Context
In a film that had four directors, at least twelve scriptwriters,
and a rotation of cameramen, the one unifying vision for the production of Gone
With the Wind belonged to its producer, David O. Selznick. Born
on May 10, 1902, to
pioneering movie mogul Lewis Selznick, David lived his early years
in financial comfort. Lewis gave his sons lavish personal allowances,
advising them to spend it all and stay broke. Selznick’s family
wealth vanished abruptly, taken not by the ravages of war but by
his father’s poor business decisions and his gambling addiction.
By 1923 Lewis Selznick declared bankruptcy, spending
his last years financially supported by his sons.
Selznick moved to Hollywood in 1926 and
quickly got a job in MGM’s story department, where he began working
his way up the ranks. Just two years later he moved to Paramount
Pictures, where he was hired as an executive before continuing on
to become vice president in charge of production at RKO. He then
returned to MGM to help produce several films, most notably David
Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Anna Karenina.
When the original head of production at MGM returned, Selznick lost
the creative freedom he craved and left to form his own production
company in 1935. The following year, Selznick
bought the film rights to Margaret Mitchell’s wildly popular novel Gone
With the Wind.
Films about the old South were popular during the first
half of the twentieth century. One of the first of these films was
Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and twelve
years later the epic The Birth of a Nation electrified
the country, redefining cinema as an art form. By the late 1930s,
however, the genre had gone into a steep decline, and when Irving
G. Thalberg, the head of production at MGM, heard the synopsis of Gone
With the Wind he was unimpressed. “Forget it,” he was famously
quoted as saying after he rejected the story. “No Civil War picture
ever made a nickel.”
Selznick had his own reservations about the story, including
the cost of screen rights and production and the difficulties of
choosing a cast that wouldn’t alienate the many fans of the novel.
Problems continued during the shooting of the film, ranging from
wars between starlets over the lead role of Scarlett to Selznick’s
constant rewriting of the script. The production surpassed its budget
before any of the action sequences were filmed, the hours were so
long that some of the cast and crew took drugs to keep going, and
the once supportive press abandoned the project entirely. Selznick,
however, remained unbeaten through these trials, firm in his vision
of a sweeping romantic drama and determined to prove that the film
the press was now calling “Selznick’s Folly” would be a success.
In the end, Selznick’s vision didn’t fail him. After its
December 1939 premiere, Gone With
the Wind proved to be a huge critical and box office success.
It was labeled a masterpiece by the very critics who had once called
it a folly, and it went on to be one of the top grossing films of
all time. It was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards and won eight
of them, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Actress (Leigh),
Best Director (Fleming), and Best Color Cinematography. In addition,
the Academy bestowed upon the film a special achievement award and
an honorary plaque. Hattie McDaniel also walked into film history
with her win as Best Supporting Actress, the first Oscar ever won
by an African American. In England, Gone With the Wind ran
in theaters for the duration of World War II, with Scarlett serving
as a symbol of resistance and liberation. For these same reasons,
the Nazis banned the film.
Such success, however, could not last. Despite the film’s
achievements, Gone With the Wind’s enormous scope
and budget precluded the chance of it strongly influencing other
films. Even if the film had spawned an imitator, there would have
been no market for it. By the end of World War II, protests over
Hollywood’s racial stereotyping had permanently tainted Southern
films, sending their popularity into steep decline. Selznick had
another success in 1940 with the film Rebecca,
but after that he was unable to repeat the success of his two most
famous films and began losing money. The creative control of producers
fell as directors rose in influence, and shifting balances of power
marked the end of the glory days of the studio system. Like the
story of the South in the Civil War, Gone With the Wind proved
to be the end of an era.
