Here's a curious case: An obscure short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald gets turned into a holiday blockbuster movie with the second highest Christmas Day box office earnings in North America.
The movie, which opened on Christmas and stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, was only nudged out of first place by the combined star power of Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston, and a puppy. As of this past weekend, it was in the #3 position with cumulative earnings of nearly $80 million -- $20 million ahead of Tom Cruise with an eye patch!
What makes it such a very curious case is that the film has just about nothing in common with the story.
I'm sure there must be Fitzgerald fans out there who've read the story -- but I have yet to meet someone who'd even heard of it before the movie came out. If you haven't seen the movie yet, by all means go, but I highly recommend that you check out the story first.
In my opinion the story is immeasurably superior. It's like nothing else of Fitzgerald's that I'd ever read. It's written as a fable -- highly comic but also quite dark. It's a deeply interesting, very entertaining meditation on the nature of youth and old age, relationships between parents and children, mass psychology, and the middle-class culture of early 20th Century America.
The movie throws just about every single particular of the story out the window and becomes instead a pointless and preposterous sort of love story -- the sort of thing that Hollywood specializes in and of which audiences seemingly never tire.
There are two versions of this remarkable Fitzgerald tale on Playaway --
Despite the fact it's dull and slow-moving, the movie is a hit. Let's hope it sends a few Brad Pitt fans in search of the original story. They'll be rewarded -- and surprised -- by what they find.
BTW, the story was first published in 1921 and is therefore in the public domain. A free version of the text (with a few typos) is available here from the American Studies Program of the University of Virginia.
