Lesbian affairs, all-night sex and cocaine..: Wild lives of Gatsby-era flappers

UK Daily Mail ^ | May 14, 2013 | Deni Kirkova and Martha De Lacey

[C19fan]

Money flowed, jazz music rang out, and fashionable young women in 1920s London, Paris and New York set aside behaviour previously deemed 'appropriate' in favour of high spirits, short skirts, hedonism and social liberation. These giddy, creative, enthusiastic women of the Roaring Twenties' were named 'flappers' because of their effervescent personalities. They were writers, actresses, painters, society heiresses, and they were a new breed of women typified by newly bobbed hair, thick make-up and predilections for smoking, drinking, dancing the Charleston... and then some. As Baz Luhrmann's new cinematic remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby prepares for release, global interest in the era is piquing.

[kabumpo]

No, the drinking was across the board, every social class.

[Bratch]

Obviously.

But the high society folks on Long Island and in Hollywood didn’t need to worry about Elliot Ness types crashing their parties.

[x]

Maybe across the board in terms of income levels or classes, but drinking was more common in the cities than in the countryside.

Some bootlegging rural counties were an exception and some people could get their hands on liquor wherever they were, but in much of small town America, booze was hard to get and the 20s weren't Roaring that much.

[Fiji Hill]

I just saw “The Great Gatsby.” The use of rap and disco music, as well as the disco dancing, in a film set in 1922 was ridiculous. Even the few tunes from the 1920’a that were used were post-1922.

And Gatsby must have gone through a time warp to get the car he was driving, a 1929 Duesenberg.

[Fiji Hill]

Is Beyoncé such a one-trick-pony that she could not have spent a few hours listening to old Ella Fitzgerald recordings and tried to sing in the style of the era?

Ella Fitzgerald (B. 1918) began her career in the mid-1930's. To capture the 1922 sound, Beyoncé should have listened to Marion Harris, Edna Brown or Fanny Brice.

[Fiji Hill]

There's nothing wrong in principle about resetting an adaptation in a different era than the original work.

If they were going to use disco and rap music, they should have set "The Great Gatsby" in 2013.

[Oztrich Boy]

Not the ones in the US, but the ones in europe, thing cabaret in Germany which was inspired by the flapper “culture”...

I know. If only German youth had been attracted to healthy outdoor activities

>

[Jack Hammer]

“...it can be a real eye-opening for us to see the big picture.”

The “big picture” IMO, encompasses the spiritual and the psychological, world-wide. Indeed, how could it not?

The period after World Wars I and II - in fact, the entire Twentieth Century - was an era of vast and irreversible moral and spiritual shock and decline, the fallout of which we are now experiencing.

[x]

It's Baz Luhrmann, the guy who put Bowie, Beck, and Bono on the soundtrack of his 1890s movie Moulin Rouge, and had his chorus singing lyrics from Labelle and Nirvana.

It can be jarring at first, but it's how he does things.