The Muppet Great Gatsby exists — in script form
Our desperate plea for a Muppets adaptation of The Great Gatsby has been answered: documentary filmmaker Ben Crew has taken the public domain novel and turned it into a downloadable 104-page fan-made script that marries Muppet antics with existential angst. My request for an adaptation may have been ridiculous, but this script seriously vindicates me.
Crew’s script, “Muppets Present ‘The Great Gatsby,’” may be a silly mashup of a novel you’re forced to read in high school and a puppet comedy variety show, but he said it became a meaningful project when January’s news cycle became too much to bear. “I knew that there was nothing I could do about what was happening in D.C. and that if I didn’t distract myself I was just going to waste away in front of the news again,” Crew wrote in an email to The Verge. “That’s when I dedicated myself to writing this script.”
The final product is a script that plays to a lot of the Muppets’ strengths, while tossing in some fun additions original to Crew. Miss Piggy does karate, Gonzo and Fozzie Bear break the fourth wall frequently, and Kermit… well, Kermit is as exactly as good-natured as we expect. Since every good Muppets movie needs human characters, Crew imagines casting Tom Holland as narrator Nick Carraway and Taron Egerton as the abusive Tom Buchanan. The script also leans frequently into the meta-humor The Muppets is known for and, of course, features plenty of musical numbers.
Crew pulled on his knowledge of The Muppets to write the script, which he says he built over years, bonding with his older brother over VHS tapes of The Muppet Show. That personal connection and a belief that there’s something genuinely, morally good about the characters made the script feel like an antidote to the anxiety that was ailing Crew. And based on the positive responses to his Reddit post sharing the script, it helped others, too. You can read an excerpt from the full script below:
NICK CARRAWAY (CONT’D)
I wonder what kind of a man Mr. Gatsby is.
GONZO
Technically he’s a frog.
Nick’s eyes zero in on the massive windows of Gatsby’s home. A lone curtain is drawn open, could someone be watching?
NICK CARRAWAY (V.O.)
All this money, all this property – but are you in there alone right now, do you have anyone to share it with?
RIZZO
He’s inner monologuing again.
GONZO
Just unpack, we’ll snap him out of it if he’s still going by dinner.
So the wheels are in motion. There’s a script written, a poster made, and a new subreddit (r/muppetgreatgatsby) devoted to the project. Disney could step in and make things official at some point, but we’ve gotten pretty far on sheer willpower and ridiculous demands alone, so let’s make another: we need this script to be made into a movie.
Our desperate plea for a Muppets adaptation of The Great Gatsby has been answered: documentary filmmaker Ben Crew has taken the public domain novel and turned it into a downloadable 104-page fan-made script that marries Muppet antics with existential angst. My request for an adaptation may have been ridiculous, but…
