The Great Gatsby (1926 film)
10 /10 1 Votes
Duration | Country United States | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Language Silent film
English intertitles Director Herbert Brenon
Ray Lissner (assistant) Release date November 21, 1926 (1926-11-21) Based on The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Great Gatsby is a 1926 American silent drama film directed by Herbert Brenon. It is the first film adaptation of the 1925 novel of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Warner Baxter portrayed Jay Gatsby and Lois Wilson as Daisy Buchanan.
Contents
The film was produced by Famous Players-Lasky, and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The Great Gatsby is now considered lost.
Robin hood 1922 trailer
Cast
Background and production
The screenplay was written by Becky Gardiner and Elizabeth Meehan and was based on Owen Davis' stage play treatment of The Great Gatsby. The play, directed by George Cukor, opened on Broadway at the Ambassador Theatre February 2, 1926. Shortly after the play opened, Famous Players-Lasky and Paramount Pictures purchased the film rights for $45,000.
The film's director Herbert Brenon, designed The Great Gatsby as lightweight, popular entertainment, playing up the party scenes at Gatsby's mansion and emphasizing their scandalous elements. The film had a running time of 80 minutes, or 7,296 feet.
Survival status
Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon, James Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, made extensive but unsuccessful attempts to find a surviving print. Dixon noted that there were rumors that a copy survived in an unknown archive in Moscow but dismissed these rumors as unfounded.
However, the trailer has survived and is one of the 50 films in the 3-disk boxed DVD set More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894-1931 (2004), compiled by the National Film Preservation Foundation from five American film archives. It is preserved by the Library of Congress (AFI/Jack Tillmany collection) and has a running time of one minute. It was featured on the Blu-Ray released by Warner Home Video of director Baz Luhrmann's 2013 adaptation of The Great Gatsby as a special feature.