We haven’t heard much about the upcoming adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s beloved classic, The Great Gatsby.  In fact, we haven’t heard anything about the project since we reported on the news that director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge) had bought the rights to the novel in 2008.  Now, Production Weekly has announced some exciting casting rumors via their twitter feed.  The rumors are that Leonardo DiCaprio is up for the role of Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire for Nick Carraway, and Amanda Seyfried for Daisy Buchanan.  There is no mention of Luhrmann directing, but I’m going to assume that he still owns the rights and will be helming the film.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel continues to be mandatory school reading (I read it in 8th grade) for a good reason.  The book’s tragic story of two wealthy aristocrats (DiCaprio and Seyfried), their next door neighbor (Maguire), and their doomed love affair during the early 1920s continues to be poignant more than 80 years later after it's first publication in 1925.  It’s easy to see why Luhrmann would be interested in adapting the story for a modern generation that continues to be fascinated by fame and wealth..  The trio of actors are, in my opinion, very solid choices and I look forward to seeing how Luhrmann will choose to tackle the novel.  Hit the jump for a plot summary for The Great Gatsby.

This plot summary comes via Amazon:

“In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem. “

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