said

(39:28):
to Scott, yes, they have more money, but that was
not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special,
glamorous race, and when he found out they weren't, it
wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.
Fitzgerald was not amused, and he wrote Hemingway an aggrieved
letter upon reading this, filled with humorous slash sad parentheticals,

(39:51):
Dear Ernest, please lay off me in print if I
choose to write diprofundis sometimes it doesn't mean I want friends,
still friends? Then praying aloud over my corpse, No doubt
you meant it kindly. How could that have been? But
it cost me a night's sleep, only one night. I'm
tougher than you think. And when you incorporate it the

(40:13):
story in a book, would you mind gently gently cutting
my name? It's a fine story, one of your best,
absolutely true and under the circumstances, insightful and generous, even
though the poor Scott Fitzgerald et cetera, rather putting it mildly,
spoiled it for me. Ever, your friend parentheses despite all Scott,

(40:35):
where are you right now? In a good place? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah, well not many people respond well to having your
whole deal unpacked in one sentence. A short story in Esquire,
like I'm sure that one just hit him dead between
the and we had to sit down and.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
Have a bottle of gin about it. Just KNEECAPPEDIM.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
Yeah, come on, man, that's tough.

Speaker 1 (41:07):
I mean, I will say, you know, I quoted Alan
Bennet's The History Boys last week in the opening of
the last week's episode. I'm gonna paraphrase. It was something like,
there's something very special about when you read something that
you had previously thought was something that was unique to you,
a unique thought, a unique circumstance, a unique anything. And

(41:30):
then you have somebody up from a century earlier writing
basically taking the thoughts from your head. And I think
the quote from Alan Bennett was it's like a hand
reaching out through time. And I find I find a
certain sense of comfort in that. Yeah, it's part of
the shared it's part of what makes us human, that
it's something that's been around for a long long time.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yeah, I just think it's I just think it's probably
weird if it's true, more than he let on. Like
when you unpack someone's in like again, I mean, that's
like a surgical strike. That's not like a flowery like
love or sadness. That is just being like, yeah, dude,
your life is a sham. And your artistic works and

(42:14):
like your core belief that motivated all of your art
and essentially your life is.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
Astake. I'm misunderstanding of the human experience.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
You should have spent more time boxing. Yeah, no one, Yeah,
no one wants to hear that. Yeah, I get it,
I get it. Yeah, but you know, not nice of
him to write a letter, regardless of.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
A Fitzgerald writing a letter to him. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
Yeah, probably it's only friends, gotcha.

Speaker 1 (42:47):
Jesus Christ? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Can you imagine the benders those two head.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
I cannot No, No, I haven't read a movable feast
in a while, but I'm sure at least some are
recounted in there. Jesus yes. Anyway, Well, by the late
nineteen thirties, Scott did what a lot of lost generation
writers did who were down on their luck. He followed
the money out to Hollywood to try to make it

(43:12):
as a screenwriter. When talkies had come into vogue at
the end of the nineteen twenties, studio heads panicked because
none of their staff writers had ever written dialogue before.
So as a result, every studio in town started throwing
money at every novelist and playwright they could find. Suddenly
Hollywood was filled with famous writers, essentially squandering their talent.

(43:35):
Scott arrived in the Writer's Building at MGM in nineteen
thirty seven, and he stayed there about eighteen months, though
he only received one screen credit for his work on
three Comrades. He also contributed to Infidelity, a film that
was intended for Joan Crawford but was canceled due to
its racy subject matter and the women, which was ultimately rewritten.

(43:55):
Bud Schulberg, Academy Award winning screenwriter on the Waterfront, recalled
his initial impression of Scott. Unlike all the famous Eastern
writers who came to Hollywood to replenish lost fortunes and
take the money and run, Fitzgerald regarded the motion pictures
as a unique twentieth century art form that demanded as
serious attention as their novels and plays. Fitzgerald became friendly

(44:18):
with Clark Gable, who kept trying to get him to
write a talkie version of Gatsby with himself in the
starring role, but unfortunately it never came together. That would
have been awesome. Clark Gable as.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Gatsby, Yeah, yeah, this is Gable's good.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
Era, right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
He also a culm to alcoholism.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Yes, this was right before Gone with the Winds, So yeah,
this was like prime Gable era. Well, was Zelda more
or less living the life of an invalid in the hospital.
Scott more or less acted like a single man. He
settled in the relationship with the famous gossip columnist Sheila Graham,
but he very nearly patched things up with his lost

(44:59):
teenage love, Geneva King, you know, the socialite who was
deemed unsuitable for a lower class boy like Scott, so
her parents married her off to a polo playing heir
to a local bank fortune, thus inspiring the entire plot
of The Great Gatsby. That one, Geneva's relationship with her

(45:19):
philandering petroleum executive husband had finally foundered, and she paid
Scott a visit at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on October
nineteen thirty eight. She was the first girl I ever loved,
and I have faithfully avoided seeing her up to this moment.
To keep the illusion perfect, Scott informed his teenage daughter
for in the world of the meeting. Yeah, your mom's

(45:41):
in the hospital, so I'm meeting my teenage fling. I
hope that's uh, I hope that's cool with you. She
was the first girl I ever loved. You know that's
a choice. Yeah. Ultimately, this long awaited reunion with his
lost love was a disaster. If you're gonna have a
reunion with a partner who rejected you, it's kind of

(46:03):
advised to show up as your best self. Otherwise, the
whole revenge fantasy thing, it doesn't really play out. And
Scott was not at his best. His body had been
ravaged by alcoholism at this point, and then we'd been
on the wagon for months. The site of Geneva destabilized him,
and sensing that this rendezvous wasn't going well, he started

(46:25):
ordering double shots of gin. Things went south as Scott
got drunker and angrier. When Geneva asked if she'd inspired
any characters in Fitzgerald's novels, drunken Scott quipped, what bitch,
do you think you are not uncalled for? It could

(46:46):
have been better? Like if it had been funnier.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
If it had been funnier, I mean, poor good a
secret idiot do you think was gonna happen? I?

Speaker 4 (47:06):
Well, I mean he was last time they had met,
he was a poor student at Princeton with no prospects,
and now he was a I guess a pasted it
literary it.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
Boy. Yeah, but it was still it was better than
he was, but not as good as he had been.
By the Christ of God, go all of us.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, Jesus Christ, boy, this is just yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
And it was on this note that the pair parted forever.
Geneva returned back to her home in Chicago, bitterly disappointed
by the man Scott had become. Scott used this final
meeting as the basis for his nineteen forty one short story,
posthumously published, I might add three hours between planes. I
will not be quoting that one.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
Please don't know, Please stop quoting him. Actually, stop telling
me details about his life. This is this is painful
to me.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
Well, how about his death? Okay? Okay. In nineteen forty,
the final year of Scott's life, only fifteen copies of
The Great Gatsby were sold fifteen fifteen thousand, fifteen. In Hollywood,
where Fitzgerald had been eking out a living as a screenwriter,
he couldn't even find his own books and stores. They

(48:25):
were out of print. When he received a royalty check
that August, it was for thirteen dollars and thirteen cents
and a mount both paltry and symbolically menacing mm HM.
He died four months later of a heart attack at
age forty four, just four days before Christmas, day before

(48:46):
my birthday. It's not believe that Fitzgerald suffered some form
of tuberculosis during his lifetime, though some suspected that diagnosis
served as a cover for his heavy drinking in the twenties. Regardless,
it was a third and final heart attack and not
tb that killed him. He went to the grave believing
himself a failure and that his work had been forgotten.

(49:07):
Within a decade, however, a revival in the interest of
his work would begin again. When The New York Times
publishes obituary, it referenced the Great Gatsby only as evidence
that Scott had never fulfilled his early promise. His funeral
was sparsely attended, with a few mourners, including his sister
or husband, their daughter, a gardener, and the people who'd

(49:29):
rented him a house where he'd written one of his books,
Tender as the Night. Fellow writer Nathaniel West died in
a car crash en route to the funeral, and that
was unfortunate because he needed the numbers writer and noted
whit Dorothy Partner also attended the funeral, and she was
heard to murmur, A poor son of a bitch, quoting

(49:52):
a line from the funeral scene in The Great Gatsby,
which you recall was also sparsely attended. The final indignity,
Scott was denied burial in his family's Catholic plot in Rockville, Maryland,
due to the perceived risque nature of his novels. Instead,
he was laid to rest alone in a Protestant cemetery

(50:15):
or I guess anything goes. Zelda paid for the plot,
and she joined him there eight years later when she
died in a fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina,
where she was being treated for her mental health issues.
She had been sedated and locked in her room awaiting

(50:37):
shock therapy when a fire broke out in the kitchen,
possibly set by a mentally deserved patient. It soon spread
to every floor of the facility, ripping through even the
fire escapes, which bizarrely were wooden. Nine women, including Zelda,
were killed. She was identified by her dental records in
one of her slippers. She was buried with Scott, but

(51:00):
because she'd only purchased one burial plot, she was buried
literally on top of him. There there remained for more
than twenty five years. Then, in nineteen seventy five, members
of the Rockville Women's Club petitioned to have the Fitzgerald
reinterred in their family plot at the Catholic Cemetery. The
case was taken all the way up to the Archbishop

(51:21):
of Washington, who immediately gave his blessing. In a statement,
he said that Fitzgerald was quote an artist who was able,
with lucidity and poetic imagination to portray the struggle between
grace and death. His characters are involved in this great drama,
seeking God and seeking grace. Today, Zeldo and f Scott

(51:43):
Fitzgerald lay together at Saint Mary's Church Historic Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland.
Written on their gravestonies the last line from the Great
Gatsby altogether Now so we beat on boats against the current,
born back ceaselessly into the past.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
I was holding my breath that entire time. Jesus Christ,
I thought this was a novel about eggs and beautiful shirts. Ah,
that hurt on many levels.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
Yeah, what was the prior record for sad It was
Dick York. It was Dick York.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
Yeah, it was Dick York.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
Dick York breaking into a cemetery to bury the baby
in the in the shoe box. Yeah, I think we
we might have surpassed that. Mmmm. Good question. Is that sadder?
That is sadder as an incident, but this is sadder
as a although his death too is also Okay, we tied,
We've we've we've hit the Dick York marker. Yeah, I

(52:57):
hope this. Make make sure this is running. I can't
take this again, Yes it is.

Speaker 2 (53:02):
Yet, how did you write this soaked in your own tears?

Speaker 1 (53:07):
It was cathartic. Holy sh We're going to take a
quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Too
much information in just a moment.

Speaker 3 (53:28):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
Well, As we touched on earlier, the book was also
considered a failure in his lifetime. Only twenty five thousand
were sold in the fifteen years before Scott's death, with
the rest languishing on shows. Critics had dismissed it as
a nostalgic period piece, a sentimental relic of the jazz age,
but within a year of Scott's death, his close friend

(53:55):
Edmund Wilson republished The Great Gatsby alongside Fitzgerald's unfinished novel
last Tycoon Rollercoaster Tycoon?

Speaker 1 (54:03):
Is that about?

Speaker 2 (54:04):
It's not about or a thinly fictionalized version of someone,
is it?

Speaker 1 (54:08):
You know? I don't know, like Andrew Carnegie. I you know,
I wouldn't be surprised or a Morgan. No, it's actually
an LA story. That's right. It's partially based on the
Hurst Louis B. Mayor and me and the Pod Louis B. Mayor. Yes,
oh my god, I didn't.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
How did he worm his sickening little way in here?

Speaker 1 (54:33):
Well? I think it's like it's like a takedown of.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Oh it's scathing. Yeah, okay, oh thank god? Oh man um. Anyway,
this sparked a slow but significant revival of interest. You
might also be interested to know that Capitol Records did
this with the Beach Boys Pet Sounds in the nineteen seventies.
So now we have forced both of Jordan's beloved be
Ea bands into an episode about a jazz age author.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
I just think that's an interesting like two works of
genius that were unappreciated upon release were then paired with
another artistic offering from the same artist as a way
to try to juice sales, and it worked.

Speaker 2 (55:14):
Yeah, there's that. In the spring of nineteen forty two,
just months after the US entered WWII the Big One,
the newly formed Council on Books in Wartime selected The
Great Gatsby as one of its Armed Services editions, compact
paperbacks designed to fit in soldiers pockets. Jesus, remember this
is what you're fighting for at home, boys, the illusion

(55:36):
of wealth in America and beautiful shirts. I'm picturing it
like a guy in a foxhole just taking out a
photo of a shirt. I'm generally kissing it, generally kissing
it and being like, I'm coming back to you.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Baby, a picture like those, but those like weird boats
storming Normandy and help the mast, or just all these
shirts instead of flax. Oh man, here's bad We're bad people.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
By nineteen forty four, over one hundred and fifty five
thousand copies of Gatsby had been distributed to American troops overseas,
even reaching prisoners of war in Germany and Japan through
the Red Cross. The greatest distribution point coincided with D Day,
the staff of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was Scott's
much loathed military professor from his days as an enlisted

(56:29):
officer ensured that troops storming Normandy had these books in
their pockets, with some soldiers reportedly reading Gatsby as they
crossed the channel.

Speaker 1 (56:38):
That's somehow even darker.

Speaker 2 (56:40):
That was las book any young men read before being
riddled with machine gun fire. And nope, that's fine. I'm
not even riffing on that one. The exposure created a
new generation of readers. Just a guy coming back and

(57:01):
going to you know, the Iowa Writer's Workshop or whatever.
I don't think that was around. And let's just say,
Harvard on the GI Bill, what INSPI did you get
into reading? Watch a lot of my buddies die face
down in the Atlantic ocean moments after reading about beautiful shirts.
Watched this guy drown on his own intestines, and I thought,

(57:24):
and I thought, I really want to chronicle the lives
of the people who.

Speaker 1 (57:28):
Are not doing this. Wow.

Speaker 2 (57:30):
Uh wow wow wow wow wow.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
Yeah. I know here we are.

Speaker 2 (57:34):
Uh anyway. Literary schudriar Roger L. Pearson defined the American
dream in nineteen seventy as the belief that every individual,
regardless of their origins, may seek and achieve their desired goals, quote,
be they political, monetary or social. It is the literary
expression of the concept of America the land of opportunity,

(57:57):
and it was in its crib shortly after the Carter presidency.
By nineteen forty five, full length scholarly articles on Fitzgerald
are being published, and Gatsby was recognized in literary circles
as a towering work of fiction. Writers like Bud Schulberg,
Edward Neuhouse, John O'Hara, and other Losers cited it as

(58:18):
a profound influence. Now I'm just kidding. I just don't
know those guys. Hunter As Thompson was so inspired by
the Great Gatsby he used to type it up on
a typewriter to experience what it was like to write
that way. He also did this with Hemingway novels, and
Thompson said that Gatsby was on his mind when he
wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
How do you feel about that? It's a weird thing
to do. I had a friend in my screenwriting department
who used to watch his favorite movies over and over
again with a pad of paper and write the story
beats out as he watched. And he just did that
as like an exercise. To try to like figure out
the rhythm of good movie writing, and I used to.

(58:57):
Part of me mocked him for that, and part of
me was like, oh, I get that, and that's that's
makes sense, even though I find it soul crushing.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
Well, there's something too the idea. But it's not like writing.
You don't get writing chops by typing something that someone
else has, right. I think he did a little. He
was in a not especially productive acid trip when he
came up with that concept.

Speaker 1 (59:21):
I want to assume.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
I mean, it's not like like in music, like you're
supposed to play like licks that you like and like
that's how you learn, right, And it's like but merely
typing someone's words, I guess. I mean, look, he probably
typed pretty fast, and he was famously you know, fast
and prolific, so I guess he got you know, one

(59:43):
am I?

Speaker 1 (59:43):
Who am I to?

Speaker 2 (59:44):
Who am I to talk? We should do fear and loathing,
don't you think?

Speaker 1 (59:48):
Yeah? I know, I keep it. That's another great Well,
that's another two for that's book movie you know. Oh man, Yeah,
I need a little bit of a recover from the
speaking of being prolific and writing a lot. It's this
was a forty two page outline. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
Throughout the nineteen fifties and sixties, the Great Gatsby became
a staple of high school English curricula and reached steady
annual sales of fifty to one hundred thousand copies. By
nineteen sixty, it had sold more copies in a single
year than it had during Fitzgerald's entire life, Which wasn't
that fifteen twenty five rus so not a hard thing
to do, no, okay, but still telling. And he was

(01:00:30):
dead in the ground with his wife's bones on top
of him, and did not see any of this.

Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
From any afterlife coffin flopping.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
No, I'm sure he was somewhere in writers heaven. This
is different.

Speaker 1 (01:00:45):
Yeah, there's no such thing as a writer's evan my friends.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Yeah, it's just it's yeah, what is writers heaven? A
room full of people giving you compliments you don't really believe, like, yeah, Jesus.
The novel's popularity only grew from there. As of twenty twenty,
the Great Gatsby sold nearly thirty million copies worldwide, with
over five hundred thousand new copies purchased each year, and

(01:01:11):
translations in forty two languages. According to its publisher, Scribner's,
The Great Gatsby is now their most popular and best
selling title of all time. Truly a remarkable transformation for
a book that was nearly forgotten its author died. Naturally,
with the success of the book on such a grand scale,
Hollywood smelled blood in the water. Gatsby proved to be

(01:01:32):
a hard novel to put on the screen, though, because
so much of it occurs in the narrator Nick Carraway's head,
hence why adaptations across the years have met with middling success.
The nineteen twenties film was hated, but three versions released
over the next ninety years got successively better, so you say,
starting with the nineteen forty nine release.

Speaker 1 (01:01:51):
Which you didn't hear this. You didn't know until yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
So throughout the forties there were tentative plans afoot to
remake Gatsby at Paramount. The studio still owned the rights
from when they made the silent version in nineteen twenty six,
and producer Robert Maybaum petitioned executives throughout the first half
of the forties before the novel's popular resurgence, and he
got a bunch of doors slammed in his face. But
he kept on. He kept a knocking, much like the

(01:02:18):
rolling Stones.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
He kept on keeping on, like.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
He kept r crumb. He was he was. He was
back in the high life again, like Aerosmith.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
He was high on the hog, like the band.

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
Jesus Christ oh Man. Sometimes they google that album cover
just to laugh and laugh and laugh. If you're a band,
if there any if any of you were fans of
the band, do yourselves a favor and check that one out.

Speaker 1 (01:02:45):
Uh for really a.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
Truly illustrative, a defining illustration of boomers failing to find
their way.

Speaker 1 (01:02:54):
Yes, ititched. It's up there with the Crosby Stills A
Nash one of just like hot dogs being ro stood
over planet Earth. Have you seen this one? No? Wait,
I insist that you watch. What's it called? That's what
I'm trying to remember. It's like it has like a
hilarious name to like, live it up, Live it up,
he stills a Nash Live it Up nineteen ninety Oh yeah,

(01:03:18):
oh boy, that's ugly. Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
Okay, as maybe I'm gonna recall this was late nineteen
forty six. Scott Fitzgerald had been dead since nineteen forty
his reputation was at its lowest EBB. The jazz age
he celebrated was regarded as an aberration. But I saw
similarity between what was happening in nineteen forty six to
what had happened to the country in nineteen twenty, and
I kept badgering the studio until it agreed to let
us prepare a script two post war eras sure a

(01:03:46):
chronologically correct assessment. This is when things went not not well.
The country was still under the draconian and puritanical Production
Code administration, so scripts that bore any resemblance to Scott's
books repeatedly rejected due to having a quote low moral tone.
Among the offenses were depictions of adultery, excessive drinking, unpublished manslaughter,

(01:04:07):
unpunished manslaughter, unpublished manslaughter is a grin.

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
Need to write that down. That's a good EP title.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
Unpunished manslaughter, and bootlegging. The screenplay underwent multiple rounds of rewrites,
which moved the movie further and further from Scott's original
vision and, most offensively to those who knew him. At least,
the script added a voice of morality and a lengthy
preamble that outright condemned Gatspi's behavior as immoral and leading
to damnation. The scene featured a moment when narrator Nick Carraray,

(01:04:39):
now married to flapper Jordan Baker, which not a plot
point from the book. He literally quotes from the Bible
Proverbs fourteen twelve that there is a way which seemeth
right unto a man, but the end thereof are the
ways of death. Maybem reluctantly made these changes in a
desperate bid to see his beloved film produced, but he
would regret the additions as all wrong and very unfitzgerald like.

(01:05:01):
To moralize like that was something he never did. He
was always indirect. It was the price I paid to
get the film done. Critics would complain that the film
lacked sufficient jazz age flavor. That's not jazz baby. They
should know. The Bible isn't jazz baby. Only Halloween is
m I was just thinking about that meme, the Miles

(01:05:23):
Davis a fake Halloween bit. I'm going to read now unabridged.
When I think about Halloween, my soul swells with music,
and that's where the jazz comes from. People call me
a genius, but baby, I'm just a servant of Halloween.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
And that's not not really. I believe it was ClickHole
damn it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:43):
But someone googled or someone posted on chat is this true?
Uh so I'm it's print the legend anyway for his lead,
maybe I'm had his sight set on Alan Ladd for
the role Gatsby. Lad would go on to play the
title character of Shane in George stevens nineteen fifty three

(01:06:05):
adaptation of the beloved Western novel. Maybaum felt that the
Oklahoma born actor perfectly embodied the nouveau riche Gatsby. I
was in Lad's house and he took me up to
the second floor, where he had a wardrobe about as
long as this room. Apparently the room that he was
in giving this quote was quite long. He opened it
up and there must have been hundreds of suits, jackets,

(01:06:25):
sports jackets, slacks and suits. He looked at me and said,
not bad Vernoki kid eh, I got goose pimples, because
I remembered when Gatsby took Daisy to show her his mansion,
he also showed her his wardrobe and said, I've got
a man in England who buys me clothes.

Speaker 1 (01:06:39):
He sends over a selection of things. At the beginning
of each season Spring and.

Speaker 2 (01:06:42):
Fall, I said to myself, my God, he is the
great Gatsby. There's also Betty Field as Daisy, McDonald Carey
as Nick, and it co stars the patron saint of Shrill,
Shelley Winters as Myrtle, the gas station attendant's wife who's
having an affair with Tom Buchanan. But Alan Ladd was
the most instrumental in getting the film made. The studio

(01:07:03):
executives were wary about actually green lighting it and essentially
used the Gatsby script as a carrot to get him
to do other projects, each time promising that his next
movie would be Gatsby. After two years of this, Ladd
finally got wise and threatened to go on strike, and
ultimately the studio relented and production began in nineteen forty eight.

Speaker 1 (01:07:22):
For as Daisy. Producer Maybaum had a sight set on
Betty Field. As we mentioned earlier, this caused a clash
with the film's proposed director, John Father of Mia Farah,
who preferred Gene Tierney. The producer went out and John
Farrell walked off the production. In his place, they hired
Elliot Nugent. Elliot Nugent anyone. This would prove to be

(01:07:48):
something of a mistake because, per his Wikipedia, director Elliott
Nugent suffered from mental illness during the shoot, and that's
putting it mildly. The long suffering producer had to go
up to the roof of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and
convinced the director not to jump off. In a June
nineteen seventy eight interview, Nugent is quoted as saying, I

(01:08:11):
felt very unhappy when I was making cats Bey. I
thought I shouldn't be doing it and Alan Ladd shouldn't
be playing in it. Lad wasn't quite up to it,
but he got away with it. It was feared that Ladd,
who apparently was a star of beadle proportions, couldn't be
brought on location shoots without being mobbed. As a result,
all filming was limited to sound stages, compromising visual authenticity

(01:08:35):
and realism. It was there that more problems developed, mostly
due to the film star Alan Ladd, was a short guy,
which made him less than great when posed alongside his
taller male co stars. Because of this high disparity, the
studio built a raised platform which was covered with carpet

(01:08:56):
that sloped down to the regular floor of the sound stage.
Poor Alan Ladd was humiliated by this and would complain
to the makeup designer, no more, no more. From now on,
I'm going to demand approval of all the other male
actors I work with. Ladd also refused to remove his
wedding ring, and he also refused to kiss his Daisy coastar.

(01:09:19):
His rationale was that children would be watching this film
and he didn't want to set a bad example by
kissing a married woman. Ultimately, he was persuaded to do it.
Considering how worried Allan Ladd was about setting a bad
example for children, it makes this next anecdote all the
more surprising. He brought his five year old daughter Alana
to the set, which was already questionable given the subject matter,

(01:09:44):
but more than that, he chose the day that they
were filming the scene where he gets shot to death
in a swimming pool. When the gun was fired at Ladd,
a capsule underneath his skin oozed blood into the pool,
thus traumatizing poor five year old Alana, who began to
sob the actor he fired the gun. Howard da Silva
attempted the comforter. Look, he's coming out of the water.

(01:10:05):
It's just pretend. But a child that age doesn't know
pretend from not pretend. He recalled, I remember feeling quite
strange about that. Thirty years later, Alana recalled the traumatic incident.
I remember that day vividly, vividly. The blood hit the
water and I started to cry. It had taken them
the whole day to set up in two hours to

(01:10:27):
form the capsule on his back, and I ruined the take.
The aforementioned literary critic, Edmund Wilson, who was a close
friend of Scott since their Princeton days, was seen as
the custodian of the Fitzgerald literary legacy. He was the
man behind paring Gatsby with Scott's unfinished work, the Last Tycoon.
All this to say, his sign off on this movie
was huge. Paramount Pictures arranged a private screening of the

(01:10:50):
film for Wilson in hopes of earning his public endorsement.
According to a witness, after Wilson viewed the film and
exited the screening room, a smiling Paramount publicity man approached
him and asked how he'd like the picture. Not very much.
I'm afraid, replied Wilson, and he kept walking to the elevator.
The paramount publicity man felt apparently betrayed by Wilson's reply,

(01:11:11):
and started chasing after him. We've gone to the trouble
making a whole movie out of your friend's book, and
you don't even appreciate it. He was not the last
person to give the film a lukewarm at best response.
The New York Times review by Bossley Crowther dismissed the
nineteen forty nine version of Gatsby as quote a limp
sentimental romance involving a bootlegger and an old sweetheart based

(01:11:35):
on Scott Fitzgerald's classic story, but lacking the novel's bite.
Brother lamented that quote. The period of the nineteen twenties
is briefly and inadequately sketched as a jumble of gay
Long Island parties, old clothes, old songs, and old cars.

Speaker 2 (01:11:51):
Gay Long Island parties means something quite different these days.

Speaker 1 (01:11:54):
Yes, the baneful existence of prohibition and the disillusionment of
post World War One were conspicuously absent despite the jazz
age setting. So this would be like somebody making a
two thousand and one era period piece without the looming
specter of nine eleven. Essentially, Brother felt that lad was
too solemn as Gatsby and gave the impression of quote

(01:12:16):
a patient and saddern No, I've never read that one.

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):
Saturnine means it goes back to the ancient like one
of the ideas that the planets governed your, oh, like
your emotions, And it means like balefull and depressed.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
A patient and saturnine fellow was plagued by a desperate
love who among us, et cetera. Part of the reason
that I and probably a lot of you have never
heard of the nineteen forty nine version of Gatsby is that,
immediately prior to the nineteen seventy four edition with Robert Redford,
Ema Farrow Paramount suppressed the distribution of this older version

(01:12:59):
to deter a theaters from playing them and competing with
their new release. This decision led to prints of both films,
the nineteen forty nine version and the silent nineteen twenty
six version, to being lost. The nineteen forty nine version
was eventually rediscovered in twenty twelve, but the nineteen twenty
six version, as we mentioned earlier, remains lost. Let's skip

(01:13:21):
over my beloved fifties and sixties until we get to
the early seventies, a time so coked out, they tapped
a past at Truman Capoti to write the screenplay with
a Great Gatsby good for them, would you say? Yeah?
It's believed that the idea was that studio executives saw
similarities between the narrator and Truman's Breakfast at Tiffany's novella

(01:13:43):
I See That and Gatsby narrator Nick Kay. Yeah. The
idea to remake The Great Gatsby in the seventies came
from legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans, he of Rosemary's Baby
and Love Story and The Godfather in Chinatown. It's a
great documentary about him called The Kid Stays in the Picture,
which is highly recommended. Robert Evans wanted to make a

(01:14:04):
movie of Gatsby for his wife Ali McGraw. He just
made her a star by casting her in the hit
nineteen seventy adaptation of the book Love Story. You know
love means never having to say you're sorry, etc. And
for a follow up, he wanted to cast her in
Gatsby because it was her favorite book, Adorable hold On

(01:14:24):
to that memory for a moment. Robert Evans made a
deal with Broadway producer David Merrick as producer, and it
was Marrek who bought the rights for Gatsby for between
three hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred thousand from
f Scott Fitzgerald's daughter Francis Scottie Fitzgerald. At some point
they approached the legendary screenwriter Robert Town to write the script,

(01:14:47):
but he passed up the gig despite the prestige and
the one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars salary, which
is like a million dollars today, because quote, I didn't
want to be the unknown Hollywood screenwriter who up a
literary class. That's fair. Yeah. Instead, he wrote Chinatown, which
earned him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in

(01:15:07):
nineteen seventy four. The studio ultimately landed on Capodi, who
took a unique spin on the Gatsby story. He reportedly
planned on exploring narrator Nick Carraway's repressed homosexuality by bringing
him out of the closet, and he wanted to make
Jordan Baker, who was Nick's casual girlfriend in the book,
a quote vindictive lesbian. When Truman turned down a draft,

(01:15:29):
the executives were horrified by what he had done and
also what he didn't do. In an interview with Deadline,
former Paramount VP Peter Bart claimed that Truman Capote merely
transcribed chapters of the book word for words. Bart recalled
an intense meeting with Capote in nineteen seventy three at
a Beverly Hills restaurant where Campodi complained to strangers at

(01:15:51):
the next table, Oh can I do a Capote voice?

Speaker 2 (01:15:55):
I ra un, it's gonna come across a little.

Speaker 1 (01:15:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:16:00):
I wrote a.

Speaker 1 (01:16:01):
Brilliant screenplay, and this man from Paramount is telling me
that I didn't write it. I simply typed it. What
should I do to him? Truman was fired, though he
reportedly kept his three hundred thousand dollars fee. That's so
much money for like nineteen seventy two bucks.

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
That is an insane kill fee too.

Speaker 1 (01:16:22):
Yeah, that's insane. Now, that's an insane yeah wow. I mean, yes,
he was Truman Capotti, but then again he was Tan Cope.
He never never really wrote anything of consequence.

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
Again, it's true, movie magic, movie magic.

Speaker 4 (01:16:38):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:16:38):
Desperate Studio had Robert Evans punted the script to Francis
Ford Coppola, who had just wrapped production on The Godfather.
For Evans, the film was in the can but hadn't
yet been released, and Francis was so unsure about how
it would be received that he took on this gig
because he really needed the money. He really thought The
Godfather was gonna tank his career. It's easy to forget.

(01:17:01):
I forgot this until we were working on the Oscars
episode that pre Godfather. Francis had already won an Oscar
for writing the script for Patent with George C. Scott.

Speaker 2 (01:17:10):
I also.

Speaker 1 (01:17:13):
That he actually got the gig for Gatsby when he
did a punch up on the way we were and
Robert Redford was like, hey, you should look at Francis.
He would do a good job on this.

Speaker 2 (01:17:25):
Good for the most handsome man in the world, for
upping an ugly Italian guy with who was probably shirtless.
All those pictures of it. I was something from Heart
of Darkness was circulating the other day. It's just like him,
like in the middle, I guess in periods between heart
attacks while filming that, but just like just in an armchair,

(01:17:46):
just being like ranting about film how many.

Speaker 1 (01:17:49):
People hat a heart attack on the Apocalypse now set?
Because I know that Martin Sheen did too, right, Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:17:56):
And I thought Copla had two?

Speaker 1 (01:18:00):
Did he have? Jesus, I didn't know that Martin Sheen
had a heart attack that was drug related? Uh, I'm like,
what kind of drugs Sheen on?

Speaker 2 (01:18:13):
That era had to be head to be coke?

Speaker 1 (01:18:15):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:18:16):
What did Copla have?

Speaker 1 (01:18:17):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:18:18):
He had an epileptic seizure. Oh, we regret the error,
We regret the air and threatened to uh threatened to
kill himself at least three times, which honestly making a movie,
Italian making a movie. Yeah, that's that's We're still bar
for the chorus on that. It's right down the middle.
You know, you don't really start to take Italian seriously

(01:18:38):
with death threats until they're actually holding the gun.

Speaker 1 (01:18:42):
It really does. See and I can say this as
a as a half Italian Italian's putting to kill themselves
a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:18:48):
Oh yeah, I mean it's moon struck. Christy bag made
a big knife.

Speaker 1 (01:18:52):
Yes, yes, that is correct.

Speaker 2 (01:18:56):
Anyway, God, we've talked a lot about the Italians. I
can say it. I'm taking it back.

Speaker 1 (01:19:06):
You know, it's sort of amazing the couple. I didn't
try to end it during this production too. He admitted
that he had read Gatsby, but wasn't familiar with it
at the time. So, in a fitting tribute to F's
lost generation social circle of expats, Francis checked himself into
a hotel in Paris, apparently Oscar Wilde's old room, and

(01:19:26):
started work. I also read these spent time in Great
Neck Long Island, which served as the model for Gatsby's
hometown of West Egg. Francis later recalled, I was shocked
to find that there was almost no dialogue between Daisy
and Gatsby and the book, and I was terrified that
I have to make it all up, you know, do
the writer thing. So I did a quick review of

(01:19:47):
Fitzgerald's short stories, and as many of them were similar
in that they were about a poor boy and a
rich girl, I helped myself to much of the authentic
Fitzgerald dialogue from them. I decided that perhaps an interesting
idea would be to do one of those scenes that
lovers typically have where they finally get together after much
longing and have a talk all night scene, which I'd

(01:20:08):
never seen in a film, So I did that. I
think a six page scene in which Daisy and Gatsby
stay up all night and talk.

Speaker 2 (01:20:15):
Did coble I invent that cliche?

Speaker 1 (01:20:17):
I if he's.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
Believed, then we have like a key story point across
like dozens of the American ron coms to think that's wild.

Speaker 1 (01:20:30):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:20:31):
He'd be probably talking all that of his ass. There's
a way I can google it right now. But that's crazy.
If actually Francis Ford Coppola invented the like rom com
trope of just staying up and talking all night.

Speaker 1 (01:20:44):
Ah, but before sunrise. He would go on to say,
I remember my wife telling me that she and the
kids were in New York when The Godfather opened as
I was writing Gatsby, and it was a big hit,
and there were lines around the block at five thieves
in the city, which was unheard of at the time.
I said, yeah, yeah, But I got to finish the
Gatsby script, and I sent the script in just in time.

(01:21:05):
It had taken me two or three weeks to complete.
Frances was reasonably happy with a script, but like many
associated with the production, he was not happy with the
final product. On his commentary track for the DVD release
of The Godfather, couple refers to writing the Gatsby script,
adding not that the director paid any attention to it.

(01:21:25):
The script that I wrote did not get made. Bitch, Bitch, bitch.

Speaker 2 (01:21:35):
Nineteen seventies version. Casting is the subject header here. You
know Jordan doesn't have as much fun with them as
I do anymore? Well, some mean after all the stuff
I read, Yeah, about forty pages of Gatsby.

Speaker 1 (01:21:50):
Well no, no, no, I mean more thless like this
is coming off of writing the Fitzgerald's Dark Knight of
the Soul.

Speaker 2 (01:21:57):
That's true, that's true. Nothing witty and funny about this.
The production seemed somewhat cursed from the start. The search
for a Gatsby was long and drawn out. Marlon Brando
was initially in the running to play Gatsby, but he
wanted too much money four million dollars or about twenty
seven million dollars today. Brando was pissed with Paramount because

(01:22:18):
he'd surrendered his profit participation points to The Godfather for
one hundred grand immediately prior to its release, and as
people do when they make that decision, he immediately regretted
it because his points of the back end would have
far exceeded one hundred thousand dollars the most. I think
the most famous example of that positively is Alec Ginness, right,

(01:22:42):
was like, not at all convinced Star Wars would do anything,
and then it just paid for the rest of his life. Well,
didn't he also get a percentage of like merchandise merch Yeah? Yeah,
So Brando was trying to gouge the studio with his
next salary negotiation to recoup his difference, and admitted as
much to studio heads. This approach failed when the studio

(01:23:02):
execs argued quite rationally that it wasn't their fault. He'd
made a stupid business decision and these were two different
movies and two different business entities. In the end, they
declined to cast Brando, which pissed him off so much
that he refused to be in the Godfather sequel around
the same period, and Brando was also fifty and Gatsby's
supposed to be in his thirties. Robert Redford, who ultimately

(01:23:25):
got the role, later commented, didn't anyone at Paramount bother
to read the novel, to which I would reply, haven't
you been in Hollywood long? Enough to know the answer
to that. Rob Bob Redford. Man, his whole aur changes
if you called Bob Redford.

Speaker 1 (01:23:39):
Yeah, yeah, that doesn't that sucks that do Bob is tough,
Bob Bob out there. But Bob it's hard to pull off.
A's Dylan. It's Dylan, right, the only I think he
succeeds despite the Bob personally. It's true. It's true. Bobby Darren,
Bobby's Bobby's a different thing.

Speaker 2 (01:24:01):
Yeah, Bob is tough. Bob's tough. He puts like a
comically long amount of time in there.

Speaker 1 (01:24:12):
Bob's tough. It's tough.

Speaker 3 (01:24:14):
Ro to ho.

Speaker 2 (01:24:15):
Also, that move was stupid of him, but it resulted
in a much better movie.

Speaker 1 (01:24:21):
Yeah, like the one of the greatest sequels of whole.

Speaker 2 (01:24:23):
Time anyway, So Brando, Yeah, man, I can't get over
that Island of Doctor Moreau documentary. It is just so
hilarious how much of a prick he was on that, Like.

Speaker 1 (01:24:37):
Are you in any way surprise?

Speaker 2 (01:24:38):
Like no, but it is like it's so like the
that he and Kilmer got up to is like there
was this one guy in that doc The documentary I'm
talking about is called Lost Soul, which is Richard Stanley's
Island of Doctor Moreau, which is he was the guy
who initially got the nineteen ninety seven movie greenlit. He
was a talented director and he just a lot of

(01:25:01):
luck and got kicked off of it. But man, one
of the film crew was talking about Val Kilmer, who
was I guess charitably method acting because his character in
the movie is like a drug addult all. And he
was talking about like seeing Val Kilmer like reach out
with the ember of a cigarette and just like burn

(01:25:22):
a guy's side burns while the focus puller while he
was filming. And Brando's famous thing was there's two things.
One was the famous ice bucket hat because he was
hot all the time. So he was like, well, I
think I think Moreau would actually have an ice bucket hat,
and they like and refused to do it, like refused

(01:25:45):
to come out until they made him one because he
was like hot and sweaty. So they literally made him
a hat that you could put ice into that would
keep his disgusting old bald Marlon Brando head. Uh yeah,
just look at the way he looks in that movie's
coden pancake makeup.

Speaker 1 (01:26:00):
It's ridiculous. He looks like a corpse. Like he looks
like not well.

Speaker 2 (01:26:04):
And the funniest thing about that movie, aside from this,
is that the little man that that who is like
at the time like the World's Shortest Man, who mini
me is famously based off of his prominence in the film,
was entirely Brando's decision. There's another actor in that movie
who's quoted in this documentary who was originally going to

(01:26:26):
have this like quite rich part as as like Moreau's
like most proud creation, because there's a whole opening scene
where he's like reciting The Tempest and is this like
German actor and he talks about like being excited about
this role and all this stuff, and Branda gets on
his side and he's like the little guy, I like,
the little guy cut the Tempest shit and like just

(01:26:48):
cut this guy's part unilatterally so that he could like
elevate this tiny man and literally make him a mini me.
And they like the whole scene where he's playing piano
and the World's Smallest Man has an equally tiny piano.
That was all Brando just being like, I'm not coming
out of my trailer until you do this.

Speaker 1 (01:27:10):
What a guy? What an aphole man, I.

Speaker 2 (01:27:15):
Don't I mean like well, I don't know. I mean
it's I don't know, you know, it was wild one
and on the waterfront, like really worth the next fifty
years of putting up with this guys.

Speaker 1 (01:27:28):
I don't know. Hollywood apparently thought, so, okay, so you've
got a street car named Desire on the waterfront, Yeah,
wild One, Yeah, Godfather, Apocalypse.

Speaker 2 (01:27:42):
If you he's good in Apocalypse now, but he's I mean,
he's kind of phoning it in already. And Godfather, I mean
he's literally talking, he's literally talking through tissues. Well yeah,
he's literally talking through tissues and he's barely mobile in
that it takes all scenes like when he moves for
the first time in the film, it kills him.

Speaker 1 (01:28:05):
Am I missing any other oh? Sorry, last thing going Paris? Yeah,
despite that, thought.

Speaker 2 (01:28:12):
Well, he was great as cal l or jorde l
or al con Alcannon whatever Superman's dad's name is in
the Christopher Reef movie. I'm joking, of course. Anyway. Brando
sidebar over with execs also initially rejected Redford during casting

(01:28:34):
because they were under the assumption that Fitzgerald had described
Gatsby as having black hair something that is not true.
Warren Beatty was also considered for Gatsby, but he reportedly
wanted to direct. This was during his Shampoof era. Wasn't
but he thought he could direct. Also refused to act
opposite Alan McGraw aka the producer's wife.

Speaker 1 (01:28:55):
So the studio head's wife. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:28:56):
Yeah, the same thing happened with Jack Nicholson, which makes me.

Speaker 1 (01:29:00):
Want to rewatch Love Story and reevaluate Elli McGraw's acting
chops because nobody wanted to actor in this.

Speaker 2 (01:29:07):
Yeah, I guess maybe it was more the idea of
like knowing that you would get blamed because the y.

Speaker 1 (01:29:15):
Oh, that's a good point. That's a very good point. Yeah,
but it ultimately was a good point.

Speaker 2 (01:29:19):
Even though Robert Evans began producing the film so he
could hand his wife the lead role in her favorite book.
McGraw did not appear in the nineteen seventy four edition
of Great Gatsby and the Reasons read like a French farce.
Due to the delays and finalizing the script, mcgral had
a gap in her schedule, so eager to strike while
the proverbial iron was hot following her success and Love Story,
she agreed to star in The Getaway alongside Steve McQueen.

(01:29:43):
During the nineteen seventy two production, Steve McQueen did what
Steve McQueen does and made Ally McGraw fall in love
with him. The pair had an affair on set, and
McGraw left Evans for him, which wouldn't you Yeah, oh yeah.
She then had the goal to approach Gatsby producer David
Merrick through her agent, at least to offer herself and
McQueen as a package deal for the movie.

Speaker 1 (01:30:06):
The studio turned her down. Robert Evans, Yeah, Steve McQueen
has Gatsby, though, I.

Speaker 2 (01:30:16):
Mean they should have had Steve McQueen show up and
just beat up Robert Evans in an office like until
he acquiesced. That would have been I think the correct approach.
Or just drive really well around him Lamon's yeah, I
was just thinking a bullet. Oh well that's a how
many movies does he just like drive really drive in?

Speaker 1 (01:30:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:30:40):
Steve McQueen just a great driver, known for it. Reports
very as to whether she walked or was fired by Evans,
who still had tremendous way over the production and after
Alan McGraw's departure, producers considered Candice Bergen, Catherine Ross, Tuesday Weld,
Julie Christi, and Sybil Shepherd. Natalie Wood was approached, but
she reportedly refused to submit to a screen test and

(01:31:03):
then was murdered. Faye Dunaway thed I messing up the
timelines there, of course, but just want to bring up
the fact that old boy drowned her and Christopher Walkin
was there anyway?

Speaker 1 (01:31:15):
Where was I talking about? They landed on Mia Farah.

Speaker 2 (01:31:17):
Mia Farah had made it personal plea to Evans, whom
she worked with on nineteen sixty eight's Rosemary Baby six
years earlier, a film most famous for its haircut, kidding,
oh and being directed by a rapist. That was the
other thing her casting seemed somewhat faded. Her father, John Farrow,
had originally been tapped to direct the nineteen forty nine adaptation,

(01:31:38):
before he dropped out of her disagreements over the casting
of Daisy. What's more, her godfather was the legendary film
director George kuk Or, who directed the original Broadway production
of Gatsby at the start of his career in nineteen
twenty six, and then, as previously mentioned, went on to
win an Oscar for directing My Fair Lady. Also weird.
The little girl cast as Mia Farah's young daughter in

(01:31:59):
the movie Pat's ken Zitt grew up to play Mea
in the nineteen ninety five biopic Love and Betrayal the
Mia Farro Story, which included a reenactment of the shooting
of this film.

Speaker 1 (01:32:10):
Isn't that weird?

Speaker 2 (01:32:11):
Fun bonus fact She was married to Liam Galliger for
a time, which must have sucked.

Speaker 1 (01:32:15):
Yeah, they had a kid together, Lenin Gallagher, and Wikipedia
feels the need to point out that Lenin is named after.

Speaker 2 (01:32:25):
Thanks Wikipedia, man, you steal all the guys songs, and
you're gonna steal his name too. Yep, speaking of me
as daughtera data talking about the Southern No, I thought
the Zelda thing they'd rubbed off of me. I'm speaking
like a Southern bell speaking of.

Speaker 1 (01:32:41):
Me as daughta. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:32:44):
No, she was pregnant wow film in the movie, a
fact disguised by the time Monald tradition of loose fitting
garments and camera angles. Because I'll just add attack on
another hour while I just slower my speaking voice down
to a drawl. That baby was Fletcher previt baby.

Speaker 1 (01:33:01):
They grew up to be Hitler.

Speaker 2 (01:33:03):
That's the third biological song of Pharaoh and Andre Previn,
her second husband, Fletcher, today is the chief Digital Officer
at Cisco Systems, the networking guys. How about that Pharaoh
went on to pair in fourteen children in total. Jesus
was she irish well, Oh, yes, four of whom were

(01:33:25):
biological and nothing ever happened again.

Speaker 1 (01:33:28):
Nothing dramatic ever happened with her children ever. Don't google it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:33:33):
Several houses stood in for Jay Gatsby's West Egg mansion,
including Rosecliffe, a nineteen oh two estate designed by architects
Stanford White and modeled after the Grand Chiennon at Vise.
The ballroom, or Gatsby wears his army uniform to dance
with Daisy, was filmed at Marble House, another Newport mansion
built for the Vanderbilt family. Many of the well dressed
male party guests were recruited from the nearby Naval War College,

(01:33:56):
where their short cropped military hairstyles made them look era upropriate.
In addition to Rosecliffe and Marble House, the exterior of
Linden Place mansion in Bristol, Rhode Island was used for
Gatsby's estate. Scenes at the Buchanan's home were shot at
Pinewood Studios in England, while other scenes were filmed in
New York City and Uxbridge, Massachusetts.

Speaker 1 (01:34:16):
I don't know what was film at Uxbridge. I know Uxbridge,
that's like not far from where corp. That's very strange
that that was fa.

Speaker 2 (01:34:25):
Miya Pharaoh would later say that she struggled to connect
with co star Robert Redford and create onstream chemistry due
to the fact that she was he was completely absorbed
in following the Watergate scandal that was eroding the presidency
of Richard Nixon. He ultimately, he reportedly spent much of
the shoot at his trailer watching news coverage or reading
Woodward and Bernstein articles.

Speaker 1 (01:34:44):
That's hilarious.

Speaker 2 (01:34:45):
Yeah, that's kind of like the Jimmy thing I was
talking about earlier. Beautiful Doe eyed woman struggle please establish
romantic chemistry with me on this film. Per famed for
your handsomeness. He's a no babe. Sorry, staying in the trailer.

Speaker 1 (01:35:04):
The hearings are on.

Speaker 2 (01:35:05):
Yeah, gotta catch up Woodband burn sty of a new
article out leave me alone.

Speaker 1 (01:35:09):
John Deane's testifying today.

Speaker 2 (01:35:14):
The John dee Ba Jesus christ.

Speaker 1 (01:35:19):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (01:35:19):
This does make sense considering that he would play Bob
Werbird and all the Presidents men two years later.

Speaker 1 (01:35:23):
But no, I don't think he was researching. I think
he was just like so into it that he willed
a movie to happen that would allow him to continue.

Speaker 2 (01:35:31):
And ultimately, Bob Redford didn't even attend the film's premiere
in the spring of nineteen seventy four.

Speaker 1 (01:35:36):
That's a Bob move.

Speaker 2 (01:35:37):
That's a classic Bob move, Classic Bob. The movie received
a promotional blitz when it was released. A photo of
Mia as Daisy was famously featured as the first cover
of our former employee People magazine. Mad Magazine spoofed the
Gatsby film in its January nineteen seventy five issue with
a subtle bit of satire called the Great gas Bag,

(01:35:57):
which is what Mad Magazine would make a joke out
of Great Gatsby, the Bad Gatsby, the Great Batsby.

Speaker 1 (01:36:05):
It was right there.

Speaker 2 (01:36:07):
The film grows over twenty six million against a seven
million dollar budget, but reviews were mixed. Vincent Canby's nineteen
seventy four review in The New York Times is indicative
of the critical response, where he cattily said, no, the
sets and costumes, most of the performances are exceptionally good,
but the movie itself is as lifeless as a body
that's been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool.

(01:36:28):
Bodies float, Vincent, that's the first thing you learn. You
have to puncture the lungs or weigh it down. Idiot,
Why don't I have to explain this to you? As
Fitzgerald wrote it, the Great Gatsby is a good deal
more than an ill fated love story about the cruelties
of the idol rich. The movie can't see this. They're
all its giant close ups of pretty knees and dancing feet.

(01:36:49):
I don't like people's knees.

Speaker 1 (01:36:51):
It's a word joint, it is. I could see that
being out a thing for some people.

Speaker 2 (01:36:55):
Though I think Charlie has a bit about it, and
it's always sunny, but I share that. I don't think
they're like when you look at all the parts in
there under the skin.

Speaker 1 (01:37:04):
I don't like that. It's an impressive engineering feed but
it is. But I don't want to.

Speaker 2 (01:37:08):
I don't get away from me. No, those joints so
much meat tendons. What were we talking about?

Speaker 1 (01:37:16):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:37:16):
Oh yeah, sorry, Uh, it's frivolous without being much fun.
Sentence that I cut out of that to talk about
my thing about knees. Roger Ebert gave a movie two
and a half stars out of four. Quote the soundtrack
contains narration by Nick that is based pretty closely on
his narration in the novel. But we don't feel italics
his mine. Ah, we've been distanced by the movie's overproduction.

(01:37:40):
Even the actors seem somewhat cowed by the occasion.

Speaker 1 (01:37:43):
Jack Cox, Oh sorry, Jay Cox, we regret the era.
We regret the era, Jay Cox. J Cox Cox is
that a uh?

Speaker 2 (01:37:55):
Jay Cox of Time Magazine summed it up even more succinctly,
the film is faithful to the letter of f Scott
fitzgerald novel, but entirely misses its spirit. Some blamed the actors.
Mia Farrow wasn't the only one who felt like Robert
Radford was too subsumed, too consumed by the Watergate scandal
to uh really give it his all. Many critics felt

(01:38:16):
his performance fell flat. What did you just look up
that you're making Jim face at?

Speaker 1 (01:38:21):
Jay Cox has three Academy Award nominations for screenplay, so
he knows what he's talking about. The most recent one
is for a complete unknown. He co wrote the complete
of the Bob Dumb Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:38:34):
Good for him, nice for him.

Speaker 1 (01:38:36):
He did an uncredited rewrite of James Cameron's screenplay for Titanic.

Speaker 2 (01:38:41):
Oh Wow, Jay Cox, Jay Cox J. J. Cox of
Time Magazine.

Speaker 4 (01:38:51):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:38:52):
Some reviews were even more personal.

Speaker 2 (01:38:53):
Vincent Canby the New York Times claimed that Bob's got
looks and persona were too ivy league for a man
who came from poverty. God, he is handsome MEA. Pharaoh
also got flag for her portrayal of Daisy, which many
contemporary refused dismissed as shrill and hysterical. That was kind
of her setting, though, yeah, respectfully.

Speaker 1 (01:39:14):
What did you do to her eyes? Look?

Speaker 2 (01:39:18):
Some people are cast for one thing and a thing
that they do well. And she has big eyes and
she's distressed. Even Fitzgerald's daughter, Scottie came from me. Although
she praised Pharaoh as a fine actress, Scotty noted that
Pharaoh seemed unable to convey the quote intensely southern nature.

Speaker 1 (01:39:37):
Of Daisy's character.

Speaker 2 (01:39:38):
Not Southern enough, not enough slurs, My god, can you
imagine that she flew out of that woman's mouth. No, No,
I cannot. Pharaoh wouldn't act in a movie again until
nineteen seventy seven. Others faulted director Jack Clayton for the
Subpower film adaptation. When screenwriter Fancis Forward Coppola first saw

(01:40:02):
screening of the studio, he was furious for some reason.
He was particularly aggrieved by a scene that had been
added where Jay and Daisy lounged near the edge of
a lake. This led him to shout at Robert Evans
during the screenplay, why are the swans floating over their
damn faces? You'd be forgiven for thinking that perhaps Coppola
was being defensive of his screenwriting prowess, But his original

(01:40:23):
script was praised by no less an authority than William Goldman,
the guy who literally wrote the book on screenwriting. Goldman
had petitioned to write the screenplay himself, so he would
have been a tough judge, and he later said, I
still believe it to be one of the great adaptations.
I called Coppola told him what a wonderful thing he
had done. If you see the movie, you will find
all this hard to believe. The director who is hired.

(01:40:45):
Jack Clayton is a brit He had that one thing
all of them have in their blood, a murderous sense
of class.

Speaker 1 (01:40:52):
Devastatingly accurate.

Speaker 2 (01:40:54):
Well, Clayton decided that Gatsby's parties were shabby and tacky,
given by a man of no elevation and tape.

Speaker 1 (01:41:00):
There went the.

Speaker 2 (01:41:01):
Ballgame as shot. They were foul and stupid, and the
people who attended them were foul and silly. And Robert
Redford and Mia Farrow, who would have been so perfect
as Gatsby and Daisy, were left hung out to dry
because Gatsby was a tasteless fool. Why should we care
about their love? It was not as if Coppola's Glory
had been jettisoned entirely. Though it was tampered with plenty,
it was more than the reality and passions it depicted

(01:41:22):
were gone. Also for what it's worth, Tennessee Williams praised
the film adaptation and one of his memoir It seemed
to me that quite a few of my stories, he said,
as well as one of my one acts, would provide
interesting and profitable material for contemporary cinema. Cough cough, that's
the hilarious thing to put in your memoir whilst living, Guys,

(01:41:44):
I've got other stuff. Enough with the cat this could
work enough, yes, if committed to such cinematic masters of
direction as Jack Clayton, who made of the Great Gatsby
a film that even surpassed Tennessee. Williams thought the novel
by Scott Fitzgerald weird take, but what else would you

(01:42:04):
expect from the guy who choked on a medicine cat bottle?
Most of this Jack Clayton film, Oh, room at the top.
Something wicked this way comes our mother's nothing, Absolutely nothing
that I remember.

Speaker 1 (01:42:22):
As you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more,
too much information after these messages. I can't believe you're

(01:42:46):
sticking me with this entire section that I like to
call your a moment of Baz.

Speaker 2 (01:42:52):
I'm not going to talk about it, but before we
get the we.

Speaker 1 (01:42:55):
Should probably nod to the two thousand made for TV
version of The Great Gatsby that was made for Annie,
which stars Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway, my beloved Mira
Servino as Daisy, and future Bond villain Toby Stevens as Gatsby.
For some reason, my English teacher in high school made
us watch it, this version and not the seventies classic.
I don't know why. And while we're here to satisfy

(01:43:18):
our complete at streak, we should probably shout out a
few other notable adaptations. There was a radio play of
The Great Gatsby in nineteen thirty four, a half hour
long adaptation for CBS's Family Hour, which starred Kirk Douglas
as Gatsby. In nineteen fifty the novel was read aloud
by Trevor White for the BBC World Service in a
ten part series in two thousand and eight, and in

(01:43:39):
twenty twelve, BBC Radio Four broadcast a classic serial dramatization
created by dramatist Robert Forrest. But all this pales in
comparison to the buzz surrounding boz Lherman's twenty thirteen version.
When boz Lerman was a child growing up down Under,
his father ran the low gas station, just like the

(01:44:02):
murderous Wilson in The Great Gatsby. Bozz first conceived of
his own adaptation in two thousand and four when he listened.

Speaker 2 (01:44:10):
Can't take the guy seriously? What the is baz baz?

Speaker 1 (01:44:14):
What is it short for bait? Basil? Oh? Is it?
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:44:20):
No, his full name is Mark Anthony. Why is it
called baz Mark Anthony baz Lerman?

Speaker 1 (01:44:29):
Is there any reason listed?

Speaker 2 (01:44:30):
He received the nickname bas at school, given to him
because of his hairstyle, the name coming from the puppet
character Basil Brush, a fictional fox best known for his
appearances on daytime British television, primarily portrayed as a glove
puppet that was so much better than I. While still
in high school, Lherman changed his name by something called

(01:44:52):
a deed poll to Basmark to Basmark, joining his nickname
and legal name together. So his actual legal name is
bas Mark Anthony Lherman. What a what a he sucks?
What a sucky guy? Who sucks? Mark Anthony?

Speaker 1 (01:45:17):
I can't, I can't say his name?

Speaker 3 (01:45:19):
Is he gay?

Speaker 2 (01:45:20):
Can I say?

Speaker 1 (01:45:20):
Is he? Is? He? Is he gay? You know? I
always assume so, but I don't. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:45:24):
It's often speculated. Oh, but he has been married since
nineteen ninety seven. His daughter has even mentioned being mocked
at school about the rumors. According to Yahoo News New Zealand,
that sucks. I'm sorry, I'm very sorry. Speaking on the
Under the Gloss podcast in twenty twenty three, she said,
I specifically remember I was driving in the car on

(01:45:46):
the radio. This guy was like, today we're going to
be discussing is bas Lerman Gay? And I went to
school and the kids were like, is your dad gay?
She did say, I'm not traumatized by it. I've gotten
over it.

Speaker 1 (01:45:58):
Buzz first conceive of his own adaptation of The Great
Gatsby in two thousand and four, when he listened to
the book on tape during a lengthy train ride through
Siberia to Mongolia. As one does okay Man, He said,
I had two bottles of red wine and the new
iPod with two recorded books. When The Great Gatsby ended,

(01:46:20):
I had inconsolable melancholia. I was like, can we do
that again? Not long after leaving the train, Baz put
in a call to Sony, who owned the rights to
the novel, and then a scant. Two years later, he
finally secured those rights and set about co writing a screenplay.
The script he co wrote with Craig Pierce made five

(01:46:42):
notable changes to the novel's plot. Nick Carrara writes from
a sanitarium, having checked himself in sometime after that summer
with Gatsby. He flirts with Jordan Baker, but unlike what
happens to the novel, he's quote too smitten with Gatsby
to notice her interesting Gaspy himself makes a grand entrance,

(01:47:02):
whereas in the novel some time passes before they do.

Speaker 2 (01:47:05):
You remember most about this movie was that was that
no Church in the Wild song that was everywhere?

Speaker 1 (01:47:11):
Oh yeah, and that was before this movie came out.
That was from wats the Throne, Yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:47:15):
And yeah, God remember there was a time when he
wasn't who he was and he was merely annoying Kanye.

Speaker 1 (01:47:23):
Yeah, yeah, I mean when it came out, I loved
My Beautiful, Dark Twisted Fantasy. I thought that was an
incredible album.

Speaker 2 (01:47:32):
I've just never gotten it. I'm sorry. He's like, he's
such a one trick pony to me.

Speaker 1 (01:47:36):
Why I like maxwellism and he also, I mean, that's
the thing about Kanye at least then, was that he
sampled good stuff, Like I loved all of what Curtis
Mayfield stuff he sampled from Moving Up and Daft Punky
sampled like it was like listening to like girl talk.
It was like all stuff I knew. So that was fun.
For me, and that was fun for me. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:47:58):
I just remember being like, was the harder, faster song
or that he sampled stronger?

Speaker 1 (01:48:06):
Oh, King Crimson was power Yeah, yeah, twenty first century
schizoid part. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:48:12):
Yeah, I don't know. I just never I don't know, man,
I'd like the last song of his that I had
on any device was gold Digger No Jesus Walks sorry.

Speaker 1 (01:48:24):
I liked when he got into like maximalism, that was kind.

Speaker 2 (01:48:27):
Of yeah, the sped up soul thing was a little
like that got to be a little one trick pony
at some point, and that was why I honestly tuned out.
And then that then my beautiful dog Twisted Fantasy came
out and all of a sudden he was just way
more in the public eye, and I was like, oh,
I just don't like you as a person. And then
I went and listened to it. I was like, I'm
just still not impressed. I'm sorry, And then we all

(01:48:49):
know how that went.

Speaker 1 (01:48:51):
I think we can agree that you're a better judge
of character than I am. Heigel, I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (01:48:56):
I actually don't. I'm incredibly credulous. I believe what people
tell me generally, and and it has it continues to backfire.

Speaker 1 (01:49:08):
There's that line when people tell you who they are,
believe them. I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:49:13):
Yeah, maybe we should have believed. I have really not
been served well by evaluating people.

Speaker 1 (01:49:23):
It's not as cynical as you are. That surprises me.

Speaker 2 (01:49:25):
It is it is it's because I do have a
core of niceness.

Speaker 1 (01:49:29):
Way, that's that's why you get so angry, is that
you actually believe deep down that things should be good.
There's a sense of justice, and people are good or
should be good. And I think for me, I don't
have that, and I'm just appreciating and grateful for things
that do happen to turn out well. And that's the
weird twist between the two of us.

Speaker 2 (01:49:50):
So that's your fun fact about me, is that I'm
credulous and believe in you and things. So go ahead
and take advantage of me.

Speaker 1 (01:49:57):
People. Some of the other differences between Buzz Luhrmann's script
and and that Scott fits Child's Gatsby novel includes Gatsby
dying thinking that his pursuit of Daisy was successful, and
some of the racism and anti semitism was toned down.

Speaker 2 (01:50:18):
Well that's lovely. Well, how do you feel about this.
You know my thing about directors coming in and being like,
I know better than this novelist, I Baz Baz my memoirs,
I Baz Luhmann, famous for taking and just making it gay.

(01:50:39):
No better than the great American novel I just that
drives me up a ball.

Speaker 1 (01:50:46):
I'm sorry why I explained when't hear more of a
while you don't like about buzz.

Speaker 2 (01:50:49):
That was a reductive thing that I said, and I apologize.
I do think that's his shtick. I'm sorry. He's not
a great script writer. Okay, this is a whole thing
about like what is he written man Rouge Australia, Australia. Yeah,
he wrote Stray Astra Austraia and got Vinnie my Winnies

(01:51:11):
my bbuh No, why do you Why should I have
to be in the position of you should explain to
me why you think he's good.

Speaker 1 (01:51:21):
I mean I never said that.

Speaker 2 (01:51:22):
Like I get I get Robert, I get the Romeo
and Juliet and almost said Robert and Juliet, which is
a very different film. I get that, right, you get
the young hot people, you do it. There's guns, there's
hip hop, there's whatever. Fine, I get it nothing else
that he's done. What was mulon Rouge based on making

(01:51:44):
songs worse? I think was the pitch of that. He
was like, what if I take a bunch of songs
and make them suck.

Speaker 1 (01:51:49):
By putting them alongside one another?

Speaker 2 (01:51:51):
No, that was actually an adaptation. Oh it's m duh.

Speaker 1 (01:51:55):
Oh Jesus, yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 (01:51:57):
Courtney Love auditioned for the role of Setine gave approval
for smells like teen Spirit to be used in the film.
It was yeah, because she wrote it, you know, Uh no, no, no,
I mean, like I know, I was being I was
being facetious. I hate her custodianship of Cobade's legacy. It's disgusting,

(01:52:19):
I mean legacy whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:52:20):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:52:20):
He probably wouldn't have cared, but because he was in
love with her for some reason. But God that she
kisses me off man literally writing in your journals, please
don't publish my journals when I'm dead, and then doing
that and being like, sure, you I want a role
in this film. You can use my husband's song, you
flamboyant Australian idiot.

Speaker 1 (01:52:42):
Did they cast her in anything Inverge? I don't think so.
I certainly hope not. Did we do? I know we did.
We didn't do the whole song the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:52:52):
This is just me mandering. I just don't. I don't
think he's good. In fact, the New York Times the
film is undeniably rousing, but there's not a single moment
of organic excitement because Luerman is so busy splicing bits
from other films. Yeah, and what did you think of Elvis?

Speaker 1 (01:53:09):
You know, I didn't see it there it is, which
I mean, I know, yeah, I know that. Actually, I
mean a lot of times when I see biopics, I
just find myself thinking, I just wish I'd seen a
really good documentary on this person rather than like whatever
I just sat through. And that seemed doubly so for
a movie that went out of its way to seem ridiculous. Yeah,

(01:53:31):
I did, like at the very end, like Elvis's when
he recreated Elvis's one of his last performance doing how
great that no unchained melody, unchained melody when he's like
in the big jumpsuit with like disposable fast food pepsi
styrofoam cups on the grand piano and he's just like

(01:53:52):
him and a piano body completely looks like a melted
candle of Elvis, but like he can just built it
and he like hits those crazy notes one last time.
That was cool and that I haven't even seen the movie,
but I'm pretty sure that's how they decided to end it.
It's in there anyway, it deserves to be how they
ended it. Anyway. That was cool. I'm glad they chose that.

(01:54:13):
That was a nice bit. I'll be coming home.

Speaker 3 (01:54:18):
Holy my my doll, Hi hungry for Okius hoe it.

Speaker 1 (01:54:49):
So slowly and time counted so much. Ho s.

Speaker 4 (01:55:17):
Honey, God speak.

Speaker 3 (01:55:30):
Too.

Speaker 1 (01:55:49):
What did you think I didn't see it? I hate Basler.
Yeah that makes sense. Oh man, we should I gotta
do Gracelands. Yeah, I have all the notes. It's just like,
so long. Do you guys want to sit hear us?
Do an episode on Elvis's house Graceland, tweet at us
or send us a note in KOFE or dm us

(01:56:11):
or hell a lot. He just text me at this point, Yeah, yeah,
text Jordan. It'll be a fun one. Well. After Baz's
box office bomb, Australia stunk up theaters in two thousand
and eight, but has decided it was time to pull
out the Big Guns enter Gatsby. From the start, he

(01:56:32):
had Leonardo DiCaprio in mind as the lead. The pair
had last worked together for nineteen ninety six's Romeo plus Juliette,
which does rule. That's actually very good. I really like that.
According to him, Leo was the only one he approached
to play Gatsby, and Leo jumped at the chance because,
in his own words, he was drawn to quote the

(01:56:52):
idea of a man who came from absolutely nothing, who
created himself solely from his own imagination. Gatsby's one of
the iconic characters because he could be interpreted in so
many ways, hopeless, romantic, a completely obsessed wacko, or a
dangerous gangster clinging to well. Toby Maguire seemed like the
logical choice for Nick Carraway, Gatsby's confidant. He and Leo

(01:57:16):
were childhood friends. This marked the third collaboration between the pair,
following This Boy's Life in nineteen ninety three in Don's Plumb,
which as a movie I Do Nothing about Daisy, however,
was a little harder to come by.

Speaker 2 (01:57:30):
How did you not put in the posse in there?

Speaker 1 (01:57:32):
I thought about it, and I took it out. Would
you like to elaborate on that? No, I just find
it hilarious that who were all of them?

Speaker 2 (01:57:41):
I just think it's Hilario's. Toby maguire's in there because he's,
you know, looks the way that Toby McGuire does. But
he was apparently running around.

Speaker 1 (01:57:48):
Second hand Leo.

Speaker 2 (01:57:50):
I was gonna say, get get in Leo's no list,
just running rampant with Leo's discard pile, his slush pile,
if you will.

Speaker 1 (01:58:01):
In twenty ten, Lerman did he workshop of his Gatsby screenplay,
in which Rebecca Hall read for the part.

Speaker 2 (01:58:08):
Of Daisy an Angel.

Speaker 3 (01:58:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:58:10):
I love rebccah Hall. She was offered Golden Globe nomination
for Vicki Christina Barcelona. Baz apparently didn't think she was talented.
He was not impressed with her performance in the reading,
and he immediately started going through his rollodecks of a
list Hollywood actresses for the part of Daisy. Well, what
does he find now? He considered Kiera Knightley, Rachel McAdams,

(01:58:32):
Abby Cornish, Ava Green, Anne Hathaway, Olivia Wilde, Blake, Lively,
who I remember hearing a lot about possibly getting this role.
Natalie Bartman, Jessica Alba, Michelle Williams, and Amanda Seyfried, who
was actually announced as the official casting at some point
in twenty ten before they walked it back. Scarlett Johansson
was also close to being finalized before she was forced

(01:58:53):
to back out due to her commitment to Cameron Crowe
for Check's Notes twenty eleven's We Bought a Zoo.

Speaker 2 (01:59:01):
Yes, I knew it would be We Bought a Zoo.
It could be nothing other than we. It's always trying
to make the case that like, I love her. I
think she's a wonderful, she seems she seems lovely. But
someone was like trying to make the case for her
as like a very serious actress. I was like, I
beg your pardon. I mean, well, it's like the Halloween series. Man,

(01:59:25):
It's like Halloween and The Exorcist. You get like when
your first thing out gets you critical cachet, people just
forget about the other dogs you do for in top
for and they'll just keep coming back. I know there
were people who think, like Black Widow is like the
role of a lifetime, but get over anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:59:42):
I'm looking at Cameron Crow's who I love by the way.
I mean, he's a music well that was the music
journalist turned screenwriter, so obviously I worship the guy.

Speaker 2 (01:59:49):
Oh you love it. You're a big fan of Elizabethtown.

Speaker 1 (01:59:51):
Vanilla Sky, like the Vanilla Sky. But wait, he did
We Bought a Zoo, which bombed because it's ridiculous. And
then he did that a Oha movie where he cast
him a stone as a Hawaiian woman and all the
fallout from that. And he has not directed a non
documentary and even then was only one since and that

(02:00:13):
was ten years Bomber. Oh, he has not done. He
did a Stevie Nick's music video. He did Roady Oh yeah,
he did that TV show Roadi's on Showtime Okay, and
he did David Crosby documentary in twenty nineteen, and that's
kind of it. Wow, good for him. Yeah. One of
the few names who wasn't bandied around by Baz in

(02:00:35):
this period was Kerrie Mulligan. Her audition seemed like something
of an afterthought in the wake of her success in
An Education. I only found out about the audition three
days before, so I read the book for the first
time and went to see Baz. She'd later say in
an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that was on November two,
and on November fifteenth, Baz called her to tell her

(02:00:55):
she got the role. She was literally on the red
carpet at the time, a fashion event in New York,
and upon receiving the news, she started to sob. I
burst into tears in the middle of this room with
Carl Lagerfeld and all these people standing next to me.
They thought I was mental. Lerman would say, I was
privileged to explore the character of some of the world's

(02:01:17):
most talented actresses, each one bringing their own particular interpretation,
all of which were legitimate and exciting. However, specific to
this particular production of The Great Gatsby, I was thrilled
to pick up the phone an hour ago to the
young Oscar nominated British actress Carrie Mulligan and say to her,
there's so many ways this could be read. Hello Daisy Buchanan,

(02:01:40):
Hello Daisy Buchanan.

Speaker 2 (02:01:43):
Yeah, that's offensive.

Speaker 1 (02:01:46):
I avoluargize good day.

Speaker 2 (02:01:51):
He didn't say good day, Good day, Daisy Struth, Carrie,
give me bloody Daisy.

Speaker 1 (02:02:01):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (02:02:01):
I heard a great new Australian expression the other day. Yeah,
Fad Dinger is a right fad dinger. He is, well,
that's caught the sorry, no, no fair dinkum, I apologize
dinkham dinkham fad inkom.

Speaker 1 (02:02:17):
Can you spell it?

Speaker 2 (02:02:18):
D I n k u M.

Speaker 1 (02:02:21):
What's that? Man?

Speaker 2 (02:02:22):
Just like a funny little scamp.

Speaker 1 (02:02:24):
Oh all right, where'd you hear that?

Speaker 2 (02:02:29):
In a video?

Speaker 1 (02:02:30):
Oh? This is gonna be good.

Speaker 2 (02:02:32):
In a prank video where a gentleman is disguised as
a home depot employee and selling this old Australian man
measuring tapes and saying, don't mind about the black bits there.
That's when me and my buds measure each other. Australian
guys like here. He's like, yo, yeah, just back in
the break room, fad dikum, aren't you.

Speaker 1 (02:02:57):
Wow? That was so much better than I could have
ever imagined.

Speaker 2 (02:03:01):
Well, I'm here to help while oh man, anyway, buzzlerman sucks.

Speaker 1 (02:03:06):
Well, you know who kind of sucks more, Kerry Mulligan.
Bradley Cooper. Oh yeah, we got to hear from Hollywood's
favorite try hard Bradley Cooper.

Speaker 2 (02:03:16):
It's so funny to me that he in in like wet,
hot American summer. He was like, it's true as self yeah,
and then and recoiled at the reception. He was like,
he was like, I'll never let anyone in that way again.
To be being a tryard theater.

Speaker 1 (02:03:32):
Boy, Bradley made a very public appeal for the role
of Tom Buchanan, the Battie.

Speaker 2 (02:03:39):
He dressed up like catwoman and went to bad Lehman's office.

Speaker 1 (02:03:43):
He basically used an interview in The New York Times
the campaign for the role. He said, to me, he's
the best character in the book. He's so complicated, he's xenophobic,
he's an alcoholic, but he also understands the profound stuff
about class. Whoever plays it has to take a gentle
and because it could so easily be stock where he's
a rich jerk you don't identify with at all. I

(02:04:06):
don't even know if I'm on Luhrman's radar. Maybe he'll
read this article after the Rolls cast and say, oh hah, yeah,
that guy was never gonna get it. But they do
not seem wildly out of character now post maestro. But
this was out a time when Bradley Cooper was chiefly
known as the guy from the Hangover comedies, so it's
doubtful that he was seriously considered.

Speaker 2 (02:04:26):
Yeah, he's it's so funny to me how unbearably earnest
he's always been. He's just a theater kid man. It
never scanned it. He was just hiding all of it
under that bro facade.

Speaker 1 (02:04:36):
You know. Who gets away to me with being unbearably
earnest and also a freak? Noel Coward more contemporary. No,
I don't know Tom Cruise.

Speaker 2 (02:04:48):
But just because didn't he do in importance of being earnest? No,
that was Oliver oscar Rod. Tom Cruise just loves movies.
He does love the movies, and I love it and
that is the yes. I just yeah, I mean it
is so funny, and he's like he really does have.

Speaker 1 (02:05:04):
It's like him and Brad.

Speaker 2 (02:05:05):
Pitt where it's just like, like, we know there's like
an FBI investigation into Brad Pitt's child and wife abuse,
but we're just kind of like, God, he's handsome. Just
let the man live. Just those two guys, you know,
if they just get this bass anyway, God, this one
has been funny.

Speaker 1 (02:05:25):
Nuts, I apologize. Where the hell are we from? O?
So okay, he didn't get the role in the Great Gaspee,
but instead he accepted a role in Silver Linings Playbook,
which earned him an Academy Award nomination. So it worked
out for Bradley True. Instead, Baz wanted to cast Ben
Affleck in the role of Daisy's British husband. Good, good

(02:05:47):
work there.

Speaker 2 (02:05:48):
I feel like bet I would make Ben Affleck sad,
and the man is already very sad. So I'm glad
this didn't befall him.

Speaker 1 (02:05:57):
Yes, no, he backed out to star and direct Our Go,
which won Best Picture. So yeah that worked out. Yeah,
a movie about the Iranian hostage crisis.

Speaker 2 (02:06:08):
Yeah, and that was like his big one where he
was like, I'm I'm everyone, I have things to offer.

Speaker 1 (02:06:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:06:16):
I think that family guy joke just really wrecked him.

Speaker 1 (02:06:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:06:22):
Yeah, man, huh they're finished Good Will Hunting by Matt Damon.

Speaker 1 (02:06:28):
Hey uh, you think we could put both our names
on that?

Speaker 2 (02:06:30):
What you've done nothing but eat briars and smoke pot
for the last six months.

Speaker 1 (02:06:34):
Oh that's ridiculous. Come on, I helped.

Speaker 2 (02:06:37):
Oh yeah, okay, right, Aline, just just right now, just
pitch me a line right now?

Speaker 1 (02:06:41):
Okay, how about that. That wasn't a line. You just
farted there any more? Pot?

Speaker 2 (02:06:47):
I like I just like Ben Affleck, as we've covered
on this as we've covered on this pod.

Speaker 1 (02:06:52):
I do too, But I worry about him. I worry
he's gonna snap and do something bad.

Speaker 2 (02:06:59):
I don't oh, I mean to himself or well, I
don't see him either way.

Speaker 1 (02:07:03):
I mean that video of him like on the red
carpet with her and being like talking to somebody smoothing.
Then the person walks away and his face just falls
like somebody flicked a Yes, that haunting that is haunting?

Speaker 2 (02:07:14):
It is yeah, yeah, yeah, But I'm saying, like, yeah,
I think he's more of a candidate for like killing
himself than like because then than having some kind of
you know, domestic situation or whatever.

Speaker 1 (02:07:26):
Sure, like again, if.

Speaker 2 (02:07:27):
You've like held off j lo oh.

Speaker 1 (02:07:32):
I think he loves her still. I think that's his Daisy.
I don't know why it didn't work out. I think
about that affair amount.

Speaker 2 (02:07:41):
Really, yeah, say more about that.

Speaker 1 (02:07:44):
I don't know. It just makes me sad that like
they had that reunion twenty years later and then it
disintegrated again.

Speaker 2 (02:07:52):
And yeah, because she's an awful person.

Speaker 1 (02:07:55):
I've never heard that she's awful. I know that that's documenting.
I never heard that document mentioned that they did. He
was uncomfortable with how much it put them out there,
and that was she published.

Speaker 2 (02:08:05):
I mean, first of all, she was legendarily hind maintenance
and insane. There were stories when she and Mark Anthony
were married about him just doling out hundreds to anyone
she interacted with in the restaurant as like an apology,
a blank apologia.

Speaker 1 (02:08:21):
I didn't know. Oh yeah, dude.

Speaker 2 (02:08:22):
The fact that she made this fuck you render about
herself and included like his love letters to her man
you don't awful woman?

Speaker 1 (02:08:30):
You ever an interviewer.

Speaker 2 (02:08:31):
Fuck No, they wouldn't let me within ten miles of her. Yeah,
your mind. They learned that lesson.

Speaker 1 (02:08:38):
Fairly.

Speaker 2 (02:08:39):
It took them longer to catch on to me than
I thought they would, But no, they didn't continue.

Speaker 1 (02:08:46):
Let's see. So yeah, Ben Affleck did not get the
role of Tom Buchanan. It went to Joel Edgerton, an
Australian actor who came to prominence in David Michaud's twenty
ten crime film Animal Kingdom. Another Australian newcomer, Elizabeth to
Becky on the part of Jordan Baker. She's better known
to me as being a dead ringer for Princess Diana

(02:09:07):
in the later seasons of The Crown. She's excellent in that.

Speaker 2 (02:09:10):
Also, just you're an Australian and you're doing the great
American novel and you're gonna change it and cast all
of your countrymen in it and women. Fuck you want
to go over? If there were a great Australian work
of literature, which I believe we're still waiting on it, uh,
I would go over and direct it and cast Americans

(02:09:30):
or even better cast the British, because that would really
get under their skin.

Speaker 1 (02:09:35):
What a fun showed. Well, this is impressive. I think
Leo and Toby are the only two Americans. You've got
Daisy is Carrie Mulligan, New's English. You've got Ilsa Fisher
who's Myrtle and she's English. You've got Elizabeth de Becky
who's Jordan Baker and she's Australian. You've got Jason Clark
who is George the gas station owner. I think he's English.
And you've got Joel Edgertoon as Australian as Tom Buchanan

(02:09:58):
as Daisy's husband. So yeah. Indian actor Amita Bachan appears
as Meyer Wolfsheim the UH. The the Jewish gangster. Thank you,
that's his first Hollywood role.

Speaker 2 (02:10:12):
Wonderful.

Speaker 1 (02:10:12):
He worked for free as a favorite to lherman favor
his first Hollywood role.

Speaker 2 (02:10:19):
Then, guys, he's a millionaire, buzz Jesus Christ. Everything about
this buzz Lehman himself. So also, where's uh, where's the outcry?

Speaker 1 (02:10:32):
You know? Man? Hey man?

Speaker 2 (02:10:35):
They find it a right man, hey man, Like couldn't
they find it authentically Jewish gangster? To portray a Jewish gangster.

Speaker 1 (02:10:43):
Buzz Luhrman gave himself a five second cameo in his
Great Gatsby adaptation as a waiter fine. On the first
day of filming, he staged the t scene between Gatsby,
Nick and Daisy during a fake rainstorm that required one
hundred thousand liters of water pull off, and then it
rained for three days straight afterwards during production. Here here

(02:11:07):
this will interest you. During production, Bows was injured when
he moving camera cranes struck his head, resulted in three stitches,
not enough the Grand Party House to pick it as
Jay Gatsby's mansion was primarily filmed that Saint Patrick's Seminary
in New South Wales, Australia, which is bos Luhman's former
high school. You think about that, sound, prompting me, oh yeah,

(02:11:32):
do you think about that one?

Speaker 2 (02:11:33):
So he literally went back to his old high school
as a flex.

Speaker 1 (02:11:37):
Yeah. Nothing to unpack there, man. I mean, as I
think we spoke about briefly on our last episode. I
actually I did enjoy my high school experience, and I
was very sad to learn that they're actually tearing my
old high school down to build a new one next
to it, which i'm parking lot, which I'm very sad. Actually, yes,
they're building one next door and then they'll tear it
down and put the new parking lot, which I'm sad about.

(02:11:59):
But my my friend Chris Fleming is taping a special soon,
and I was trying to convince him to do it
like at the high school exactly, but like do it
in three parts. Like the first part is at the
high school auditorium that we all like started our drama
club experience in, and then midway through it's like partially
demolished and there's no roof, and then at the very

(02:12:19):
end there's just the stage in the middle of like
an empty construction site.

Speaker 2 (02:12:22):
That's pretty good.

Speaker 1 (02:12:23):
It's pretty good, he was. He was not doing it.
I mean probably, I'm sure the unions won't like that,
but yeah, The Magic's interiors were styled in a richly
gilded blend of Art Deco and traditional establishment taste.

Speaker 2 (02:12:36):
That's the other thing. Man, he's just he's he's trump like.
It's just it's guilded.

Speaker 1 (02:12:44):
It's tacky.

Speaker 2 (02:12:45):
He's tacky.

Speaker 1 (02:12:48):
I've never seen a straight man so angrily hissed the
word dacky at me. And trust me, I've had I've
had it a lot.

Speaker 2 (02:13:00):
Ah Marion, that's my favorite.

Speaker 1 (02:13:03):
Did you ever see the Studio fifty four movie where
Mike Myers is the is like the founder of fifty
four four. Oh, it's great. He's like this flamboyant man
who co founded Studio fifty four and he's finally getting
busted for tax evasion and a whole laundry list of
other things. And he's let out of the club in handcuffs,

(02:13:26):
coming off of some serious downers and suicides. Are all
droopy and all the photographers are there taking his pictures.
Is being let out in the handcuffs and shoved bend
in the back of the paddy wagon, and he just
goes right before they shove him down inside. He goes,
this is so tacky. They slammed the door and try
fop and it's so good for him. Mike Myers is

(02:13:48):
great in that movie. It's not a great movie, but
a great performance. Uh. On the gate of Gatsby's house
is the Latin phrase at finem fidelus, which is Latin
for to the end, which symbolizes Gatsby's undying devotion to Daisy.

Speaker 2 (02:14:06):
It's also the in slogo of the US Marine Corps.

Speaker 1 (02:14:12):
I thought, that's always prepared. Fine. I just wanted another
reason to get mad at Helio and you took that.
You took. You're about to give you one right now.
Many of the lavish cars seen in this great Gasby
adaptation came from Jay Leno's personal collection. Ah, there it is.
It is due to the rarity and value of authentic

(02:14:32):
Duzenberg automobiles. For example, one sold for four point five
million the same year that this Gasby movie came out,
in twenty thirteen. They used replica Dusenberg's, which were painted
yellow and modified for filming action scenes.

Speaker 2 (02:14:46):
It's so funny that they they now make a they
now make guitars Dusenberg. Yeah, they're really good guitars. They're
super cool looking. They're like they're expensive too. It's not
a cheap guitar. I think I'll set you back. Oh my,
it's good good German craftsmanship, beautiful rebuilding a rebuilding an
vehicle or making it a custom What were you talking about?

Speaker 1 (02:15:07):
Oh yeah, that's interesting to me. I don't really understand.
I mean, I'm the kind of guy that would like
buy out like a knockoff, like fake roles, because I
like the way it looked. I don't really care that.
It's if it looks the part and it works, Okay,
I don't Yeah, yeah, like so that's cool. I'd like
I think it's.

Speaker 2 (02:15:22):
Just all done with like fiberglass. Yeah, right, Like that's
that's the joke about Like, I mean, they're like monster
truck shells. They're just like designed to like look good,
yeah briefly, and not actually be a functioning vehicle or whatever.
Who cares? Who cares? It's like, my body, bring this
one home, baby.

Speaker 1 (02:15:43):
The film's wardrobe, led by costume designer Katherine Martin, was
almost entirely custom made, which is crazy.

Speaker 2 (02:15:49):
Yeah, that's why his that's why his buddy had to
work for free.

Speaker 1 (02:15:52):
Oh yeah, Despite her initial hopes of using authentic vintage clothing,
Martin realized that original nineteen twenties garments were far too fragile,
so she worked with designers like Muccia Prada, who created
only forty custom dresses like okay, forty custom dresses apparently
from my notes, and Brooks Brothers, who outfitted the mail

(02:16:12):
cast and extras. Tiffany and Co. Supplied the jewelry, but
they had a dedicated on set security guard there at
all times to make sure that they got it all back. Yeah.
The most expensive and time consuming costume was a satin
pajama set worn by Elizabeth Becky, the Bickie. I don't
know how you say her name. I'm sorry, sorry to
that woman who played Jordan Baker. It was cut from

(02:16:36):
a single piece of satin fabric, and they had to
make two sets just in case she spilled something on
one of them, just in case. Leonardo DiCaprio's wardrobe included
a standout midnight blue tuxedo, chosen specifically to contrast against
a seat of black suits, and although the film's fashion

(02:16:56):
evoked a glamorous nineteen twenties look, many costumes orients criticized
it for its inaccuracy. Yeah, Catherine Martin, custom designer and
Prada modernized the clothing to appeal the contemporary audiences with
adjustments like push up bras that were not true to
the silhouettes of the jazz age era. Just stupid, man,

(02:17:17):
I'm sorry, is this what? Martin defended the decision, arguing that.

Speaker 2 (02:17:22):
Just even it from the trailer when he's like the
classic shot of him doing the like champagne glass towards
the camera, Like, how did they not fundamentally just telegraph
to everyone that this man did not understand this material,
like from the get go. But I guess people don't care.
They just wanted it to be loud and flashy.

Speaker 1 (02:17:44):
Well. The costume designer defended her decision by arguing that
the fashion of the nineteen twenties, especially as portrayed in illustrations,
was inherently about sex and bodily freedom, so it was
true to the spirit of the fashions. She said, it
was the first time that women basically wore no undergarment,
not even a garter belt. I don't know if that's

(02:18:05):
true citation needed. Alice Jurou of the Art Deco Society
noted that the film leaned into the nineteen twenty stereotypes
that aligned more with mid decades styles, short skirts and
clamorous flapper outfits rather than the actual fashions that were
in vogue in nineteen twenty two, and the movie took place,
which featured longer flowing garments. People would be startled and

(02:18:27):
disturbed if anybody did real nineteen twenty two fashion in
the production. Juro said, oh, you do the soundtrack stuff.
Here's music, you like music.

Speaker 2 (02:18:37):
I hate his whatever, although even better. Uh. The soundtrack
drew criticism as well from purists or people who were
not familiar with his stick, for its bold and anachronistic choices,
such as a Beyonce and Andre three thousand cover of
Amy Winehouse's Back to Black and Jack White's reinterpretation of
You Two's Love His Blindness.

Speaker 1 (02:18:59):
I don't remember that, okay, but I just.

Speaker 2 (02:19:02):
Man, this is just like, like I can't articulate how
stupid and basic those choices.

Speaker 1 (02:19:07):
Are, you know, like, oh, who's all right now? Oh yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:19:11):
Beyonce have her cover Amy Winehouse, who died within her
lifetime and her most personal song make it Joyful? Also,
Jack White like that. I usually give him credit for
having like a rigid moral compass, but like, how big
of a check did they dangle in front of? Can
you cover a YouTube song like Jack White? Mister analog purist? Mister,

(02:19:37):
my favorite recording of all time is Sunhouse is grinnin
in your face on like a shalack thing. Covering a
band whose entire existence owes itself to digital delay technology
must have been That's why his buddy had to work
for free, because they had to pay Jack White to

(02:19:58):
cover a You two song. Despite the backlash, Lureman defended
the off beat selections, explaining a Rolling Stone that his
goal was to evoke the same sense of cultural immediacy
from modern audiences that f. Scott Fitzgerald had for readers
in the nineteen twenties. In IgE, the energy of jazz
is culting the energy of hip hop, he said racistly,

(02:20:19):
jay Z, what that fu shit with?

Speaker 1 (02:20:21):
Like? Hip hop is the new jazz.

Speaker 2 (02:20:23):
That's the most lazy shit in the entire world. Jay
Z served as executive producer on both the film and
its companying album, which prominently features a small circular jay
z icon beneath its title. For the course of two years,
he worked closely with Lehman to create a soundscape that
merged hip hop, traditional jazz, and contemporary pop musical equivalents

(02:20:43):
of the jazz age's decadence and intensity. As I alluded
to early, the most controversial title was Beyonce's version of
Back to Black, and this is largely because Amy Winehouse's
scumbag father inserted himself into it and made a big stink.

Speaker 1 (02:20:55):
Which is his thing, right, Yeah, he's awful.

Speaker 2 (02:21:00):
Wichwinehouse vented his frustration on Twitter, saying he had not
been informed of the cover and suggesting that Beyonce donate
one hundred thousand pounds to the Amy Winehouse Foundation, which.

Speaker 1 (02:21:09):
Is a weird move because like, if you're going to
go for anybody come for the production.

Speaker 2 (02:21:13):
Yeah yeah, well, I mean I doesn't who manages those rights?

Speaker 1 (02:21:18):
Would that not?

Speaker 2 (02:21:19):
I'd ostensibly have gone through him.

Speaker 1 (02:21:21):
I don't know that. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:21:23):
He noted the potential impact such a gift could have,
writing do you know how many kids that would help?
Just putting it out there, But he also tweeted that
he had no issue with Beyonce's performance, and he did
with Andre three thousand. I just heard the Andre part
of Back to Black. He wrote terrible. He should have
let Beyonce do it all. That's so funny. His Andre's
back in the discourse today for his jazz explorations.

Speaker 1 (02:21:45):
What do you think of his jazz explorations? Terrible?

Speaker 2 (02:21:48):
He's not a good artist. I mean he's sorry, let
me take that back. He is an incredible artist. He
is not good at playing jazz for someone who has
been doing fall l apparently, you know, Woody Allen is
a better clarinetist.

Speaker 1 (02:22:04):
I saw him at the Carlisle.

Speaker 2 (02:22:05):
Yeah no, I mean, uh, look, so the thing that
this week is Matthew Shipp, who is a virtuoso pianist,
is a jazz pianist, was like, what the.

Speaker 1 (02:22:15):
Fuck is this shird? Like really and like super slammed it.

Speaker 2 (02:22:19):
So now all the people are coming out on both
sides of it, which is like Andred three thousand freely
admitted that he just sat down with his iPhone or
MacBook on a piano and just noodled.

Speaker 1 (02:22:31):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (02:22:32):
So people were like, well, you know, he's exposing the
audience to a lot of to the idea of improvisitory
piano and all that people said when he made New
Blue Son. But you know, he's a dilettante man. I'm
so sorry to call it like it is. He's a
virtuoso rapper and a terribly earnest musician who, at least

(02:22:54):
on The New Blue Sun, had the wherewithal to surround
himself with much more talented people just dropping hot takes
all over here. At least he doesn't have Swifty level fans.

Speaker 1 (02:23:05):
Buzz Luhrman's adaptation of The Great Cats He was supposed
to be ready in time for Christmas twenty twelve. After
meeting with Warner Brothers president Jeff Robinov, the date was
pushed back. Rubanov asked Baz Luhrman if the movie will
be ready for Christmas, and Luhrman said yes. Then Robinov asked,
will the movie you want to make be ready for Christmas?
Lehrman replied no, and so they gave him a few

(02:23:27):
more months to work in the film. It ultimately got
a wide release in the United States on May tenth,
twenty thirteen. When all was said and done, it raked
in three hundred and fifty three million dollars worldwide on
a budget that I've seen ranging from one hundred and
five to one hundred and ninety million that is so
much money.

Speaker 2 (02:23:46):
Yeah, I mean you factor in what like fifty percent
of that again for marketing spends. So that movie was
a success, but wasn't a world conquering success, as we
like to say.

Speaker 1 (02:23:57):
Could have been a bigger success good like the seventies adaptation,
reviews were mixed. Joel Morgan Stern of The Wall Street
Journals slammed the film as quote a tale told idiotically,
full of noise and fury signifying next to nothing. Hell yeah, brother.
He criticized its lavish production design as a misfire and
drew a parallel between the film's flaws and the very

(02:24:20):
decadence Fitzgerald condemned, writing that quote, what is intractably wrong
with the film is that there's no reality to heighten.
It's a spectacle in search of a soul.

Speaker 2 (02:24:33):
God is assa like.

Speaker 1 (02:24:36):
Lerman's entire career as far as I'm concerned. The Chicago
Reader echoed the sentiment, declaring Lherman is exactly the wrong
person to adapt such a delicately rendered story, and his
three D feature plays like a ghastly roaring twenties blowout
at a sorority house. However, not all reviews were negative.
Ao Scott of The New York Times praised the film

(02:24:56):
as quote a lot of fun, describing it as less
a convention movie adaptation than a splashy, trashy opera, a wayward,
lavishly theatrical celebration of the emotional and material extravagance that
Fitzgerald surveyed with fascinated ambivalence. Scott advised, quote, the best
way to enjoy the film is to put aside whatever

(02:25:16):
literary agenda you're attempted to bring with you. Ty Burr
of The Boston Globe single Nott Leonardo DiCaprio's performance for
a claim saying magnificent is the only word to describe
this performance the best movie Gatsby by far, superhuman in
his charm and connections, the host of revels beyond imagining,
and at his heart, an insecure fraud whose hopes are

(02:25:39):
pinned to a woman. Hilariously, critics really came for Toby McGuire.
Philip French of The Guardian called him miscast or misdirected,
and Hornaday of The Washington Post wrote, this is amazing.
Toby maguire is his usual recessive presence, barely registering as
either a dynamic part of the events he describes, or

(02:26:02):
their watchful witness. Elizabeth Whiteman of The New York Daily News,
opining that quote. Despite the wry observational skills needed for
Nick's Midwestern decency, the characters directed toward a wide eyed,
one note performance. This is all fine.

Speaker 2 (02:26:18):
I mean, at least at least we're still allowed to
say mean things about these people who have careers and
wealth we will never amass.

Speaker 1 (02:26:25):
Like thank god that was twelve years ago. Though. No,
he's back on.

Speaker 2 (02:26:29):
I guarantee you his next piece of sh will cost
seven hundred million dollars and it'll be.

Speaker 1 (02:26:33):
Like, well, he wants to do Hamlet. His dream is
to do Hamlet with Leonardo DiCaprio's Hamlet.

Speaker 2 (02:26:40):
And he'll get it, and he'll get it, and he'll
get it, Jordan, He'll get it. Do you understand that
he will get to do that because of this world,
bas Luhman, no new car ideas Mark Anthony Luhmann will
get to direct Hamlet and make it so shitty, and

(02:27:01):
he'll just get to do that in the world with
probably no repercussions.

Speaker 1 (02:27:08):
Just think about that.

Speaker 2 (02:27:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:27:10):
One person who liked the film was f Scott Fitzgerald's granddaughter.
She's quoted as saying that Scott would have been proud.

Speaker 2 (02:27:18):
Sure man, No, he wouldn't have, and that pisses me
off more than anything. I speak freely for the dead.

Speaker 1 (02:27:28):
And this brings us to the end of our two
part look at the Great Gatsby. It's a story about
love and longing, yes, but also about illusion, reinvention, and
the quietly devastating truth that the American dream was always
just a little out of reach for most. Gatsby's pursuit
of Daisy, like America's pursuit of wealth and grandeur in

(02:27:49):
the Roaring twenties, end's not in triumph but in tragedy.
Just a few years after Fitzgerald published his master work,
stock market crashed, the economy collapsed, and the so called
jazz Age turned into one of the darkest chapters in
modern American history. By nineteen thirty three, fifteen million Americans
were out of work, and yet a decade earlier, Fitzgerald

(02:28:12):
had already sensed it. He'd seen through the glittering surface
to the emptiness beneath. He would later call the decade
the twenties the most expensive orgy in history. Great gaspy
was his warning that the party couldn't last forever. But
if the novel ends in death and disappointment, it offers
something beautiful, something enduring. As literary critic Marine Corrigan puts it,

(02:28:38):
Gatsby is about the doomed beauty of trying. You can't
escape the past, she writes, but isn't it noble to try?
That's the message here, to be the boat against the current,
even though failure and death inevitably await you. Hell yeah, brother.
Maybe that's why we keep coming back to Gasby again

(02:28:58):
and again in high school classrooms, in movie theaters, and
in quiet, reflective late night readings, because even if the
dream is a lie, there's something noble in the pursuit.
And in that way, Gatsby, foolish, hopeful, extraordinary Gatsby lives
on in anyone who strives to be better and get

(02:29:20):
more out of their life.

Speaker 2 (02:29:22):
It's a hell of a kicker, Mark, Anthony Lehman, how
about that?

Speaker 1 (02:29:29):
Take us home? Oh sorry, I thought you.

Speaker 2 (02:29:32):
I don't want to put anything after your kicker. That
was so good man. Oh thank you, Yeah, this has
been wonderful. Thank you for letting me into your well researched,
well written thing to just spewbile. You get to phone
it in for the next couple ones.

Speaker 1 (02:29:50):
Buddy, read it. Read this. I actually think you'd really
enjoy this book. I'm sure I would. It's on my kindle.

Speaker 2 (02:29:56):
It was free, and I'll get around to it. You
just have so much jazz fusion to listen to. Man
really a lifestyle.

Speaker 1 (02:30:06):
I mean you can. I mean I feel like that
would be a really good soundtrack to reading The Great Gatsby.
It's listening to jazz fusion during the next couple of
weeks when you got to rest your finger and can't
play bass, listen to jazz fusion and read The Great Gatsby,
and then I'll come out in a few weeks and
we'll talk about it.

Speaker 2 (02:30:21):
Yeah, all right, I'll do that. Thank you, Japanese jazz fusion.

Speaker 1 (02:30:25):
Oh anyway, I'm Alex Heigl.

Speaker 2 (02:30:28):
I did nothing.

Speaker 1 (02:30:29):
This has been too much information. That's true. And your
and I'm Jordan bront dog your air Jeordes, Oh you're
gonna make that happen.

Speaker 2 (02:30:38):
Yeah, you're Jeorde Big Jeorgs tweeted me.

Speaker 1 (02:30:42):
Tweetedhigol with the ideas for a nickname for me. I
got Jordi for a while, got Jordo. I don't like Jordo,
but but I've got that a lot over my years.
I got Jordi from Algiro, the jazz vocalist. Oh, I
wish I would love that.

Speaker 2 (02:30:58):
Jorda sounds like a Star Wars character.

Speaker 1 (02:31:00):
Yeah, j is a part Trek character.

Speaker 2 (02:31:04):
Yeah that's but I see with Geordy like I see
it that way, and I don't like that. All right,
I'm gonna stop recording now.

Speaker 1 (02:31:13):
And I'm Jordan run Talk.

Speaker 2 (02:31:15):
We'll get you next time.

Speaker 1 (02:31:21):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio. The
show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The
show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was
researched and written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and
Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the
Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please
subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio,

(02:31:43):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.

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The Great Gatsby (Part 2 - The Movies): Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript

Host

Jordan Runtagh

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Great Gatsby (Part 2 - The Movies): Everything You Didn't Know