Statewide Iowa — A writing assignment for a University of Iowa honors class turned into a novel that caught the attention of movie producers and resulted in all 19 students signing a film option with two Hollywood studios.
UI Professor Harry Stecopoulos says he’s delighted by the development and while he couldn’t disclose the terms of the contract, says his students were thrilled with the deal they brokered.
The students’ collaboration, “Gilded in Ash,” is a new version of what many regard as the greatest novel of the 20th century. The copyright on “The Great Gatsby” expired last year, so Stecopoulos had his students create a completely new telling of the classic 1925 story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Never did he dream it would result in a film option.
The original plan called for an electronic version of the students’ novel to be released in January through the University of Iowa’s Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, with a paperback version this spring. That didn’t happen.
The film option was signed with Independent Pictures and Fugitive Films, but there’s no guarantee “Gilded in Ash” will ever become a movie. “The film business is fickle,” Stecopoulos says, but he’s confident the movie will be made eventually. The characters in the new story are “largely the same but it’s a different plot,” Stecopoulos says. “For example, Gatsby is an African-American woman who is an art forger, so a major change there.” The UI students’ story is still set in the 1920s and in New York City but he says it’s very much an original account. So what does the next writing project involve with Hemingway?
Expiration of the copyright means anyone can publish the book, write a prequel, or adapt it however they’d like. Stecopoulos notes, there is no payday for him with the upcycled Gatsby tale, as the only reward he craves is in his students’ success.
