A Great Gatsby TV show is in the works, but what's stopping you from just making your own?
According to The Hollywood Reporter, A+E Studios and ITV Studios America have tapped writer Michael Hirst (creator of Vikings and its upcoming Netflix sequel series, among other things) to put together a new TV miniseries based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The project will reportedly be a “closed-ended miniseries” that tweaks the original story to “explore New York’s Black community in the 1920s as well as the musical subculture.” Blake Hazard, a great-granddaughter of the Fitzgeralds and a trustee of their estate, will serve as a consulting producer.
Of course, any involvement or approval from the Fitzgerald estate is wholly unnecessary at this point. As of January 1, The Great Gatsby is in the public domain, meaning there’s nothing stopping anyone from making a Great Gatsby TV show of their very own. Hell, there’s nothing stopping anyone from, say, reposting the entire book in the body of a news story on a pop culture website… but we won’t do that. The payoff wouldn’t be worth it. Then again:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.
He sits on the edge of the highest freeway on the overpass, legs dangling over the side like Huck Finn. He is using some broken crayons to draw something on a scrap of paper: A childish drawing of himself shooting another man in the head, brains blowing out. The victim’s thought bubble reads: “OUCHIE!!!” Even through the mask, he looks pleased by this.
DEADPOOL turns to CAMERA:
“Oh, hello, Deadpool here.”
Deadpool beats on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The end.