Gone with the Wind (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Gone with the Wind premiered on the 15th of December 1939, and on that single night, roughly 300,000 people packed the streets of Atlanta for seven miles just to watch limousines carry its stars from the airport to the Loew's Grand Theatre. Georgia's governor declared the day a state holiday. President Jimmy Carter would later call it "the biggest event to happen in the South in my lifetime." Yet behind the spectacle waited a film that had nearly destroyed its creator, survived multiple directors and a furious five-day screenplay rewrite fueled by bananas and salted peanuts, and cast its now-iconic lead only weeks before shooting began. How does a production so chaotic produce the highest-grossing film in cinema history? And how does a movie celebrate the American South while one of its own stars is barred by law from sitting with her colleagues at its own premiere?

• 2. The Rights and the Gamble

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  In July 1936, just one month after Margaret Mitchell's novel appeared in bookstores, David O. Selznick paid her $50,000 for the film rights. The purchase was not his instinct. Before he changed his mind, Selznick had declined to option the book, as had Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg at MGM, Pandro S. Berman at RKO, and Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox. Jack L. Warner had flirted with the idea, but his biggest star, Bette Davis, showed no interest. It was Selznick's story editor Kay Brown and business partner John Hay Whitney who pressed him to act.

  Once Selznick committed, the problem of casting Clark Gable as Rhett Butler threatened to derail everything. Gable was under contract to MGM, which had a firm policy against lending its stars to rival studios. Gary Cooper was explored, but Samuel Goldwyn refused to let him go either. Warner offered Selznick a package deal - Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, and Olivia de Havilland - in exchange for distribution rights, but Davis refused to appear opposite Flynn as Rhett. Selznick was left with one path: negotiate directly with MGM chief Louis B. Mayer, who happened to be his father-in-law. In August 1938, a deal was struck. MGM would provide Gable and $1.25 million toward the production budget, take half the profits, and handle distribution. Selznick would pay Gable's weekly salary out of his own pocket.

  The arrangement forced a delay. Selznick's existing deal with United Artists had to run its course before MGM could distribute. That gap gave Selznick time to revise the script and engineer what became one of the most effective publicity campaigns in Hollywood history: the nationwide search for Scarlett O'Hara.

• 3. The Search for Scarlett

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  Selznick's team interviewed 1,400 unknown women for the role of Scarlett, at a cost of $100,000. The effort found nobody suitable for the part, but Selznick openly acknowledged it generated "priceless" publicity. Meanwhile, recognized actresses were tested and rejected in a long parade. Katharine Hepburn lobbied hard with the support of director George Cukor, who had already been hired. Selznick vetoed her. Norma Shearer withdrew after fans reacted negatively. Joan Crawford was considered because she was already at MGM. Early frontrunners Miriam Hopkins and Tallulah Bankhead were assessed even before the rights were purchased; Margaret Mitchell privately felt Hopkins was closest to her conception of Scarlett, but Hopkins was in her mid-thirties and deemed too old.

  By December 1938, only four women remained under serious consideration. Two finalists, Paulette Goddard and a young English actress named Vivien Leigh, were tested in Technicolor on the 20th of December. Goddard nearly won the part, but unresolved questions about her marital status with Charlie Chaplin gave Selznick pause. Leigh had been on Selznick's private shortlist since February 1938, when he saw her in Fire Over England and A Yank at Oxford. Her American agent was the London representative of Myron Selznick's talent agency - Myron being David's brother - and Leigh herself had requested in February that her name be submitted. Selznick's brother arranged their first meeting on the night of the 10th of December 1938, during the filming of the Atlanta fire sequence. Two days later, Selznick wrote to his wife calling Leigh "the Scarlett dark horse." Her casting was announced on the 13th of January 1939.

  Just before shooting began, Selznick offered one pointed note to the press via columnist Ed Sullivan: Scarlett O'Hara's parents were French and Irish. Leigh's parents, he noted, were exactly the same.

• 4. A Production on the Edge

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  Principal photography began on the 26th of January 1939 and was supposed to rest on a finished, functional screenplay. It did not. The original screenwriter, Sidney Howard, had delivered a draft so faithful to Mitchell's novel that it would have run at least six hours on screen. Howard refused to leave New England to make revisions in person, so Selznick assigned the rewriting to a succession of local writers. When he dismissed director George Cukor less than three weeks into filming, he turned to Victor Fleming, who was mid-production on The Wizard of Oz at MGM. Fleming read the script and declared it unworkable.

  What followed became one of the more extraordinary creative sprints in Hollywood history. On the morning of Sunday the 20th of February 1939, Selznick and Fleming roused screenwriter Ben Hecht from sleep, informed him he was on loan from MGM, and drove him to work. Hecht had not read the novel and there was no time to start. Instead, Selznick and Fleming acted out scenes from Howard's original draft while Hecht sat at a typewriter and transcribed and rewrote as they performed. Selznick refused to allow lunch breaks; he supplied bananas and salted peanuts. The three men worked eighteen to twenty hours a day. By the end of seven days, Hecht had completed the first nine reels. The rewrite was costing Selznick $50,000 per day the production sat idle, so the pressure was structural, not theatrical.

  Cinematographer Lee Garmes was replaced on the 11th of March 1939, a month in, because Selznick found his footage too dark. Ernest Haller and Technicolor cinematographer Ray Rennahan took over. Director Sam Wood filled in for two weeks in May when Fleming temporarily left due to exhaustion. At the close of principal photography on the 1st of July 1939, the day counts told the story: Fleming had directed ninety-three days, Wood twenty-four, and the fired Cukor eighteen - some of whose footage Selznick kept, estimating it amounted to "three solid reels" in the final cut. Post-production finished on the 11th of November 1939, just weeks before the premiere.

  The total estimated production cost reached $3.85 million, making it the second most expensive film produced up to that point, surpassed only by Ben-Hur from 1925.

• 5. The Score and the Costumes

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  Max Steiner spent twelve weeks on the score - the longest he had ever devoted to a single film - and produced a work running two hours and thirty-six minutes, also his longest. Selznick had worked with Steiner at RKO in the early 1930s, and Warner Bros., which had Steiner under contract since 1936, agreed to lend him for the project. Five orchestrators assisted: Hugo Friedhofer, Maurice de Packh, Bernhard Kaun, Adolph Deutsch, and Reginald Hazeltine Bassett. Even so, the deadline pressure was severe enough that Steiner received additional composing help from Friedhofer, Deutsch, and Heinz Roemheld, and two short musical cues composed by Franz Waxman and William Axt were pulled from the MGM library to fill gaps.

  The score carries two distinct love themes - one for Ashley and Melanie, another evoking Scarlett's passion for Ashley - but notably contains no love theme for Scarlett and Rhett. Steiner drew on folk and patriotic repertoire including Stephen Foster tunes such as "Beautiful Dreamer" and "Old Folks at Home," which contributed to Scarlett's theme, alongside "Dixie," "Marching through Georgia" by Henry Clay Work, and "The Bonnie Blue Flag." The melody associated with the O'Hara plantation, known as "Tara's Theme," became the musical basis for the song "My Own True Love" by Mack David in the early 1940s. In total the score comprises ninety-nine separate pieces of music.

  Costume designer Walter Plunkett approached Scarlett's wardrobe as a visual record of her circumstances. Early gowns use light pastels and vivid primary colors. As the story darkens, her attire shifts to crimson and burgundy. In the latter sections, her extravagant costumes deliberately contrast the drabness of those around her. Plunkett drew on nineteenth-century sources - including illustrations from Godey's Lady's Book and surviving 1860s-1870s garments - while streamlining the silhouettes to suit 1930s screen taste, replacing excessive ruffles and lace with cleaner lines and ostrich plumes.

• 6. Records, Reactions, and Race

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  The film's run at the Capitol Theatre in New York alone averaged eleven thousand admissions per day in late December 1939. Within four years, an estimated sixty million tickets had been sold across the United States - a figure roughly equivalent to just under half the American population at the time. In London during the Blitz, it opened in April 1940 and ran for four years at the Little Ritz in Leicester Square. By the time MGM pulled it from circulation at the end of 1943, the worldwide gross rental had reached $32 million, the most profitable film ever made to that point.

  The premiere itself carried a painful contradiction. Clark Gable threatened to boycott when he learned that Hattie McDaniel - who played Mammy and was banned from attending by Georgia's Jim Crow laws - could not sit alongside her white colleagues. McDaniel persuaded him to attend. Months later, at the 12th Academy Awards, McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award. She and her escort were made to sit at a segregated table at the back of the Coconut Grove during the ceremony.

  Black critics did not remain silent. Carlton Moss published an open letter describing the film as a "rear attack" on American history, calling out specific stereotypes: the "shiftless and dull-witted Pork," the "indolent and thoroughly irresponsible Prissy," and Big Sam's "radiant acceptance of slavery." Poet and educator Melvin B. Tolson argued it was a "subtle lie" that would be absorbed as truth by millions. Malcolm X recalled his visceral discomfort watching Butterfly McQueen's performance. Demonstrations were held in various cities. McDaniel's Oscar win divided opinion in the Black community: some crossed picket lines and praised her portrayal, others condemned her participation. Her own response to NAACP leader Walter Francis White - that she would "rather make seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid than seven dollars being one" - became one of the most quoted lines associated with the film.

  Behind the scenes, Selznick had made deliberate choices to soften the novel's racial politics. He removed all explicit references to the Ku Klux Klan, citing concern about producing what he called "an unintentional advertisement for intolerant societies in these fascist-ridden times." According to film historian Thomas Cripps, only a few weeks after the film's initial run, a story editor at Warner wrote an internal memo describing a plantation-genre script as now "unproducible" in light of what Gone with the Wind had made audiences expect.

• 7. Commerce, Controversy, Legacy

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  MGM's distribution terms for the original run were unprecedented. During the roadshow phase, the studio collected 70 percent of box-office receipts rather than the typical 30-35 percent. Even at those terms, it earned roughly twice what the previous record-holder had earned. The 1967 reissue alone generated a box-office gross of $68 million, making it MGM's most profitable film after Doctor Zhivago from the latter half of the decade. A 1971 re-release briefly allowed it to recapture the all-time grossing record from The Sound of Music, bringing its cumulative worldwide gross rental to approximately $116 million by the end of that year.

  In November 1976, NBC paid $5 million for a single network television airing, broadcast in two parts on successive evenings. It became the highest-rated television program ever presented on a single network at that time, watched by 47.5 percent of American households and 65 percent of television viewers - a record for the highest-rated film to air on television that still stands. In 1978, CBS signed a deal worth $35 million to broadcast it twenty times over twenty years.

  Across all releases, an estimated 200 million tickets have been sold in the United States and Canada alone. In 2014, Guinness World Records calculated the inflation-adjusted global gross at $3.44 billion, the highest in cinema history. The film was voted the most popular American film in Harris Interactive polls of more than two thousand adults in both 2008 and 2014.

  In June 2020, HBO Max temporarily removed the film following an op-ed by screenwriter John Ridley arguing it gave cover to those who romanticize plantation-era iconography. Film historian Jacqueline Stewart was later commissioned to introduce the film when it returned, describing it in a CNN piece as "a prime text for examining expressions of white supremacy in popular culture" and arguing it should stay available precisely because of ongoing racial injustice. The debate about the film's meaning had not simplified in eighty years; if anything, the argument had grown louder, which is perhaps what Stewart meant when she called the controversy "an opportunity to think about what classic films can teach us." The film was selected for the inaugural class of the United States National Film Registry in 1989 - one of twenty-five films deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant enough to preserve for all time.