Vladimir
Nabokov Had Nothing to Do With the 1974 Great Gatsby Movie
By David Haglund |
Posted Tuesday, April 9, 2013, at 4:30 PM 918
Robert Redford never spoke
dialogue written by Vladimir Nabokov. Or Philip Roth. Or Thomas
Pynchon.
If you go to the Wikipedia page for the 1974 film adaptation of
The Great Gatsby, you may notice something curious. On the upper right-hand side
of the page, where the credits are listed, there, below Francis Ford Coppola’s
name, is Vladimir Nabokov’s. The famous Russian-American author, the Wikipedia
page says, did “rewrites” on the script.
A detail from the Wikipedia page
for the 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby.
Of course he did no such
thing. Nabokov didn’t even like Fitzgerald’s novel. (“Tender Is the Night,
magnificent; The Great Gatsby, terrible,” he told Fitzgerald biographer Arthur
Mizener.) Just to be sure, though, I asked Andrea Pitzer, author of The Secret
History of Vladimir Nabokov. She assured me that the author of Lolita had
nothing to do with the famously disappointing Robert Redford vehicle, which
co-starred Mia Farrow and Sam Waterston....//...