TV adaptation of The Great Gatsby, the Myth of Camelot, The Beautiful and Damned

The Great Gatsby is coming to television. A+E Studios and ITV Studios America are teaming with writer Michael Hirst for a big-budget TV series based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's iconic novel. A network is not yet involved as the co-producers plan on shopping the series to premium cable and streaming outlets. Envisioned as a closed-ended miniseries, for which Michael Hirst (Elizabeth, The Tudors) will pen the script and exec produce alongside Groundswell Productions' Michael London (Sideways, Milk). Fitzgerald's estate is also involved as Blake Hazard, a great-granddaughter of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and a trustee of the estate, will serve as a consulting producer. Sources say A+E Studios has had the rights to the iconic novel dating back to the 2000 TV movie that starred Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway, Toby Stephens as Jay Gatsby and Mira Sorvino as Daisy Buchanan. That telefilm was a co-production with BBC and aired stateside on A&E. The rights to the book, effective this year, are now open to the public domain. "I seem to have lived with Gatsby most of my life, reading it first as a schoolboy, later teaching it at Oxford in the 1970s then re-reading it periodically ever since," Hirst said. "As the critic Lionel Trilling once wrote: 'The Great Gatsby is still as fresh as when it first appeared, it has even gained in weight and relevance.' Today, as America seeks to reinvent itself once again, is the perfect moment to look with new eyes at this timeless story, to explore its famous and iconic characters through the modern lens of gender, race and class conflict.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's profoundly romantic vision does not prevent him examining and exposing the darker underbelly of the American experience, which is why the story speaks to both tragedy and hope, and why it continues to resonate today." Described as a reimagining, the series will dig deeper into the hidden lives of its characters through the modern lens of a fractured American dream while also capturing the full majesty of Fitzgerald's timeless vision. "I have long dreamt of a more diverse, inclusive version of Gatsby that better reflects the America we live in, one that might allow us all to see ourselves in Scott's wildly romantic text," Hazard said. "Michael brings a deep reverence for Scott's work to the project, but also a fearlessness about bringing such an iconic story to life in an accessible and fresh way. I'm delighted to be a part of the project. There are few stories in the pantheon of American literature that transcend time like The Great Gatsby. A+E Studios is privileged to bring this powerful, complex work to life with the blessing of Fitzgerald family member Blake Hazard. Michael stays true to Fitzgerald’s novel while building on that legacy with a modern vision that will be more reflective of America both then and now, including an enhanced exploration of the female characters. We are currently searching for a director and are excited to bring this out to the market." Gatsby has been adapted for the big screen multiple times, with takes in 1926 (toplined by Warner Baxter), 1949 (starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field), 1974 (starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow) and in 2013 (with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan). Source: hollywoodreporter.com

A professor named Carlyle V. Thompson published a paper arguing that Jay Gatsby was an outsider of the American dream. Gatsby's origins as a bootlegger explain the thousands of speakeasies and craft cocktails bearing his name. But the novel never clearly divulges the source of his wealth. Gatsby represents the failed dream of an immigrant, he could represent Joe Kennedy, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and even Anna Delvey. American fiction is full of thinly veiled Gatsbys as Don Draper in Mad Men or Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. In 1915, Scott had written in his ledger: “If I couldn’t be perfect, I wouldn’t be anything”-which can be linked to his fragment from The Great Gatsby (now considered the great American novel but unfortunately rejected from the Modern Library in the early 1940s because of low sales): “Jay Gatsby of West Egg sprung from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s editor and ‘intellectual conscience’, completed the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon (1941) using Fitzgerald’s personal notes and drafts, and reckoned his Princeton friend as “a martyr, a sacrificial victim,” after his premature death (aged 44). Fitzgerald understood in the midst of the 1920s what most would only see in retrospect: that “the dead dream” will always fight on, as we try to touch the intangible, “struggling unhappily, yet undespairingly” towards what we keep losing. 

Part of our fascination with Fitzgerald involves his fall from grace, noted Arthur Krystal in The New Yorker in 2009. “The man who commanded between $3,000 and $4,000 for a short story as late as 1930 was forgotten by the reading public six years later; in 1936, his total book royalties amounted to just over $80. “My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald. Even the feminine characters,” the complex author reckoned. In the recent critical essay Understanding Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (2014), Robert A. Albano clarifies: “Fitzgerald was able to incorporate the many sides of his own personality into the creation of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald himself was a romantic who ignored the reality in order to achieve a goal which many would have thought to be impossible.” Source: www.highbrowmagazine.com/

One of Jackie Kennedy's favorite romantic novels was The Beautiful and Damned,  F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. Reggie Nadelson, writing in The Independent, claimed, “In the end, Jackie liberated herself from the Kennedys and became the last real Kennedy—glamorous, desirable, mythic.” Author Norman Mailer, who had been both her friend and foe, delivered his assessment: “Jackie Kennedy Onassis was not merely a celebrity, but a legend; not a legend, but a myth—no, more than a myth: She is now a historic archetype, virtually a demiurge.” Back in her apartment, John Jr. opened a letter that she’d asked him not to read until after her burial. “My dear, beloved son: You are going to take your special place in history. I want to be looking down on you as you assume a future position of power, like your father. He attempted to make the world a better place. And Bobby was going to carry on in his footsteps. Now the burden will be on you. In my heart, I know you will succeed beyond your greatest dreams. It is with eternal love and pride in you that I send you on your way, which I know will be the road to glory. When your battles are over, and the burden passes from you, I know one thing that is good and true. you will be the greatest Kennedy of them all. Your mother, Jacqueline.” —Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (2015) by Barbara Leaming

Marilyn Monroe was a virtual icon for Madonna. Marilyn had had an affair with John F. Kennedy, Sr. It seemed almost logical that Madonna should follow in her footsteps. The president wasn’t around to seduce any more, but his son, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was around—and in her words, “he looked smart and hot.” JFK Jr. went backstage to greet Madonna after her “Who’s That Girl?” performance in Madison Square Garden. Don Johnson, then at the peak of his Miami Vice fame on TV, was also there with flowers, but Madonna rejected him before walking away with the prize hunk of the night, JFK Jr. himself. The JFK Jr./Madonna sightings began in New York during the weeks leading up to Christmas of 1987. “Could it really be true?” the public asked, “that Madonna was actually dating the son of Marilyn Monroe’s former lover, his father, President John F. Kennedy?” The symbolism that MM, the blonde bombshell of the 50s had been replaced by another bombshell in the 80s, Madonna, wasn’t lost on the tabloids. Biographer Wendy Leigh claimed, “In her own mind, Madonna wasn’t just Marilyn emulated but Marilyn reincarnated, sent here to fulfill her psychic destiny. At every step, Madonna continued her consumption of the Marilyn mystique, but she craved something more. John F. Kennedy, Jr. was just the last step to finish off the deal—the ultimate Monroesque experience. Madonna realized that adding John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s scalp to her sexual belt would be another publicity coup.” In his biography of Madonna, Andrew Morton wrote: “Although JFK Jr. and Madonna were lovers for a brief period, the affair was not a success. John Junior was intimidated by Madonna’s reputation. Rather ruefully, she explained to friends after the end of her affair with Kennedy that he was just too nervous for them to click sexually. The chemistry certainly wasn’t there. ‘Some guys can handle the fame, others can’t,’ she sighed. “And he couldn’t.’” When Jackie heard of her son’s new main squeeze, she asked Ted Sorensen, “What designs does this volatile creature have on my son?” 

A photo taken on Monday January 11, 1994, by Paul Adao outside Jackie Kennedy's apartment, reveals that John Kennedy Jr had taken the decision of leaving behind his relationship with Daryl Hannah and introduce Carolyn Bessette to her mother for approval. It seems only John's ex-girlfriend Christina Haag had been given a previous seal of approval. In her memoir Coming to the Edge, Christina recalls her relationship with Jackie: "For years after that first weekend together, even when my romance with John was over, there would be a letter from Jackie now and then. On occasion, she would call—she’d seen me acting in a play or there was a book of hers she wanted me to have. It would arrive by messenger, and slipped inside the fresh pages would be an oblong cream card with the Doubleday anchor at the top: I thought you’d like this, love Jackie. The letters—on pale-blue stationery in blue pen, or lapis correspondence cards embossed with a white scallop (and one black-and-white postcard of Pierrot)—I kept tied with a red ribbon in a shoe box. The last arrived a month and a half before she died, before I flew back from Los Angeles to attend her funeral Mass at St. Ignatius Loyola—police barricades outside the baroque church and a slew of perfect white flowers blanketing her coffin. “I hope all goes well, Christina,” she had written  in her last letter in her artful, tender script. 

And whenever Jackie called—there would be her voice, more like music than speech, and I would feel an intense thrill, like the kind you get from a private crush you want always to keep secret. I remembered how she giggled when she ate ice cream in August and there was a windy ride one summer on Mr. Tempelsman’s boat. I was alone with Jackie on the back deck; we were on our way to pick up John, who was spearfishing off Aquinnah in Martha's Vineyard. The whole way, she told me stories, the ones I wanted to hear—not of the White House, but of her youth adventures, of the balls and parties she’d gone to in Newport and Southampton before she was married, when she was a girl in New York. Once Jackie and Mr. Tempelsman offered me a lift in their Lincoln Town Car, and when we passed the marquee for Speed-the-Plow, she lit up. Had I seen it? I hadn’t. The play, she said, was good, but Madonna was terrible on it. She drew out the last word and laughed. The tabloids had been rife with stories about them that spring, stories John scoffed at. “I think you should go,” Jackie said to me, like sharing a joke, “I think you should go next week—and have John take you. And then go backstage!” I remembered also how she always made a point of complimenting me—my hair or some detail of the clothes I wore. At first, because of who she was, it stunned me. But what may have been good manners or the desire to nurture confidence in a young woman became for me a lesson in acceptance and feminine grace. And I learned, in the end, to simply thank her. —Come to the Edge (2010) by Christina Haag

One morning, I replayed one of her phone message, listening once more to the glide of her voice. It was the first time we’d spoken since Christmas. Since I was no longer her son’s girlfriend, my intention was not to be too personal this time with Jackie, but if I expected some awkwardness, there was none with her. We just caught up and we spoke of other things. Then she explained to me why she had called. She told me John had met this PR young woman who worked in Calvin Klein, Carolyn Bessette. Jackie thought she was lovely and educated, and that she could see how much love Carolyn felt towards her son. Source: wattpad.com