The Great Gatsby (1926 film)

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This article is about the 1926 film . For other uses, see The Great Gatsby (disambiguation).

The Great Gatsby
Directed by	Herbert Brenon
Produced by	Jesse L. Lasky Adolph Zukor
Starring	Warner Baxter Lois Wilson Neil Hamilton Georgia Hale William Powell
Distributed by	Famous Players-Lasky Corporation Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	1926
Running time	80 minutes
Country	United States
Language	silent film English intertitles
IMDb profile

The Great Gatsby is a 1926 silent film adaptation of the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was made by the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation and Paramount Pictures, directed by Herbert Brenon and produced by Jesse L. Lasky and Adolph Zukor.

[edit] Background and production

This was the first filmed version of the novel. Two more films (1949), (1974) and a television adaptation (2000) were to follow.

This version was based on the stage play by Owen Davis, adapted from the novel, which opened on Broadway at the Ambassador Theatre on Feb 2, 1926. It was directed by George Cukor. F. Scott Fitzgerald received US $45,000 for the film rights. The film was entrusted to a contract Paramount director, and the screenplay to Becky Gardiner and to Elizabeth Meehan who supplied the adaptation.

The cast was Warner Baxter as Jay Gatsby, Lois Wilson as Daisy Buchanan, Neil Hamilton as Nick Carraway, Georgia Hale as Myrtle Wilson and William Powell as Wilson.

The film had a running time of eighty minutes, or 7,296 feet and was designed as lightweight entertainment, and played up the party scenes at Gatsby's mansion for all their scandalous potential. It was created as a popular film, nothing more [1] .

According to the Internet Movie Database, no prints of this film are known to survive [2].

[edit] Lost film

Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon, James Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln has made fruitless attempts to trace a copy, and says

“

There is, supposedly, one copy of the 1926 version of The Great Gatsby surviving in an archive in Moscow, but most film scholars dismiss this as merely a fanciful rumor. After a diligent search, I was unable to locate any screening prints in either Los Angeles, New York, the archives of Paramount Pictures, the American Film Institute, the British Film Institute, George Eastman House, or even the National Archives in Washington, DC, where the film was registered for copyright. According to Charles Silver of the Film Study Center at the Museum of Modern Art, the film is officially listed as "lost," and no prints, negatives, or any other materials on the film are known to have survived in any archive, which is a great loss.[3]

”

It appears, however, that the trailer has survived and is one of the 50 films in the 3-disk boxed DVD set called More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894-1931 (2004), compiled by the National Film Preservation Foundation from 5 American film archives. It is preserved by the Library of Congress (AFI/Jack Tillmany collection) and has a running time of 1 minute.