Gone with the Wind is the favorite film of multitudes of classic movie lovers and even the favorite film of many for whom Gone with the Wind is the only classic movie they know. Coming out in 1939, the year still considered one of the greatest years of Hollywood’s Golden Era, and filmed in three-strip technicolor, this movie, at the time the longest and most expensive color film in existence, captured the hearts of millions and still has the record for the most tickets sold, which means, when adjusted for inflation, it’s still the all-time box office champion. And while there is much I enjoy in Gone with the Wind, it is not, alas, my favorite film of all time. In fact, it wouldn’t even make my top 100. That’s no slam against the movie, I just have a lot of favorites before it. More importantly, it is my favorite in another category: “Making of” Movies. There’s no movie that I’ve enjoyed reading about and watching the making of more than Gone with the Wind, the greatest “Making of” movie in history.
Back in 1988, Turner Entertainment aired The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind and I recorded it. I kept that VHS tape for years and watched it dozens of times, at least in part, because here was a backstory to the making of a movie that truly fascinated me. With other movies, especially in the DVD era of ubiquitous “Making of” features included with every purchase, the action behind the scenes is often pretty dull. I’m probably not the only one who long ago stopped listening to every director’s commentary after realizing that very few were interesting at all and didn’t provide much of interest in the way of why or how something was done. More often than not, a classic DVD with a film historian doing the commentary, like our own David Kalat or Richard Harland Smith, is far more interesting. What made the making of Gone with the Wind stand out, and still does, is that it covers everything in the movie making business as well as everything you will ever need to know about the studio era and how they made their movies. In other words, what’s so fascinating about the making of Gone with the Wind is all the stuff that happened, and there was plenty of it, before the cameras ever started rolling.
A part of what makes it so interesting was simply the amount of time that went into preproduction – years. Years. Preproduction on the 1939 classic started in 1936 as writers were brought in, sets were designed, costumes put together, and screen tests after screen tests were done for the lead role of Scarlett O’Hara, with the majority of those screen tests done with the beautiful and talented Paulette Goddard before, after years of tests, the beautiful and talented Vivien Leigh was chosen (this is probably as good a time as any to highlight the opening line of the book itself, “Scarlet O’Hara was not beautiful.” So, anyway…).
David O’Selznick, the independent producer who bought the rights to the book, made a deal with MGM to distribute the film and cover a lot of the production costs. His career was one of endless deals to get his movies made and distributed to the public. After leaving RKO, where he spearheaded a personal, longtime favorite, King Kong, he formed Selznick International Pictures and produced several great thirties pictures, including two Fredric March successes, Nothing Sacred and A Star is Born. But Gone with the Wind was the biggest, being worked on while all those other movies were being developed, shot, edited, and released in the meantime.
A current exhibit (yes, it’s titled The Making of Gone with the Wind), sponsored by TCM, at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, is all about the making of this classic epic, complete with an in depth companion book. What I like about the exhibit, which I’ve “toured” online (though I’d love to see it in person), is that it doesn’t shy away from all the history of the book and movie, including the racial controversies surrounding it. From the moment it was released, there was controversy over how the brutality of slavery was simply, and completely, overlooked. In the movie, the slaves are presented as servants paid with room and board, happy to serve and never abused. Mentions of the KKK in the novel were removed for the movie but the actions are still there. In the book, for instance, Ashley is a member of the Klan and that raid on the shantytown is a Klan raid because of the black man grabbing Scarlett (they change it to a white man in the movie). In the movie, they use the euphemism “political meeting” to signal Klan activities.
The exhibit, which runs from September 9th through January 4th, also has everything one would expect of a great “making of” experience including props, costumes, stills, and storyboards, like the ones I used to illustrate this post. Those props include three dresses worn by Vivien Leigh in the movie, including the classic “Green Drapes” dress which, for better or worse, for a certain age segment of the population, including myself, always brings to mind Carol Burnett’s classic send-up of the movie on her great variety show. The exhibit also has the memos and notes from O’Selznick himself, detailing every aspect of the production. Gone with the Wind has long been called a producer’s movie, not a director’s movie, and for good reason. Since the movie went through multiple directors, with the main ones being George Cukor, Sam Wood, and Victor Fleming, it was the producer’s signature seen all over the movie (in other words, the money’s up there on the screen, not so much a director’s vision).
For me, the three greatest “Making of” movies of all time are Gone with the Wind, Apocalypse Now, and Citizen Kane. Gone with the Wind is the greatest pre-production making of, Apocalypse Now the greatest shooting schedule making of, and Citizen Kane the greatest post-production making of. Apocalypse Now has the great documentary Hearts of Darkness detailing its travails, Citizen Kane the equally great The Battle of Citizen Kane, and now Gone with the Wind has an entire exhibit surrounding the history of what is, for many, the greatest “Making of” movie ever made.