History Daily - The Premiere of Gone With the Wind

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

December 15, 1939. The epic Civil War drama Gone With the Wind receives its premiere in Atlanta, Georgia. Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more. History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.

It's just before midnight on December 10, 1938, on a Hollywood backlot in Los Angeles, California. Studio executive David Selsman grips a megaphone and roars out orders across the set. He's sitting on top of a 30-foot observation town overseeing the first shot of his new production Gone with the Win. David's been trying to get this movie off the ground for years, but even though he's finally about to start shooting, he still hasn't found his lead actress. No one in Hollywood quite fits the passion. green-eyed Southern Bell, Scarlett O'Hara. But under pressure from his millionaire backers,

David has decided that he needs something in the can with or without his leading lady. So today, David plans to set fire to some old sets as a backdrop for one of the most dramatic sequences in the movie, The Burning of Atlanta. From the tower, David lifts his megaphone and barks out his final orders. Beside him is the film's director, George Cucor. And once David is happy with the preparations, he nods to George. George, who shouts action. Flames race across the set.

The heat is so intense that even up on his tower, David has to shield his face. Dan, right on cue, a stunt driver races a horse-drawn carriage through the blaze, dodging smoke and debris. Seven, technicolor cameras capture all the action before George shouts cut, and the flames begin to die down. David leaps to his feet and heads for the ladder. He's delighted. After three years of planning, he's finally got the first shot.

and it's a spectacular one. And reaching the bottom of the ladder, he hears a familiar voice congratulating him. It's his brother Myron Selznick, a powerful Hollywood agent, and he hasn't come to set alone. With him is one of his clients, the young British actor Lawrence Olivier.

But David barely even notices him, because on Olivier's arm is a beautiful woman wearing a long mink coat. The fire, still burning on set, dance in her bright green eyes. With a grin, Myron tells his brother to meet Ville. Vivian Lee, the actress born to play Scarlett O'Hara.

Convinced that fate has delivered to him Vivian Lee just when he needed her the most, David Selsnick immediately cast her in his film. Principal photography will begin a few weeks later, but the shoot will be beset by problems, though David will stop at nothing to finish his epic masterpiece, eventually premiering Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, the very city he destroyed on film on December 15, 1939. A quick word before we get to the rest of the episode.

The first show of my live tour will be in Dallas, Texas on March 6th at the Granada Theater. We'll be exploring the days that made America through storytelling and music, and they aren't the days you might think. Sure, everyone knows July 4, 1776, but there are many other days that are maybe even more influential. So come out to see me live in Dallas. For more information on tickets and upcoming dates, go to historydailylive.com. That's historydailylive.com. See my Days That Made America tour, live on stage. Go to HistoryDailyLive.com. From Noisor in Airship, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast, every day, we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world. Today is December 15, 1939, the premiere of Gone with the Wind. It's May 1936 in Honolulu, Hawaii, almost three years before production begins on Gone. with the wind. David Selsnick lies on a deck chair, flicking through the synopsis of a novel. Although he's on vacation, the 34-year-old studio executive is always on the lookout for properties he can spin into box office gold, and now his assistant has alerted him to an exciting new title. Written by newcomer Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, is set on the eve of the American Civil War. The book follows Scarlett O'Hara, a southern bell fighting for love amid the upheaval of

conflict. It's an exciting story, and David can immediately see its big-screen potential, but he's not alone in that. The book is already the talk of Hollywood, and Margaret Mitchell's agent is demanding $50,000 for the adaptation rights. That's a monumental sum for an unknown author's debut novel. But David's always been willing to take a gamble, whether it's in a studio boardroom or down at the racetrack, David loves the rush he gets from a high-stakes bet. So on July 6, 1936, David pays a small fortune to secure the movie rights. to Gone with the Wind.

Mitchell's novel is 1,000 pages long, with dramatic set pieces and a large cast, so David knows that making the movie version won't be easy or cheap. His first move, then, is to enlist the help of an old collaborator, director George Kukor. George has directed five pictures for David before, and is well known for his sensitive work with actresses in particular. That's an important consideration for David on a film with a female lead, but they still need writer to adapt the mammoth novel. So on George's recommendation, David approaches Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sidney Howard. In October 1936, Sydney agrees to take on the project, but on one condition,

that he can work alone from his Massachusetts farmhouse, three thousand miles away from Hollywood, because producer David has a reputation in the industry as a meddler, demanding daily meetings on every aspect of production. So Sydney wants to be as far away as possible. Reluctantly, David agrees. But progress is slow. It takes nearly six months for Sydney to complete a first draft. And when David finally gets his hands on it, he's baffled. The script is almost as long as the book itself. Annoy, David recalls Sydney to Hollywood and confines him to a conference room, relentlessly pushing him to finish the script and incorporate a list of revisions. After six weeks, the next draft is finished and it's 15 pages longer than the first.

At this point, David has had enough and he fires Sydney. Over the next few months, a host of other writers take a shot at the script, including the famous author F. Scott Fitzgerald, but David is unhappy with every draft. Eager to push production forward, though, he turns his attention to casting. Because the novel is now a best-selling sensation, the question of who will play Scarlett O'Hara has become something of a national obsession. David received streams of letters, imploring him to cast an established star like Catherine Hepburn or Betty Davis.

But David doesn't want a big name for the role. Instead, he sends his assistant on a whistle-stop tour of the American South on the hunt for an unknown. But if Scarlett O'Hara won't be played by a star, David knows he'll have to make up for that somewhere else in the cast. The obvious candidate is Rhett Butler, Scarlett's dashing love interest, and David thinks he knows the perfect actor for the part, the heartthrob Clark Gable. Gable is currently under contract at MGM and is technically unable to work for another studio. But fortunately for David, MGM is run by his father-in-law. David approaches him and begins negotiations. But David's father-in-law is a shrewd businessman.

He knows that Gone With the Wind doesn't have a workable script or a lead actress and that David is running short on cash, so he spies a business opportunity. He offers to loan David's production not only Clark Gable, but also $1.25 million. David is delighted, but there is a catch. In exchange for Gable and the cash, MGM demands the lucrative worldwide distribution rights for Gone with the Wind, as well as half of the film's profits for a period of seven years. It's a hard bargain, but David doesn't have much of a choice. And even with Clark Gable cast in a new influx of funds, David still needs his lead actress.

But his assistant comes back from his tour of the South empty-handed, and by late 1939, David is under intense pressure from his father-in-law to get production started. so he begins preliminary shooting for a pivotal action sequence where Rhett and Scarlet escape the burning city of Atlanta. But when shooting of the scene begins, David will get far more than he expected. His brother Myron will visit the set, accompanied by a 25-year-old British actress. And when David sees Vivian Lee in the firelight of his burning set, he will know he has found his Scarlet O'Hara at last. It's February 1939 in Los Angeles, California.

two months after production began on Gone with the Wind. Producer David Selsnick jumps around his Hollywood office acting out the final scenes of Margaret Mitchell's novel. Watching from a sofa is scriptwriter Ben Hecht, who frantically scribbles down notes. The men have been up all night fueled by amphetamines, scotch, and peanuts in their desperate race to finish the script of Gone with the Wind.

Production on the film is already underway, but the early weeks of shooting have been difficult, and not just because they don't have a lot, locked script. Director George Kukor shot just 23 minutes of film before David decided he wasn't going to work. He fired George and brought in another director, Victor Fleming. But when Victor arrived at David's office, he took one look at the lengthy screenplay and demanded changes. Now, on Victor's advice, David has brought in scriptwriter Ben Hecht to rewrite the entire thing. But with production already underway, there's no time for Ben to even read the

original novel. Instead, David and Victor act. doubt the whole storyline for him. With a strange southern drawl, David plays the heroine Scarlett O'Hara, while Victor channels the men characters. Finally, after five days locked in David's office, the three exhausted men emerge with a finished screenplay for Gone with the Wind. But if David hopes the production will now run more smoothly, he's soon disappointed. The film's epic scope stretches the budget to its breaking point, and David's father-in-law refuses to inject any more cash into the project. So as David scrambles for new investors, the stress takes its toll. He gets stomach ulcers and his hair turns ghostly white. In the end, it takes a million-dollar check

from a wealthy fan of the novel to keep the cameras rolling, but even that doesn't change the production's fortunes. In April 1939, director Victor Fleming nearly drives off a Malibu cliff in his Cadillac. He goes on leave, and David is forced to hire a third director to finish the movie. But Victor makes an unexpectedly rapid recovery, and just two weeks later, he's back on set, but that only means that chaotic production now has two directors, with each insisting they're in charge. David reaches a compromise. There's so much left a film that he decides to keep both directors on the project. The most recent hire will handle smaller scenes, while Victor will tackle the more technically challenging ones, and David certainly wants Victor behind the lens for one of the

biggest scenes in the film, where Scarlett walks through a vast crowd of wounded soldiers outside the Atlanta train station. On the day of the shoot, the production buses in 800 extras, but even that's not enough to match David's vision. So the crowds of extras are augmented with dummies dressed in Confederate uniforms. David figures that no one will notice the difference in the finished film, and it takes seven long takes to get the perfect shot. But it's not just on these big set pieces where the hunt for perfectionism slows production down. In one scene on the Plantation House set, Clark Gable must carry a kicking and screaming Vivian Lee up a long flight of stairs. It's a pivotal moment in the story, and Victor

orders his cast to repeat the scene again and again. After hours of filming, Gable is on the verge of collapse, but Victor asks for one more take. The exhausted Clark Gable reluctantly obliges, plotting up the red-carpeted staircase with Lee in his arms. And then when Victor shouts cut, he turns to the crew with a smile and tells him he didn't need that take. He'd already gotten the perfect shot. He just wanted to see if Clark Gable could do it. The cast endures six grueling months of shooting in total.

But finally, on July 1, 1939, the last day of principal photography arrives. The scene sees a tearful Scarlet O'Hara beg Rett Butler not to leave her, but Vivian Lee's tears on set aren't acting. The long shoot has worn her down, and she yearns to be in New York with Lawrence Olivier. But David Selznick has one final touch to add before finishing the scene. Something about the rhythm of Clark Gable's last line doesn't work for him, so he tweaks it until he lands on the soon-to-be iconic phrase, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

With that, production wraps. It's taken 125 days, three directors, countless scriptwriters, half a million feet of film, and a near record $4.25 million, but it's done. David takes the footage to his editors, and after months of chaos, the tranquility of the editing room will be a welcome change of pace. And when David emerges, his masterpiece will be complete, and everyone in the world will finally have a chance to see Gone with the Win for themselves. It's December 15, 1939 in Los Angeles, California, five months after production wrapped on Gone with the Wind. Hattie McDaniel turns up the volume on her kitchen radio. She's listening to

her report, broadcasts live from the Lowe's Grand Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. The radio crackles with the announcement of the cast and crew's arrival at the premiere of Gone with the Wind. David Selsnick, Vivian Lee, and Clark Gable all strut their way down the red carpet. Patty could just picture the pageant of elegant dresses, sharp tuxedos and mink furs, but she stiffens with indignation because she knows she deserves to be there. just as much as any of them. In Gone with the Wind, Hattie played the role of Mamie,

Scarlet O'Hara's enslaved house servant. It's one of the most important roles in the film, but as an African American, Hattie has been banned from attending the premiere. George's Jim Crow segregation laws don't allow black people into theaters like the Lowe's Grand, even if they star in the film being shown. A few days after the premiere, though,

Hattie receives a telegram. It's from Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind. Margaret says that Hattie's performance received a standing ovation from the audience in Atlanta, and she wishes Hattie could have heard it. More praise soon follows. Gone with the Wind is hailed by critics as a masterpiece, a sweeping, historical epic brought to life in spectacular technicolor.

At the Academy Awards the following year, it takes home ten Oscars. Among the winners is Hattie McDaniel for Best Supporting Actress. She is the first black actor to ever win an Academy Award, but even at the ceremony she's treated as a second-class citizen, placed at a segregated table away from the rest of her white castmates. Patty's treatment reveals the truth about race in America that Gone with the Wind disguises. The movie's representation of slavery and its heroic vision of the Confederacy bear little resemblance to the cruel reality of either institution.

And as years go by, Gone with the Wind will increasingly be regarded as a controversial masterpiece and its place in film history will continue to be debated, long after its segregated premiere in Georgia on December 15, 1939. Next on History Daily, December 16th, 1773, American colonists dumped chest of tea into Boston Harbor in a protest against taxation without representation. From Noisor and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shazi, sound design by Molly Bob. Music by Throne. This episode is written and research by Angus Gavin McCarne, edited by William Simpson. Managing producer Emily Burke, executive producers are William Simpson for airship and Pascal Hughes for noisers.