The green light ends up standing for this dream of an "orgastic future"—that's right, that means a future lived at the height of orgasm—which is constantly getting farther and farther away, and that we keep trying to grab for, despite the impossibility of reaching it. Gatsby's downfall starts at the moment when he stops seeing the green light as a symbol for his dreams and goals. Alan Glynn: Sure, a script is a big step closer to a movie, assuming you or someone you’re working with has a clear idea of what’s possible and practical and it has a real chance of being made. Otherwise you’re working in a vacuum. Alan Glynn: I see what you mean, and I suppose it’s true. What I really mean is that if the book wasn’t any good in the first place, I doubt that it would have been pursued as tenaciously as it was, over such a long period of time. You can't have good times without the bad either. Ever. Not in Nature, Life forces/forms, or Economics. Not even in space. Every positive has a void or negative opposed that defines its own very nature.

For this week's featured article, I'd like to try something ScreenAnarchy hasn't done in a while: I'm going to be talking about a novel that's (relatively) recently been adapted into a film. How did it turn out on screen? Did it do the source material justice? What worked, and what didn't? And most importantly, which one comes out on top? The American Dream, which is the aspirational hope that the novel shows in both its positive and negative lights. But throughout the book, the question remains: If you had such a drug available, what would you do?

However, during the novel, Gatsby's dream is revealed to be the delusional conviction that he could ignore five years of events and Daisy's own personality and inner life to get what he wants. With this disappointment, the symbolic meaning behind the green light collapses. Daisy is not a magically perfect creature, but instead a fallible and deeply flawed person. The love Gatsby feels for her can only be played out as a secretive and morally questionable affair. And the green light loses its "enchanted" qualities and instead is revealed to be the not particularly reliable indicator that it actually is (suddenly, it becomes invisible in the fog). All that said, I enjoyed the movie and the book for different reasons. They tell different stories and tell them in different ways. In the movie, Robert De Niro has a line that goes something like "Your powers are unearned to date. Nothing is unearned." I thought this was going to end up being the central thesis of the movie, but of course, being Hollywood, it isn't. The book is substantially darker, and written with an edgy, literary feel that reminds me of an early William Gibson novel. Like a lot of those early Gibson novels, Limitless is ultimately about the transplantation of humanity into technology, and the conflict that comes from that. Humans are still human, after all. During the course of the novel, Gatsby's dream is revealed to be delusional and unrealizable, so the symbolic meaning behind the green light collapses. Alan Glynn: Yes, absolutely. Lazarus-like. I always felt that it should have done better the first time round. The central idea really appeals to people, and everyone I’ve spoken to who’s read the book seems to love it.

The thing is, if you think you’re saying something or making a point in a book you’ve written, you’d be foolish to expect a movie version to say exactly the same thing or make exactly the same point. The other route is to pitch the book or idea to a producer before you write the whole screenplay, though I’m not sure how practical that is these days. After that I wrote a novel called The Paloma Stripe, but couldn’t find a publisher for it. Then I wrote another novel called Winterland, and initially we couldn’t find a publisher for that either.I didn’t realise that the book had actually been re-released under a different name to tie-in with the film. The book was originally published in 2001 and was called The Dark Fields. Limitless is a 2011 American science-fiction thriller film directed by Neil Burger and written by Leslie Dixon. Loosely based on the 2001 novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, the film stars Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, Robert De Niro, Andrew Howard, and Anna Friel. The film follows Edward Morra, a struggling writer who is introduced to a nootropic drug called NZT-48, which gives him the ability to use his brain fully and to improve his lifestyle vastly. Ebert, Roger (March 16, 2011). "He knew everything, but forgot most of it". Chicago Sun-Times. RogerEbert.com. She kept me informed of everything that was going on all through the process, which I believe is pretty unusual. She was very sensitive to what I’d think about everything—script decisions she’d made, casting choices, who’d direct and so on. To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you can either eyeball it (Paragraph 1-50: beginning of chapter; 50-100: middle of chapter; 100-on: end of chapter), or use the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text.