FIVE THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE GREAT GATSBY

1. The Great Gatsby has sold millions of copies since its 1925 publication, and has remained in print as a perennial bestseller. But it wasn’t a get-rich-quick scheme for author F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He noted in a ledger, newly online thanks to researchers at the University of South Carolina’s Thomas Cooper library, that he made just $2,000 for the Gatsby book, about the same as what he’d earn from The Saturday Evening Post for a short story. He did better with the movie rights.

2. Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming version brings to five the number of times The Great Gatsby has been adapted for film. These include Robert Markowitz’s 2000 made-for-TV version, starring Toby Stephens as Jay Gatsby, Mira Sorvino as Daisy Buchanan and Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway.

3. The 1926 silent version of The Great Gatsby is considered a “lost” film, since no prints of it remain. But you can get a taste of it in the film’s trailer, linked online by Slashfilm at bit.ly/1566yRW. “Come and see it all, and enjoy the entertainment thrill of your life! The Great Gatsby is great!” the trailer reads.

4. Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda hated the silent version, which was directed by Herbert Brenon, and starred Warner Baxter, Lois Wilson and William Powell. “We saw The Great Gatsby in the movies,” Zelda wrote to a friend. “It’s ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left.” It was the only screen version of the novel made during the lifetime of Fitzgerald, who died in 1940 at age 44.

5. Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in two locations, both of them meaningful to Luhrmann. “One of them was about 20 minutes from our house in Manhattan. The other was about 20 minutes from the beach in Cannes. He wrote most of the novel there.

While he was writing it, his wife Zelda was having an affair with an officer, romping around pretty much where the Palais des Festivals is — and the Palais, of course, is where we’ll be showing The Great Gatsby!” Peter Howell