The Great Gatsby (1949)

Interesting facts

• Based on: The Great Gatsby
• Filmed in: Los Angeles

The Great Gatsby is a 1949 American historical romance drama film directed by Elliott Nugent and produced by Richard Maibaum, from a screenplay by Richard Maibaum and Cyril Hume. The film stars Alan Ladd, Betty Field, Macdonald Carey, Ruth Hussey, and Barry Sullivan and features Shelley Winters and Howard Da Silva, the latter of whom returned in the 1974 version. It is based on the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Production

In 1926, Paramount Pictures paid $45,000 (equivalent to $818,374 in 2025) to purchase the film rights to F. Scott Fitzgerald's critically acclaimed yet commercially unsuccessful 1925 novel. The studio produced the first film adaptation in November 1926 starring Warner Baxter as Jay Gatsby, Lois Wilson as Daisy Buchanan, Neil Hamilton as Nick Carraway, and William Powell as George Wilson.

With the advent of sound films, actor Clark Gable often conversed with F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood about remaking The Great Gatsby as a star vehicle for himself in the early 1930s. Gable and writer John O'Hara pressed Paramount Pictures to allow them to do a sound remake with O'Hara writing the screenplay, but their efforts failed, and Fitzgerald died in 1940.

As the Fitzgerald revival slowly gained salience in popular culture, Paramount producer and screenwriter Richard Maibaum—who had met F. Scott Fitzgerald during the author's sojourn in Hollywood—became intent on a new adaptation starring Oklahoma-raised actor Alan Ladd. Maibaum became friends with Ladd during their collaboration on the 1946 film O.S.S. Maibaum presented the idea to Ladd and his wife, Sue Carol.

I was in [Ladd's] house and he took me up to the second floor, where he had a wardrobe about as long as this room. He opened it up and there must have been hundreds of suits, sport jackets, slacks and suits. He looked at me and said, "Not bad for an Okie kid, eh?" I got goose pimples because I remembered when Gatsby took Daisy to show her his mansion, he also showed her his wardrobe and said, "I've got a man in England who buys me clothes.

Although Maibaum and Ladd wanted to make the film, Paramount executives proved hesitant to make this second film adaptation as Fitzgerald's beloved novel had not yet attained widespread popularity. "This was in late 1946," Maibaum recalled. "Scott Fitzgerald had been dead since 1940. So it seemed, except in the hearts of a few devotees, were his out-of-print novels. His reputation was at its lowest ebb.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.