The film
Gone
With The Wind has
sold more tickets than any film in history, and received ten Academy
Awards, a record which stood for twenty years. It has been comfortably
placed in the "top ten films of all times" by virtually every poll
since its premiere in 1939.
David
O. Selznick, the young helmer of David O. Selznick Productions, was
desperate to crawl out from the shadow of his father-in-law, Louis B.
Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Mayer had loaned him most of the money to
finance the film and pushed for Clark Gable to star. Gary Cooper had
been Selznick's first choice, but he was under contract to another
studio. Erroll Flynn was also discussed heavily, but Mayer was not to
be denied. In return for Mayer's funding, MGM received 50% of the
profits and distribution credit.
Producer David O. Selznick on
the set of Gone with the Wind
Selznick
paid $50,000 for the movie rights to Margaret Mitchell's book, a record
sum for the era, just weeks before it became the highest selling novel
to that time. What seemed folly to the other studios, all of whom had
passed on the book, suddenly looked like a wizard deal, but the
pressure on Selznick to satisfy the book's avid and countless fans was
profound. In older days Hollywood made few attempts to protect the
integrity of a film's source material if they thought they could
improve upon it. But this book was too popular and its fans demanding.
Gone With The Wind included
many racy and controversial elements, and it was rife with moral and
ethical ambiguity, but Selznick was determined to get them to the
screen intact.
He encountered massive obstacles to getting the major roles cast and a
manageable screenplay finalized. It seemed as if every actress in
Hollywood and beyond did a screen test for the coveted role of Scarlett
O'Hara, and some of those tests were elaborate and self-financed. While
some may think Vivien Leigh could have been the only one for the role,
she had various
degrees of competition from Jean Arthur, Lucille Ball, Tallulah
Bankhead, Joan Bennett, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Frances Dee, Olivia
de Havilland, Irene Dunne, Joan Fontaine, Greer Garson, Paulette
Goddard, Susan Hayward, Katharine Hepburn, Miriam Hopkins, Carole
Lombard, Ida Lupino, Merle Oberon, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck,
Margaret Sullavan, Lana Turner, and Loretta Young. After nearly three
years of auditioning (and battling the rumor mill), there was still no
Scarlett.
Victor Fleming (center)
directing Vivien Leigh
in Gone with the Wind
As
legend has it, Selznick's brother, agent Myron Selznick had brought
visiting Laurence Olivier and his lover Leigh to the studio one evening
to watch Selznick set fire to the studio's excess scenery. Selznick's
crew filmed the event, for use as footage for the burning of Atlanta in
the movie. As the giant gates from the previous Selznick film
King Kong blazed,
David took one look at Vivien Leigh in the reflection of the dancing
flames, and he knew he had found his Scarlett. Leigh was a relatively
unknown British stage actress at the time. Hollywood lesson #1: never
turn down an invitation to a fire.
The
screenplay took equal amounts of effort to complete. Dozens of the most
famous writers in Hollywood took whacks at it, including F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Charles MacArthur. Sydney Howard's script got
final credit, but it was unwieldy and he refused to come to Hollywood
during filming to make daily rewrites. With actress-friendly George
Cukor directing, they started production, but after three weeks of
filming Selznick pulled the plug, fired Cukor, and took Victor Fleming
off of the final weeks of
The Wizard
of Oz to direct. Hollywood lesson #2: never hire a slow director
to film a long and dense script.
Fearful
that his screenplay was not filmable, and with the most expensive
production in the history of Hollywood in hiatus, Selznick turned to
famed screenwriter and playwright Ben Hecht to pound out a draft from
Howard's screenplay that they could use to resume shooting. Fleming,
Hecht, and Selznick all have noted that Selznick locked them in his
office and fed them nothing but bananas and peanuts until the work was
done. How long they were held there, and how much of the final
screenplay they created is still open to some debate. The idea of these
three mad and clever geniuses, from radically different social
viewpoints and Hollywood status levels, fighting their way through to
some consensus propelled Ron Hutchinson to speculate on the event in
Moonlight and Magnolias.
Fleming received directing credit for both
The Wizard of Oz and
Gone With The Wind,
two of the most famous and successful films of all time. Hecht wrote
the screenplays to dozens of the most respected and touted films in
Hollywood history, among them
Notorious,
Spellbound, Lifeboat, Wuthering Heights, and
Scarface. Selznick went to
extraordinary extremes to bring his vision of Margaret Mitchell's novel
to the screen. The result was
Gone
With The Wind,
forever the prototype of the Hollywood blockbuster. Some of the human
toll, though, in all of its mad glory, is brought to you in
Moonlightand Magnolias. Hollywood lesson #3: watch your head!
-- Andrew Barnicle