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Couple of months ago, while on a Packard Club run, I was approached by a photographer looking for LHD Packards to possibly be used in the re-make of the film, The Great Gatsby. Unfortunately it appeared I couldn't help because the local Packards of that era are RHD cars. The photographer also said that 2 Duesenbergs had been loaned by the Petersen Automotive Museum and imported for use in the film.

Then today, DavidM's '29 Roadster features prominently in the pic's of a story, about the re-make of the film, currently being shot in Sydney. The story is in today's Sydney Morning Herald newspaper online edition and also appears on Page 7 of the printed copy of the paper. Glad they found David and his car's, which are all RHD!

The last couple of seasons of The Avengers were filmed here in Canada, not far from where I live. They had the same problem transforming LHD cars to RHD.

The solution was to make special road signs,with the lettering reversed, film the scenes then flip the negative over. This made the LHD cars into RHD and made the signs read the right way round.

Ah the magic of the movies!

In the best known version starring Robert Redford, Gatsby drives a Rolls Royce.

As a Gatsby fan I look forward to the movie even though the chance of them getting the point of the story is practically nil.

Don't look now but they are filming a re-make of the Great Gatsby in Sydney virtually as we speak. I have it on very good authority that at least one or two local Packards will be included. Changing from LH to RH drive will not be a problem. We drive on the left side of the road in Australia so the local cars are all RH drive.

Having had a closer look at the pic's I believe that's David and Veronique in their period "clobber" on the set in picture #6.

Mal, your story (slightly changed) is now on top in the world (yellow) press.

--> The $3 million Packard

---> Robert Redford meets Mal





picture soure: www.nicerendezvous.com
story: Mal Gatsby

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That is the point. The Avengers was set in England but filmed in Canada so they had to reverse the negative to get it to look right.

The Great Gatsby took place in and near New York City in the summer of 1922 so they have the opposite problem, making Australia look like America 90 years ago.

So, they already screwed up and they haven't even started filming yet.

They bought 1929 cars that are too new by 7 years. So there is a jarring note unless they set the film in 1929 or 1930. But conditions were much different in those years than they were in 1922. The whole story becomes pointless unless it takes place at a specific time.

The whole point of the story is that Gatsby was forced to leave Daisy while he went off to fight in WW1 and when he came back, she had married Tom Buchanan. So from 1919 to 1922 he is amassing the money through various shady deals, to match Buchanan in wealth and woo Daisy away from him.

If this process took 10 years it would become pointless for Gatsby to try and get Daisy back.It would turn the story into a farce.

If Gatsby wandered off in 1926 for no reason, and came back 3 years later crazy about Daisy, it would make no sense. There is just no way to change the time frame without killing the motivation of the main characters.

Typical Hollywood.

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To about 95% of the audience watching this film, every car other than a Model A is a Dusenberg.

This kind of stuff only drives us car guys nuts.

I bet they get the characters wrong too.

Tom Buchanan is a wealthy polo player, handsome and strong, but a little on the dumb side. He is also a racist, cheats on his wife and slaps women around.

Daisy is a beautiful airhead.

Their friend Jordan Baker is cut from the same cloth as they are. She is an amateur golf and tennis champ who is not above cheating if she can get away with it.

They have a habit of getting into jams through their selfishness, then skipping town.

Gatsby is an ambitious young roughneck who can turn on the charm when he wants to. And a romantic underneath it all.

Wilson is a struggling small businessman with a streak of religious fanaticism.

His wife is a tramp.

How hard is that to understand?

I have copy of The Great Gatsby and Packard was just not the kind of car Fitzgerald could be describing as follows:

''rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns'' (68).

Besides the Ghost the other candidates among the super rich of Westbury, Oyster Bay, Morgan Island, etc. would be Cunningham, Locomobile, Isotta-Fraschini, or Hispano Suiza. Rolls-Royce was the car of choice on Millionaires Row and Upper Long Island and given the chassis price of up to $16,000 is in keeping with Gatsby's spending. For my money I'll bet Fitzgerald was describing a McFarlan maybe even Paul Whiteman's flamboyant touring car. Of course a real life Jay Gatsby would probably choose the Type 41 Bugatti Royale.

Fitzgerald's tale makes a significant moral statement in that Daisy and Tom kill each others lovers and yet stay together unperturbed for appearances sake. Fitzgerald's entree into New York society via literature no doubt found him shocked at the savagery of so called "high society" which echos in popular tunes like Irving Berlin's "Puttin on the Ritz", and other standards like "Aint we got Fun" which played to the rich on Broadway.

One of the few great Hollywood film's that hasn't been butchered by remakes is John Huston's and Ray Bradbury's casting of "Moby Dick". For some reason nobody wants to stoop to that kind of schlock. Thus, I will not be wasting my time watching a Gatsby remake especially since the soundtrack by Nelson Riddle made the movie so great. There isn't anybody alive who can equal that music score or can assemble the required session men because that kind of work is as extinct as dinsosaurs.