Gatsby Intuition
If you listen to recordings or newsreels of people speaking to each other during the 1930s and ’40s, they don’t sound like people do today, for the most part. They sound a bit more naive or hee-hawish or more rigid and formal in their phrasings, like they’ve just come out of an elocution class. I’ve heard two or three voice recordings from the ’20s (one of them of Clarence Darrow speaking at the Scopes trial) but I’m presuming it was the same if not more so. A certain starched-shirt, stick-up-your-ass tonality.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire during Sydney-area filming of Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby.
Something tells me you could hear all kinds of tension and constipation and uncertainty in people’s voices back in the days of The Great Gatsby. Mind your manners, know where to put your soup spoon and always dress correctly, etc. The purring be-bop talk of the ’50s (i.e., the way Marlon Brando‘s Johnny spoke in The Wild One) that came out of the post-World War II beats and their struggles to shirk off middle-class uptightness and anxieties was more than 30 years away when Gatsby’s story was happening.
Something also tells me that Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, as Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway, are going to sound like 21st Century guys when they say their lines in Baz Luhrman‘s 3D filmed version. Because they’re not British or RADA-trained, and because they’re native Southern Californians and they both have this way of speaking (particularly Leo) that they want and need, and I can’t imagine them ever sounding like real-deal fellows who lived and side-stepped and clinked champagne glasses 85 years ago. But I do trust that Carey Mulligan, as Daisy Buchanan, will sound exactly right.
And I’m still wondering if Luhrman will have the courage not to go all nutso and wacko with the 3D and just shoot Fitzgerald’s novel more or less straight, and let it be what it is and screw the under-35 ADDs will will (presumably) be twitching in their seats.
Last February the Hollywood Reporter‘s Pip Bulbeck quoted New South Wales (NSW) state government’s Kristina Kenneally projecting that Luhrman’s Gatsby is costing AUD$120 million (USD $118 million), with the shoot expected to last seventeen weeks” (i.e., finishing in early January 2012) “and another thirty weeks to be spent on post-production” or seven months give or take. “A reported 275-person crew will be employed during the pre-production stage with more than 400 cast and crew being employed during principal photography. Another estimated 150 post-production and visual effects crew will also be employed. Filming began on 5 September 2011 at Fox Studios in Sydney.”
“I’m still wondering if Luhrman will… not go all nutso and wacko”
Are you kidding? That’s his whole schtick. I fully expect no less than 5 scenes with 3D confetti blasted at the audience while the characters dance to modern day pop songs.
1) LOOK AT HER! Mulligan is the walking definition of my favorite word: FETCHING.
2) This is a great point by Wells, and you know Leo and Tobey, great though they both are or at least can be, are gonna flat-voice it all the way through this. But… what’s the alternative? Have them doing that “lookieherenowseeeee, wegotta do this WAAAAAH!” Hawks/Hecht speed-cadence like they did in old movies? That’d get a bad laugh from modern audiences– and picking on these two guys seems a little easy, since this complaint would apply to, oh, every period movie EVER. Not like Thomas Jane, Banderas and Jolie were bringing a lot of late 19th century CUBAN VERBAL FLAIR to Original Sin, to pick the most random example imaginable by man. It’s a concession we all have to make, nobody outside of maybe the Coens are gonna make a period picture where the actors use the vernacular and cadence of the day depicted.
But I always wonder… (getting marginally away from the “real recordings” truth)… DID people talk as fast, as articulately, in the “olden days” as they did in old movies? Like would your workaday grocery bagger in 1933 rattle off wiseguy cadence like a Cagney character, would your kitchen-sink Brits reel off these lightning-paced witticisms like Noel Coward characters in “This Happy Breed”? Or was everyone a bunch of lazy-voiced dumbasses back then, too, just movies were cut and written differently, and we all have this rose-tinted misconception that everyone “back then” was speaking faster than John Moschitta?
aw man you are right. maybe they will see this post and be like, oh shit. maybe we should have hired that dialect coach. :/ they do look good in the photo though.
Isla Fisher’s role in this as ‘Myrtle’ sounds interesting. I’m not familiar with the story but she’s like a abused wife and get’s killed in a car accident? sound pretty juicy to me. Could be Carey for Best Actress and Isla in Supporting next year if it’s any good although (the Mia Farrow version had no acting noms) Jeff, Isla’s the one you said you confuse with Amy Adams lol)
Often thought about what Lex is bringing up myself. I’m sure movie dialogue back then had a much more stilted and mannered way of speaking than was actually going on, much like our own movies do today, let’s face it. There are few writers and directors today who actually make movies the way people really talk, stepping all over each other, long gaps when you try think of the right words, etc
Always Sunny does a pretty good job of getting how people, for the most part, speak, with some exaggeration for comedic effect.
However, I doubt that most people spoke like they did in the movies, or as eloquently as Darrow did. There were slums and street talk and slow talkers back then too, just as there are now. To say everyone talked like that is ridiculous. And to expect it in a contemporary film, where no one even knows how they spoke 90 years ago, is even more ridiculous.
I hope Baz goes all out with this. Fireworks indoors, confetti, and I would love it if they spoke like ’30s gangsters. Who the hell wants to watch another uptight, stodgy, period piece? Embrace this.
RobbyH, you’re not familiar with the story? Do yourself a great favor and read the novel – it is amazing!
Can someone offer up some cultural analysis about why we are getting all of this film set in the pre WWII early 20th century right now? HUGO, WAR HORSE, THE ARTIST, TITANIC reissue, SHERLOCK HOLMES… Ken Burns PROHIBITION…
Remember though, Tobey and Leo nailed Seabiscuit and The Aviator, respectively. I think both are quite adept at period pieces. I’ve studied The Great Gatsby in school and based on my pretentious analysis and half-assed intellectualism, they’re both ideal for the parts of Nick and Jay. I trust them more than Luhrman.
The two most vocally limited actors of their generation, TOGETHER AT LAST.
Leo’s voice ruins every movie he’s in. However expressive and gifted an actor he may be PHYSICALLY, he kills scenes the second he opens his mouth and reveals himself as a little valley boy playing dress up. He’s embarrassing in J. EDGAR and his mock Nicholson line-readings in INCEPTION were cringe-worthy. And let’s not forget that Tobey singlehandedly ruined THE GOOD GERMAN — Clooney and Blanchett were game and totally nailed the ’40s tone, but Tobey sounded so jarring and iconoclastic in his scenes with them, that it killed the whole exercise. Luhrmann’s movies are actually quite good and effective once he manages to slow down — it’s only in his first acts that he lets all his annoying ADD tendencies come to play. I’ve never understood that about him. The first 20 minutes are ALWAYS all freak show, like he was trying to compress an hour of cut footage into the reel to bring down the running time or something. But then the first 20 minutes also always have all that mugging and bad Jeunet tone, so it can’t just be a length thing. AUSTRALIA would have been a classic if not for that awful first reel. It felt like a schizophrenic edited it.
Do you not think Leo might have seen Boardwalk Empire?
Recordings from that era, both audio and video, must be approached carefully because most were made before standardized recording and presentation rates. It’s why silent movies, even dramas, often look speeded up. The camera may have been hand cranked, so the projector could only approximate the speed at which something was filmed.
To ditto Gridlock, Boardwalk Empire captures the style quite well.
Jeff, it’s called THEATER, VAUDEVILLE and RHETORIC. If you were an actor, you sounded a certain way because of the legacy of the stage where you had to project for an audience without a microphone. If you were an educated public figure, you were classically trained in rhetoric and debate, likewise you sounded a certain way. That culture trickled down to people, so there was a certain way to sound “smart” during an era when sounding smart and educated was more respected than sounding like a hipster.
How soon we forget that the 1920s were closer to the Victorian Age than we are to Brando’s 1950s.
It’ll certainly be fun to watch. Luhrmann’s movies are always a bit like a drug trip – a hyperkinetic, frenzied opening, and then an ultra-depressing, melodramatic finale, all operatic in scale. Agree with Rashad that I’d rather see this approach than some boring-ass Stephen Daldry version of Gatsby or something.
Mulligan looks like Parker Posey in a blonde wig in this pic.
I agree with Rashad. I think I’ve said it before here, but I’m not sure you can really successfully adopt the book anyway – so much of its power and affect comes down to Fitzgerald’s prose. I’d rather approach this as something more or less separate from the book, on its own terms.
To JLC’s point, look up audio of the famous Hindenburg radio announcements (I’m too lazy to provide links)
The one everyone heard was at the typical something-or-other speed of the day, so it’s how it was heard over the radio, but there’s a recording that sounds much more accurate to the actual speech, and it’s slower and deeper.
I’m looking forward to seeing it. I hope Luhrman does take it in a somewhat different direction — along the lines of his version of Romeo and Juliet. That may be the only way to do it, by the way, and get some real juice out of it in a genuine movie sense. No other film version has worked and I think they’ve tried going the route of making it as much like the book as they could. While some object to any tinkering with literary masterworks, I’m not that stuffy as long as they arrive close enough to the truth of the original and don’t tidy it up too much (meaning don’t change the general plotline). Anything else is just window dressing, and if window dressing is the only thing that makes it work for you, then you’re not interested in looking much deeper, are you?
That’s “Keneally,” one “n” and two “l”‘s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristina_Keneally
Well, the common folk probably talked in regional dialect more than they do today. I swear, television has watered down most regional dialects. Although, I live in a region whose dialect is basically Broadcast American English, so what the fuck do I know? I mean, except for white trash here, who act like they’re from Alabama, but poorly.
But yeah, I think what Jeff’s talking about is the upper classes of the past, the milieu in which The Great Gatsby is largely set.
gree with Rashad that I’d rather see this approach
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An industry pal once told me that a producer friend of his told a well-respected young star that he reminded him of Cagney. Said star had no idea who that was. Producer gave him DVDs of a couple of Cagney’s vintage Warner Bros. films. Star returned DVDs a couple of days later, saying he couldn’t watch them. “Everyone talked so fast and I couldn’t understand what they were saying.”
Cagney was too fast?
My head hurts.
If anything I think about how it was a slower time then. Remember the beginning of Magnificent Ambersons where it laments for an even simpler time? There was greater emphasis on speech back then, the spoken and written language in general. People weren’t ADD’d to death with smartphones, internet, email, texting, giveittomenow of today.
Just listening to a Teddy Roosevelt clip a few weeks ago and it illustrates the point well.