A TV adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” is in development at A+E Studios and ITV Studios America, the studios announced Tuesday.
“Elizabeth” screenwriter Michael Hirst is set to adapt the iconic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel for the potential series, which does not yet have a network or platform attached to it.
The project is described as a “single season dramatic event series” that is a “re-imagining” of Fitzgerald’s book: “The Great Gatsby” dramatizes for the first time the full expanse of what made the book an American classic by creating a rich history and exploration of the backstories of its larger than life characters, from Nick Carroway’s life in the Midwest and Jay Gatsby’s humble beginnings to Daisy Buchanan’s spoiled early life. “The Great Gatsby” digs deeply into the hidden lives of these characters through the modern lens of a fractured American dream while capturing the...
“Elizabeth” screenwriter Michael Hirst is set to adapt the iconic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel for the potential series, which does not yet have a network or platform attached to it.
The project is described as a “single season dramatic event series” that is a “re-imagining” of Fitzgerald’s book: “The Great Gatsby” dramatizes for the first time the full expanse of what made the book an American classic by creating a rich history and exploration of the backstories of its larger than life characters, from Nick Carroway’s life in the Midwest and Jay Gatsby’s humble beginnings to Daisy Buchanan’s spoiled early life. “The Great Gatsby” digs deeply into the hidden lives of these characters through the modern lens of a fractured American dream while capturing the...
- 1/26/2021
- by Jennifer Maas
- The Wrap
Illustration by Leah BravoFive years ago, a film came and went with little fanfare, except a spattering of positive reviews, making around $4 million worldwide on a budget of about $10 million: Take This Waltz. More people know it as a Leonard Cohen song, from which its title comes. More people know Leonard Cohen than the director Sarah Polley, but as of this cultural moment, more people might know the star, Michelle Williams, than Leonard Cohen, due to her other movies and a popular TV show. These jejune concerns amplify less than we know and more than we'll admit. Name recognition: these go into the common denominators decision people look for when they decide to fund a film, a book, a play. How will it sell? How will it fit? What can it capitalize on? How can we make something that will not make people think too much or depress them? We...
- 8/16/2016
- MUBI
After 50 years as the Observer's film critic, Philip French is retiring. Here he talks about his life and career and answers questions from readers and film-makers including Mike Leigh and Ken Loach
It says a lot about Philip French that after 50 years as the Observer's film critic – five decades in which he has watched more than 2,500 movies, written six books on the subject and received an OBE for his services to film – he is nervous enough about this interview to have researched his answers in advance.
When I arrive at his house in Tufnell Park, north London, I find French poring over a thick reference book at the kitchen table. A cup of coffee is left to cool as he thumbs through the relevant footnotes, anxious to get the facts absolutely right. He will turn 80 in a couple of weeks and says that he occasionally struggles to remember names of directors or actors.
It says a lot about Philip French that after 50 years as the Observer's film critic – five decades in which he has watched more than 2,500 movies, written six books on the subject and received an OBE for his services to film – he is nervous enough about this interview to have researched his answers in advance.
When I arrive at his house in Tufnell Park, north London, I find French poring over a thick reference book at the kitchen table. A cup of coffee is left to cool as he thumbs through the relevant footnotes, anxious to get the facts absolutely right. He will turn 80 in a couple of weeks and says that he occasionally struggles to remember names of directors or actors.
- 8/24/2013
- by Elizabeth Day
- The Guardian - Film News
Do you want to quiz the Observer film critic before he retires? Here's your chance
For decades Philip French has been a fixture of British Sundays, "a heavyweight of film criticism", "an exemplar of the very best". ("I tend not to read reviews," said director Kevin Macdonald in 2008, "but I do read his.") Next month Philip retires, 50 years and thousands of reviews since he first wrote for this paper in 1963, taking in a dozen Martin Scorseses, 30-plus Woody Allens, three cinematic releases of Apocalypse Now, seven Batmans… To mark the end of an era we've invited Philip to take part in our "You ask the questions" series, and we need your input. Do you have a burning question for Philip French? Let us know.
Perhaps you'd like to ask him what it can possibly be like to absorb so much film over the hours (days, weeks – years?) he's spent in screening rooms.
For decades Philip French has been a fixture of British Sundays, "a heavyweight of film criticism", "an exemplar of the very best". ("I tend not to read reviews," said director Kevin Macdonald in 2008, "but I do read his.") Next month Philip retires, 50 years and thousands of reviews since he first wrote for this paper in 1963, taking in a dozen Martin Scorseses, 30-plus Woody Allens, three cinematic releases of Apocalypse Now, seven Batmans… To mark the end of an era we've invited Philip to take part in our "You ask the questions" series, and we need your input. Do you have a burning question for Philip French? Let us know.
Perhaps you'd like to ask him what it can possibly be like to absorb so much film over the hours (days, weeks – years?) he's spent in screening rooms.
- 7/18/2013
- by The Observer
- The Guardian - Film News
As Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's classic bursts on to our screens, it's not hard to see why this cautionary tale of the decadent downside of the American dream has returned to haunt us, writes Sarah Churchwell
They called him an "ultra-modernist" and dismissed his books as overrated and forgettable, just "so much unnecessary evanescence travelling first class". When his third novel was published, on 10 April 1925, a characteristic review complained: "The boy is simply puttering around. It is all right as a diversion for him, probably … But why he should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained to me." At the last minute, he had asked his editor if they could change the new novel's title to Under the Red, White and Blue, but it was too late. F Scott Fitzgerald's ultra-modernist...
They called him an "ultra-modernist" and dismissed his books as overrated and forgettable, just "so much unnecessary evanescence travelling first class". When his third novel was published, on 10 April 1925, a characteristic review complained: "The boy is simply puttering around. It is all right as a diversion for him, probably … But why he should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained to me." At the last minute, he had asked his editor if they could change the new novel's title to Under the Red, White and Blue, but it was too late. F Scott Fitzgerald's ultra-modernist...
- 5/3/2013
- by Sarah Churchwell
- The Guardian - Film News
A New Yorker returns to his old midwestern campus in Josh Radnor's amusing meditation on literature and learning
Josh Radnor, probably best known for his continuing role in the TV sitcom How I Met Your Mother, is not only the writer-director of the semi-autobiographical Liberal Arts, but he also plays its main character, Jesse Fisher, a 35-year-old New Yorker experiencing some sort of midlife crisis. It's a simple film in its dramatic construction but complex in the ideas, experiences and emotions it plays on and is the most intelligent, truthful movie about literature, higher education and the life of the mind since the Curtis Hanson film of Michael Chabon's novel Wonder Boys a dozen years ago.
The film's title refers to the ideal form of wide-ranging, interdisciplinary university education offered by prestigious liberal arts colleges that shape inquiring minds and supposedly send their owners out into the world...
Josh Radnor, probably best known for his continuing role in the TV sitcom How I Met Your Mother, is not only the writer-director of the semi-autobiographical Liberal Arts, but he also plays its main character, Jesse Fisher, a 35-year-old New Yorker experiencing some sort of midlife crisis. It's a simple film in its dramatic construction but complex in the ideas, experiences and emotions it plays on and is the most intelligent, truthful movie about literature, higher education and the life of the mind since the Curtis Hanson film of Michael Chabon's novel Wonder Boys a dozen years ago.
The film's title refers to the ideal form of wide-ranging, interdisciplinary university education offered by prestigious liberal arts colleges that shape inquiring minds and supposedly send their owners out into the world...
- 10/6/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
With this past Spring’s release of Damsels In Distress, his first new title in thirteen years, the Criterion Collection has refurbished two Whit Stillman titles this month, including his impressive independent darling from 1990, Metropolitan. An odd-duck anachronism upon its initial release, time has only added a more subdued refinement and fascination to its subject matter, a depiction of a dying culture giving birth to an auteur whose own brand of strangeness may have recently shown itself to be as equally misdated in dealing with the modern youth in today’s world, where the upper class more freely walks amongst its inferior company.
One New York Christmas, not long ago, a group of seven upper class young adults on Christmas vacation are on their way to a deb ball, and it tis the season for a considerable flurry of such high brow events. Several members of the group known as...
One New York Christmas, not long ago, a group of seven upper class young adults on Christmas vacation are on their way to a deb ball, and it tis the season for a considerable flurry of such high brow events. Several members of the group known as...
- 7/17/2012
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
"Nobody talks in real life the way they do in your novels," the psychologist William James once said to his novelist brother Henry, who promptly responded, "Perhaps they should."
Nobody in real life talks as they do in Whit Stillman's world, either, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone to makes James' recommendation that they should. If that seems an overly literary reference for Damsels in Distress, a light collegiate comedy, you've never seen a Whit Stillman movie: in his debut Metropolitan, a tightly-wound satire of Ues preppies, two characters have a sustained argument over Lionel Trilling's reading of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. This is Stillman's level, and at his best his movies are whimsically cerebral.
Damsels in Distress, unfortunately, is neither. The film is set at the fictional-but-steretypical Seven Oaks College, somewhere on the eastern seaboard, and follows Violet (Greta Gerwig) a Miss Manners...
Nobody in real life talks as they do in Whit Stillman's world, either, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone to makes James' recommendation that they should. If that seems an overly literary reference for Damsels in Distress, a light collegiate comedy, you've never seen a Whit Stillman movie: in his debut Metropolitan, a tightly-wound satire of Ues preppies, two characters have a sustained argument over Lionel Trilling's reading of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. This is Stillman's level, and at his best his movies are whimsically cerebral.
Damsels in Distress, unfortunately, is neither. The film is set at the fictional-but-steretypical Seven Oaks College, somewhere on the eastern seaboard, and follows Violet (Greta Gerwig) a Miss Manners...
- 6/6/2012
- by Evan McMurry
- Filmology
"Death disports with writers more cruelly than with the rest of humankind," Cynthia Ozick wrote in a recent issue of The New Republic.
"The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive--dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer's noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.
"Oblivion comes more cuttingly to the writer whose presence has been felt, argued over, championed, disparaged--the writer who is seen to be what Lionel Trilling calls a Figure. Lionel Trilling?
"Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his "field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag,...
"The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive--dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer's noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.
"Oblivion comes more cuttingly to the writer whose presence has been felt, argued over, championed, disparaged--the writer who is seen to be what Lionel Trilling calls a Figure. Lionel Trilling?
"Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his "field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag,...
- 4/24/2011
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
Critics reflect on how social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and myDigg, fit into the perennial debate on cultural elitism
Miranda Sawyer, broadcaster and Observer radio critic: 'Twitter has made it easier for critics to hear other people's opinions. Even then, though, you tend to hear similar views to your own'
When I was writing for the Face, during the 1990s, I went to interview some boy racers: young lads who spent all their money souping up their cars in order to screech around mini roundabouts or rev their engines in supermarket car parks until their tyres smoked. The kids asked me who I was writing for. When I said the Face – a magazine that prided itself on representing all aspects of British youth interests – every single one of them replied: "Never heard of it."
The point is that most people – especially those outside the high-culture capital of London – are...
Miranda Sawyer, broadcaster and Observer radio critic: 'Twitter has made it easier for critics to hear other people's opinions. Even then, though, you tend to hear similar views to your own'
When I was writing for the Face, during the 1990s, I went to interview some boy racers: young lads who spent all their money souping up their cars in order to screech around mini roundabouts or rev their engines in supermarket car parks until their tyres smoked. The kids asked me who I was writing for. When I said the Face – a magazine that prided itself on representing all aspects of British youth interests – every single one of them replied: "Never heard of it."
The point is that most people – especially those outside the high-culture capital of London – are...
- 1/30/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
Three entertaining novels: an epic, wry account of Brits in the Balkans during WWII, a gripping murder mystery in a Southern town, and what Marilyn Monroe's dog, Maf, saw.
The Balkan TrilogyBy Olivia Manning
Related story on The Daily Beast: This Week's Hot Reads
No young man dreams of growing up to be a lecturer for the British Council. But when I first stumbled across Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy in graduate school, I was ready to be signed up. At nearly a thousand pages, Manning's three novels are a sweeping story of marital love, English manners, and Balkan intrigues, set against Europe's descent into the Second World War. Harriet Pringle, bright and self-confident, joins her husband, Guy, in Bucharest, Romania, where he teaches English at the local university as part of a British cultural program. "Anything can happen now," Harriet thinks as her train chugs eastward, somewhere beyond Venice.
The Balkan TrilogyBy Olivia Manning
Related story on The Daily Beast: This Week's Hot Reads
No young man dreams of growing up to be a lecturer for the British Council. But when I first stumbled across Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy in graduate school, I was ready to be signed up. At nearly a thousand pages, Manning's three novels are a sweeping story of marital love, English manners, and Balkan intrigues, set against Europe's descent into the Second World War. Harriet Pringle, bright and self-confident, joins her husband, Guy, in Bucharest, Romania, where he teaches English at the local university as part of a British cultural program. "Anything can happen now," Harriet thinks as her train chugs eastward, somewhere beyond Venice.
- 12/19/2010
- by The Daily Beast
- The Daily Beast
Michael Moore's attack on capitalism falls short of his other documentaries
An imaginative writer can dramatise an abstract concept – see Griffith's Intolerance, Stroheim's Greed, or Galsworthy's Justice. But you need a grasp of history and philosophy to write a treatise or make a serious documentary on such a subject as capitalism. On the strength of this film, Michael Moore is ill-equipped for such a task. The knockabout, barrack-room lawyer technique he employed for his patchwork attacks on American gun laws, the Bush's presidency and American healthcare is unsuited here.
He starts with jokey CCTV footage of bank robbers to present an image of capitalism at work, throws in heart-breaking footage of honest workers facing foreclosure and eviction, puts pro-capitalist remarks into the mouth of Christ in a kitsch biblical movie, has a montage of economists trying unsuccessfully to define what a derivative is, and so on. Meanwhile he struts around,...
An imaginative writer can dramatise an abstract concept – see Griffith's Intolerance, Stroheim's Greed, or Galsworthy's Justice. But you need a grasp of history and philosophy to write a treatise or make a serious documentary on such a subject as capitalism. On the strength of this film, Michael Moore is ill-equipped for such a task. The knockabout, barrack-room lawyer technique he employed for his patchwork attacks on American gun laws, the Bush's presidency and American healthcare is unsuited here.
He starts with jokey CCTV footage of bank robbers to present an image of capitalism at work, throws in heart-breaking footage of honest workers facing foreclosure and eviction, puts pro-capitalist remarks into the mouth of Christ in a kitsch biblical movie, has a montage of economists trying unsuccessfully to define what a derivative is, and so on. Meanwhile he struts around,...
- 2/28/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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