Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [128]
Gatsby started shooting in Newport, Rhode Island, on June 11, 1973. Much of the action of the story takes place at Gatsby’s mansion and Carraway’s “eyesore” bungalow on the mansion’s grounds. A Tudor home called Rosecliff, under the management of the Newport Preservation Society, was negotiated as the Gatsby property, while a construction crew under designer John Box, winner of four Academy Awards and the man who designed Lawrence of Arabia, built the Carraway bungalow from scratch. The only other major exterior location, Fitzgerald’s symbolic valley of ashes, was constructed at Pinewood Studios in England. Along with Box, many of the leading crew members, including emerging cinematographer Douglas Slocombe and hairdresser Ramon Gow, were British, but, said Clayton, “an unmitigated, unprecedented effort was made to build Fitzgerald’s American Jazz Age, which became a kind of surrealist-deco blend beyond any distinctive accuracy.” Box famously described the awkwardness of pinning down Clayton’s vision: “Call it [capturing] the quality of a butterfly or a bird.”
There are many legends in the British film community about Redford’s unpopular presence on the set of Gatsby. He was said to be uptight and unapproachable. Bruce Bahrenburg, a writer commissioned to keep a diary of the film for publication, spoke of his remoteness. One British newspaper went so far as to suggest that Mia Farrow had complained about Redford’s insensitivity. She denied it, sued and was awarded damages.
There were several contributing factors for the bumpy ride. Farrow was pregnant. Merrick and Evans’s decision to do half the production in En-gland (where the budget could be pared back 20 percent, to $4 million) elicited criticism from several principal cast members because of “atmo-sphere” variations. Redford himself was struggling internally to grasp the amorphous soul of Gatsby and bridge the interpretative differences between Coppola, who wanted to remain faithful to Fitzgerald, and Clayton, who wanted something new. George Roy Hill had at first mocked the idea of Redford playing Gatsby. He had considered Alan Ladd wrong for the part all those years ago, and now, Redford. “I thought, for a start, it was one of the trickiest of all great American works. I thought that Gatsby is unknowable—that’s the key—and I wondered how any director or actor would play that out.” Then he thought about what he perceived as Redford’s “fundamental loneliness.” He said, “When I reflected on it, I could think of no one more apt for the role of Gatsby. Bob was the guy in the gray area. But when you got into the deep stuff with him, it was bottomless. And that’s where he went for Gatsby.”
The power of The Great Gatsby as a novel is the poetic proficiency that incited more contradictory critiques than any novel of the 1920s. Superficially it’s a love story. But it is also a satire, in which Fitzgerald mocks the greed of the postwar, heroless Lost Generation. The strength resides, as critic Lionel Trilling pointed out, in the notion of Gatsby as the supreme metaphor for America. What exactly, the novel asks, is “great” about the average midwesterner Jimmy Gatz, who comes east to the Old World bridgehead of Long Island to conquer the beautiful Daisy? America’s greats were not of the stature of Alexander the Great; instead the epithet “great” belonged to vaudevillians and the likes of Rudolph Valentino. Was that great enough? Metaphors apart, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby was a significant literary mutt, steering away from the contemporary naturalistic trend of Stephen Crane and Frank Norris and back to the romanticism of John Keats. “Nobody really grasped that,” says Redford. “Literature and Hollywood don’t seem to mix well, and if we failed as we went along, we may have failed by overlooking some aspect of the poetry other than