- The 1928 Rolls-Royce Phantom I Ascot Dual Cowl Sport Phaeton that starred in the 1974 movie The Great Gatsby will cross the auction block on Sunday in Greenwich, Connecticut.
- The Great Gatsby car is expected to fetch between $175,000-$225,000, according to Bonhams.
- The car is considered to be a significant bit of automotive movie memorabilia since it figured prominently in the storyline of the movie that featured Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.
GREENWICH, Conn. — The 1928 Rolls-Royce Phantom I Ascot Dual Cowl Sport Phaeton that starred in the 1974 movie The Great Gatsby will cross the auction block on Sunday in Greenwich, Connecticut.
While decidedly more sedate than the automotive standouts in The Fast and the Furious, The Great Gatsby car is significant since it figured prominently in the storyline of the movie that featured Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.
The Great Gatsby car is expected to fetch between $175,000-$225,000, according to the Bonhams auction online catalog.
The catalog says the Rolls-Royce was "selected after a beauty contest cum car show." It was "repainted to match Fitzgerald's description of rich cream and its natural hide upholstery dyed to be the requisite 'green leather conservatory.'"
The Phantom was essentially a murder weapon in the movie. "Paramount, sympathetic to the age and authenticity of the Phantom's fenders, commissioned a duplicate set in fiberglass, along with a suitably wrinkled right front wing post-accident," the catalog notes. "The car will be sold with the movie's fiberglass fenders but comes with the original steel fenders and the crumpled post-accident fiberglass fender."
The movie was based on the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book is now a staple in high school American-Lit classes and is called "one of the chief texts of the American literary renaissance in the post World War I period," according to the Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature. The novel chronicles the morally bankrupt wealthy society in New York City and Long Island during the Jazz Age.
Inside Line says: If you identify with Jay Gatsby, a man with a shady past who has achieved social rank, this may be the car for you.
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northsparrow says:
08:03 AM, 06/04/2011
but that's no matter
northsparrow says:
08:01 AM, 06/04/2011
"He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, bur that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...... and one fine
morning---
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Why doesn't IL add this Rolls to the long term fleet?
mce63 says:
07:49 PM, 06/03/2011
I don't know the going price for an old Rolls but $175-$225K seems awfuly low compared to other cars' sales.
cz_75 says:
07:47 PM, 06/03/2011
It's IL - when can't you find at least one?
app5 says:
05:07 PM, 06/03/2011
I spot a typo!