Who wrote the screenplay for the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby?

Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay for the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

The film was directed by Jack Clayton and stars Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, and Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway. It adapts F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel about Gatsby’s attempt to reclaim his past relationship with Daisy amid the social excesses of Long Island’s wealthy elite.

Coppola was brought onto the project after Truman Capote, the original screenwriter, was replaced. Coppola wrote his version quickly while working in Paris, drawing on Fitzgerald’s novel and some of the author’s other fiction to develop dialogue and scenes that the novel leaves largely implicit.

The finished film did not follow Coppola’s screenplay exactly, a point he later criticized. That production history can cause confusion, but the credited screenwriter for the 1974 film—and the canonical answer to this question—is Coppola. He later became famous for directing The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now.