Update: No sooner had this post gone up than the first two TV spots for the film arrived, courtesy of The Film Stage. There’s little snippets of new footage in there, so it can only whet your appetite further. Watch them below.
If your audience needs to read up beforehand, your movie may be a little over-ambitious. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” however, which stands at sub-200 pages and with a tally of no more than seven principal characters, doesn’t present itself as an obvious adaptive head-scratcher. So a new character map for Baz Luhrmann’s long-awaited Cannes opener from graphic designer Something So Sam, is presumably more fun than function.
Like Jay Gatsby, it is a slick piece of work. For anyone who hasn’t read the book (shame on you), this is a crash course on the Jazz era experience, which can presumably buy some in-theater time to gawp at Luhrmann’s effects. It provides visual CliffsNotes on the tangled dynamic of that most famous and most fated of Long Island sets, even using Luhrmann’s visions of the characters so it doesn’t throw you off come the film’s release (and by its nature, it does contain spoilers, but we honestly don’t know what you’re doing here if you’re trying to avoid them). And if you really like the poster, you can order a print from here.
With a history in the shamelessly extravagant (see “Romeo + Juliet,” “Moulin Rouge!” and “Australia”), the director’s rendition of the great novel is likely to be quite a spectacle. The film opens on May 10th, and with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan on the list, Luhrmann’s party is the hottest ticket in Hollywood.
