Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [127]
The novel presents the mysterious Jay Gatsby through the eyes of the kindly patrician midwesterner Nick Carraway, who has come to live on Long Island alongside Gatsby’s mansion and close to the home of socialites Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Carraway befriends the nouveau riche Gatsby, attends his extravagant parties and meets his New York cronies. The truth of Gatsby’s origins remains unclear—was he a war hero or a bootlegger?—but it is clear that he is obsessed by Nick’s cousin, Daisy, whom he fell in love with before the war and determines to seduce again. Gatsby clashes with Buchanan but he succeeds in reconnecting with Daisy. While driving in Gatsby’s car, Daisy accidentally knocks down and kills Myrtle, her husband’s mistress. As Gatsby tries to confront the crisis, Carraway advises him to get away from the community. He has made his judgment of his friend—“They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole bunch put together”—but Gatsby doesn’t flee. In the end, Myrtle’s husband, George, kills Gatsby in his swimming pool. This story arc is strong, but the novel’s structure is loose, with long sections of dialogue and sudden melodrama studded with Fitzgerald’s sidebar metaphors: Daisy’s green light, the valley of ashes that divides the privileged enclaves from the urban Manhattan huddle, the all-seeing oculist. These varied elements, Clayton felt, made for a difficult screenplay adaptation.
Capote’s script, when it arrived shortly after Christmas 1972, was disastrous. It was dialogue-heavy and cast Nick Carraway, the narrator, as a flamboyant gay. Clayton immediately wrote to Capote that it was unsuitable: “It’s like a great fish that is all head and no tail.” What in fact he was identifying was the problem he’d noticed in the novel itself: Daisy and Gatsby don’t get together until the middle of the book, and only in the last third do plot and incident dramatically accelerate. Clayton’s need, he said, was to truncate the first half, get Daisy and Gatsby together within twenty minutes, then widen and pace the ending. Capote had no stomach for this, so Francis Ford Coppola was brought in as a replacement by Evans.
Redford liked the Coppola script given him four months later. But while he was fine with the idea of expanding the “new” phase of the Gatsby-Daisy romance, he remained wary of many deviations from the novel dictated by Clayton. For example, all reference to Gatsby’s beginnings, to the seafaring millionaire Dan Cody who apparently gives him his break, was removed. Through the spring, Redford went back to the novel. “I became concerned there might be a built-in problem with so mythologized a book. It seemed to overawe the adapter. Capote couldn’t handle it. Coppola did better. But I wasn’t sure Clayton grasped the heart of it.”
Clayton’s objective was twofold: apart from developing the modern-day relationship of Gatsby and Daisy, which Fitzgerald dismissively summarized in one line, he also wanted to create a David Lean–style romanticism that would heighten the otherworldly “impossible dream” of the story line, which, essentially, lambastes the class mentality that proscribes rich-poor unions. Above all, insisted Clayton, the tension within the story had to be tweaked in order to command its audience and drive home its point. Clayton wrote in his preparatory notes: “I intend in fact to keep throughout the film a constant feeling of extreme heat. I want people to perspire all the time and I want to see even stains on people’s dresses.… As [Gatsby] is a story basically about obsession, it is absolutely necessary that the film has constantly a kind of mystery to it. Mystery, mystique and absolute touching sadness.”
Overarching objectives apart, Redford needed a hook on which to hang his personal Gatsby. He found it not in discussion with the director, but in reading Scott Fitzgerald.