WHAT WENT WRONG - Gone With The Wind

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel may have starred in 1939’s Gone With the Wind, but this was David O. Selznick’s dumpster-fire-turned-classic. Join Lizzie as she takes Chris all the way back through a truly disastrous production featuring more than a dozen writers, a hat trick of directors, an amphetamine fueled producer, and racism galore - both onscreen and off.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And welcome back to what went wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop that happens to be about movies. Today, I am joined, as always, by my co-hosts, the lovely Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how are you doing this evening? I'm good. I'm actually, I'm really excited to talk to you about the movie that we are covering today. Also scared. I'm terrified. But I am excited to talk to you about it, too.

I'm also excited to talk to you about some of the original titles for the movie that I looked up. Scarlett O'Hara Hellspon Scarlett O'Hara the Black Widow, Scarlet O'Hara, the emotional typhoid Mary. Wow. Scarlet O'Hara caused more damage

than the Civil War. Those are just a few of the alternate titles I heard the studio was talking about. But of course they went with, Lizzie, what movie are we covering today? We are covering a Whopper. Today, we are covering Gone with the Wind. And it is, honestly, this is the hardest, this is the hardest one that I've done so far out of all of the what went wrongs.

It was an insane amount of research and I could have done more. And I just had to stop because I was like, I don't, I didn't, we don't have eight hours to talk about this. But before we get to go on with the wind, we do want to remind all of you lovely listeners that we have a Patreon. We have, we bought a zoo. We bought a Patreon. We, you bought a Patreon. actually, because a surprising number of you all have already signed up, and we really appreciate that. And we have a lot of stuff on there for you all. We have a video episode every month. So one of the

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wrong on Patreon. We didn't think about that when we named this podcast. But again, www. patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast. All right. Enough on the Patreon. Back to your regularly scheduled programming. Lizzie, Gone with the Wind. Where do we begin? Gone with the Wind. All right. It premiered December 15th, 1939 in Atlanta, Georgia. It was directed by Victor Fleming. Sort of. There's actually a minimum of three directors. attached to this, more like five, which we're going to get into. Produced by David O. Selsnick. Now, normally we don't list off the producers, but this time we very much will because he

is kind of our main character for better and mostly for worse across this. It is written by Sidney Howard based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell, but again, written by Sydney Howard, that's loosely. There have been up to 15 writers attached to this film, depending on who you ask, starring Vivian Lee, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard, Olivia DeHavilland, and someone who I am now extremely fascinated with and want to learn a lot more about Hattie McDaniel. If you don't know, she was the first black person ever to win an Academy Award, but we will get into all of that. Now, the synopsis according to IMDB, which apparently was written by Chris because it also

hates Scarlett O'Hara, says American Motion Picture Classic in which a manipulative woman and a roguish man conduct a turbulent romance during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. Seems very accurate. I don't agree. That's fine. I'll just lay out the facts at the end of this podcast of literally the exact things that she does. Oh, she's an asshole. I mean, that's, listen, before we, well, before we get into everything, Chris, I do want

to hear your take on this movie. Had you seen it before? When I was very little. I didn't remember it at all. So this is the first time. I'd seen it in adulthood, I watched it on HBO Max, and I think it's important to mention, and Lizzie, I know you'll get into this, but there's an intro video when you watch it on HBO Max, a disclaimer where Jacqueline Stewart, who's a TCM host and film scholar,

discusses why HBO Max has put this film back on its platform and why it is in its complete, unedited form, the importance of watching films in their, original form, but gives us a great context for the film, both at the time and how it relates to now, because this is a pretty egregious example of revisionist history and romanticism for an era that was quite horrifying for many, many, many, many, many people. And so I personally really appreciated that disclaimer at the beginning. Yes, I did too, and I want to talk about it a little bit actually because that disclaimer was not there when Gone with the Wind originally went up on HBO Max. And in 2020, during the kind of cultural reckoning that we were all experiencing,

John Ridley, writer of 12 years a slave and also a very prolific producer, wrote an op-ed where he basically said, you need to put some context on this. He actually asked that they take it down for a little bit. But then he was like, put it back up. Like, by all means, put it back up when we've kind of, you know, recovered a little bit from this. But when you do, don't just put it up like it's normal because it's not. And he's totally right. I very much appreciated the sort of context added to it by Jacqueline at the top of this. And it is really important. I'm glad it's available. I'm glad you can watch it. But it's worse than I remembered, and I remembered it being pretty rough. Before we get any further into this, I do want to make it very clear, like what Chris was just hinting at.

Yes, this movie is about the Civil War, but it's not really, and it is romanticizing the antebellum South as this sort of time of dreamy chivalry. This is literally the text that scrolls across the screen at the very top. It says there was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be be seen of knights and their ladies fair of master and slave look for it only in books for it is no more than a dream remembered not great bob yeah i like that's wild this is 1939 so it's what 80-ish years after the actual civil war 84 years after so it shows how little progress we had made in many ways obviously this is 20 years before the civil rights movement um gone with the wind obviously has been an

incredibly enduring and popular movie for decades, but the biggest, not only does the film use a war as a backdrop for an odd romance, which I have many problems with the story of the film independent of its ignoring of any racial reckoning, but it completely ignores the, not only ignores the horrors of slavery, it ignores the precipitation of the war in general. It doesn't just ignore it. It rewrites it. it's fan fiction. It's fan fiction.

This is literally fan fiction. And I want to make that very, very clear. And we're going to get a good understanding of why that is based on who wrote it and also why it was very popular when it came out. But to a certain extent, this is propaganda. This is for an era of people when this is probably one of the first generations where people had not been alive during the Civil War or during Reconstruction. So in many ways, this was an opportunity to reintroduction. repaint this picture for people who did not have first-hand experience with it. And I think it's very intentional. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. I grew up in the South. This is hard to watch

for a lot of reasons. And, you know, many of them are the fact that people still idolize Scarlett O'Hara, still sort of idolize this Southern Bell culture and the idea that this was, like, a dreamy time of your. So I just want to acknowledge right at the top that this movie has an immense cultural significance. And I think did some real damage in terms of what it was perpetuating. All that being said, the reason I said I'm kind of nervous to talk about this is I like this movie. And that's, that feels weird to say, because obviously like it is, it is a racist movie. I've heard people say, oh, there's racist characters in it. No, I think it is an actively racist movie. But I also think there's some amazing performances. I think the story is really engaging.

It's long as shit. Chris, what did you think about the movie itself? So it's definitely racist. Yeah. I agree. I think it's technically magnificent. It's the best propaganda film that's ever been made. This is what Elron Hubbard had in mind for Battlefield Earth that they did not achieve in terms of creating like a fantasy for his own existence.

No, I mean the cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, the use of color. film. It's really, it looks amazing. The restoration on HBO looks and sounds amazing. I agree. I think the performances are really, really good. The acting doesn't feel nearly as dated as a lot of films that came after. I don't find the story that engaging. I found it really melodramatic and kind of boring. Interesting. Let's start with the book. It was written in 1936 by Margaret Mitchell, and it was an instant bestseller. I mean, this is like, I think there's a lot of parallels here to like a twilight situation, which we'll see a little bit more of as we keep going. But a little bit about Margaret Mitchell.

She was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia around the turn of the century. She was highly educated. She was a debutante. She went to Smith College. Her grandfather was a Confederate soldier. He also made money selling lumber for reconstruction. As you can tell, Margaret pulled. quite a bit from her own family's history for Gone with the Wind.

She is also of Irish descent. She was raised Catholic, but I think one of her parents was also a Protestant. And yes, her family did own slaves. Her mother also died while she was away at school from the 1918 flu pandemic. And interestingly, Margaret's own grandmother, who apparently was just a total bitch, was her kind of primary source for information because she was around. She was around for the Civil War and Reconstruction. Didn't like her, but she told her a lot.

She also spent time as a child with a lot of Confederate veterans. So the picture you're getting here is like, this is not someone who's. Yeah, that's where the fan fiction comes from. Yes, exactly. That's where I think people are giving this maybe a little bit too much credit when they try to say that, like, no, like it's calling out the South for being stupid. It's really not. I hate to break it to you. This espouses all the views that were held by the South.

Well, and interestingly, this is one detail that really kind of pulled it into focus for me. She did not know that the South had lost until she was 10 years old. And she found out, I saw a bunch of different versions of this, but the general story is that her mother took her on a tour of all the plantations that Sherman had burned on his March to the Sea. And she talked about the world that those people had lived in and how it had just, like, exploded and been ripped out from underneath them. And then her mother is like, someday that's going to happen to you. And you better have a weapon. It's like, whoa.

It just goes to show you how little actually changed. And there was not any reflection that was really being done, especially at a national level. And the creation of the Jim Crow South was just an extension of what had come before. unlike Germany following World War II, where when it became clear that they were forgetting the past, they made a concerted effort to not forget and double down on Holocaust education.

We did the opposite, clearly, as a country. We very much did. We made Gone with the Wind instead. Exactly. I think this movie is a total product of that. She was a journalist. She was writing for the Atlanta Journal. I saw some places that she liked to collect erotica

up and was reading a lot of it while writing Gone with the Wind, which also tracks. And then she was recovering from an ankle injury, and her husband was like, you're annoying me so much. Can you please write something instead of making me go back and forth to the library a million times? And so she wrote Gone with the Wind. It was again an immediate bestseller. It won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, if you can believe that. I mean, listen, it's an entertaining book, but it's like a beach. read. So the book's a big hit. Producer David O. Selznick bought the rights, the film rights, a month after it was published for $50,000. MGM and Fox both declined. Selsnick also originally

declined because he didn't want a Civil War picture. That's what everybody said. They were like, those don't perform. We don't care. We don't want it. But his story editor, Kay Brown, who had brought it to him originally, pushed back. And she was like, I really think you're wrong. I think this is a massive, massive hit, and I don't think you can let this go. She was right. So he went ahead and he bought it. Now, David O. Selsnick, he was one of the biggest producers of the time. He'd worked at RKO, MGM, Paramount, and in 1935, he'd formed his own company, Selsnick International Pictures, with distribution running through United Artists. Remember that. Yep.

He has a very fascinating backstory that we don't have time to get into, unfortunately. but basically his father was a very early pioneer in silent filmmaking who ended up losing it all while his contemporaries like Louis B. Mayor rose to the top. Didn't Selsnick marry Louis B. Mayor's daughter? Yes, he did. We're getting to that right now. Oh, yeah, that was like the one in Selznick fact I knew. Yep, he also added an O to his name to differentiate himself from his father, who nobody liked, especially Louis B. Mayor.

And he also wanted to sound more like Louis B. Mayor, or Cecil B. DeMille. But he still managed to become a major player in the industry and, as Chris said, married Louis B. Mayor's daughter, much to Louis B. Mayor's chagrin. He did not like him. And didn't he and he leased out the old Culver Studios, I believe? Because I thought that was what was under the title of Selsington International Pictures, right? Yeah. That's in Culver City, California. You guys can go see the exact view from that photo from the street. So his story also tracks alongside the rise of the studio system, which we've talked about a lot before. If you want to hear more about that and more about some other players we're going to talk about in this episode, listen to our episode on The Wizard of Oz, also released in 1939. Also Citizen Kane, we talk a little bit about it too. Yes, that's true.

David O'Slznick also produced What Price Hollywood, which fun fact is the original film on which every a star is born is based. George Cucor directed it, and he would go on to direct the Judy Garland version, as well as, Bap-da-Bah, gone with the wind. But you might notice he is not credited. No, he's not. Selznick had produced several other very successful book-to-screen adaptations prior to this point, among them a tale of two cities, Anna Karenina, and David Copperfield. And this is important because the thing that he learned was, A, book-to-screen makes money, and B, the most important thing to him was loyalty to the text.

Oh, interesting. Not what you would expect. I think in what we discussed in the 50 Shades episode about El James wanting everything perfect because the fans would know, that is David O'Seltznik in this situation. People that have a single letter for a middle name. They just sticklers for... Sticklers. Sticklers.

Now, when he left MGM to form his own company, he really pissed off a major figure in his life, not just the head of MGM, but also his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayor. Yeah. So this is a bit of a whoopsie that's going to come back and bite him in the ass real soon. He set up shop in what is now Amazon Studios in Culver City, the old Culver Studios. He was not the highest bidder for Gone with the Wind, but Margaret Mitchell didn't really care. She had seen David Copperfield, and she felt confident that David was someone who would handle her book with care, aka stick very close to the source material, so she sold it to him. a la E.L. James, 50 Shades of Grey.

Exactly. But unlike E.L. James, Margaret Mitchell wanted absolutely nothing more to do with the film. She really disliked the limelight, and she had personally struggled quite a bit with the amount of fame that Gone with the Wind had brought her. So she was all too happy to be like, take it, go for it. Like, I'll watch it and tell you what I think about it when you're done and I'm at the premiere, which is what she did. She really did not get involved. So, lest you think everyone in 1939 was totally chill with a big Hollywood blockbuster of Mitchell's novel, they were not. The NAACP spoke out publicly about their concern, as did the Los Angeles Sentinel, which advocated for a boycott of all David O. Selsnik films past and future. In particular, they were flagging concern about racially insensitive language, which we will get into in a little bit, and the book's framing of the KKK.

as a tragic necessity. Now, Chris, did you clock where the KKK is in the movie? Because it is in the movie. No, I didn't. What? They sneaky. They got you. Yeah, they did.

Where was it? Well, in case you missed it, as Chris did, if you remember the night where Scarlett's second husband, Frank Kennedy, dies. Yeah, he gets shot. She finds out, like, very late. He gets shot in the face. Uh-huh. Yeah.

It's because he was going out with a group of men to clear out the encampment. The shanty town. The shanty town, yep, to protect the women, right? Oh, was that they were saying that's what the KKK was for? Yeah, he was in the KKK. He and Ashley were both in the KKK. That is what that is. Wow.

The movie presents it as if they were going out to do God's work and protect the women and that the biggest threat to them were those damn Yankees. Carpet baggers, yes. The carpet baggers that were going to cut. Oh, my. And it's like, no, they were actually just in the KKK. Yeah, yeah. No, that's just the KKK fully. So the night where Frank Kennedy dies. Well, that's intentional. Selsnik under pressure agrees to the NAACP's suggestion that he hire a technical advisor who would be there to advise on the treatment and depiction of African Americans in the film. But guess who he hired?

Someone in the KKK. Oh, two white men. Yeah. Someone in the KKK. I'm sure they just kept saying technically this is fine because they were white men. in the 1930s. And again, really quickly, all that Lizzie is highlighting right now is that I think a lot of people say,

well, it was, you know, in that time, when Gone with the Wind was made, this was normal. No, they knew. No, it wasn't. That's the point. It was being protested. It was being boycotted.

Yeah. There was so much pressure on it that the head of this independent studio felt the need to address these issues, which I'm sure he didn't like spending the money. But my point is that even at the time, this was problematic. 100%.

So right away, Selznick wants his buddy George Kuker to direct and Clark Gable to star. Right away, Selznick began receiving letters from fans and all of them

wanted Clark Gable. This is tantamount to fans trying to cast Edward Cullen or Christian Gray. That's kind of why I keep coming back to that as a touchstone. And he really knew

that he had to serve the fans. He was like, okay, great, we got to get Clark Gable. It's not even a question. One little problem though, Clark Gable is under contract at New Daddy's MGM. So to Selznick's super pissed off father-in-law, Louis B. Mayor, who never liked him in the

first place, now holds the key to the star that he needs the most for this movie. He considered a bunch of other people. He considered Gary Cooper, but pretty much everyone else was under contract. Remember, Selznick's studio is relatively young. So most of the major players are elsewhere. And again, the fans want Clark Gable. And this is the studio system. So again, actors would sign contracts with studios.

They could only make films with that studio. Yes. MGM finally agrees to loan M. Clark Gable and cover half the film's financing, estimated at that time at around 2.5 million, in return for world distribution rights and half the film's profits. And Selsnik had to cover Gable's weekly salary.

It's not a great deal. What? Bad deal. I mean, good deal for MGM. Yeah. Well, this is how much he wanted Clark Gable. He was like, from the beginning, he was like, I am not going to piss off the fans. I will pay all of this.

And he also knew he didn't have enough money to pull off what he wanted to do. So he just said, yes. Could you imagine the family dinner after mayor fucked his son-in-law like that? It's like that's like succession. That's an episode of succession. Truly. One more problem, however, which is that Clark Gable did not want to do this. He really did not want to do this movie.

He was very afraid of the role. given the rabid fan base. It's kind of what we saw, again, with Charlie Hunnam, leaving 50 Shades of Gray. Like, he was not on board. However, didn't matter. He didn't have a choice. He was under contract, as Chris said, with MGM,

and they basically told him, we don't care. You're doing it or you're fired. And on top of that, he was about to undergo a very expensive divorce. So his soon-to-be ex-wife and MGM both actually managed to squeeze some extra cash out of this deal that Gable saw none of.

Wow. He was fine. No, he made plenty of money. But yeah, not a fun, not a fun way to start. Another problem. I mentioned at the top that Selsnick's distributor was United Artists, not MGM's distribution arm. So he has to wait two plus years to run down the clock on his distribution deal with United Artists in order to be ready to start filming when he can then get on board with MGM.

Oh, wow. Yes. So that's why we see. any younger. He's really not. He has fake teeth. I learned that doing this. He looks a little older. I mean, he looks relative to Vivian Lee, obviously. She's very young. Yeah. Yeah. So Selzig needs to kill some time. He decides to start a nationwide search for the actress to play Scarlett O'Hara, which turns up absolutely nothing except for Ashley's super annoying sister, India Wilkes, played by Alicia Red. Again, who does nothing wrong in the movie and gets fucked by.

She's so annoying. I know you don't like her for whatever reason. I'm just saying she does nothing wrong. Hate her. Oh, man. Gosh, okay. I mean, whatever. Let's keep going.

I don't want to sidetrack with Scarlett's psychopathy anymore. Let's just keep moving. You know what? She's tenacious, Chris. This was a PR move. Like, he was not actually expecting to find anybody out of this. Right. Apparently at one point, a giant replica of the book showed up at his house.

And then a girl dressed as Skrtle. Charlotte O'Hara ripped her way out of it and said, Merry Christmas, Mr. Salsnik, I'm your Scarlet. David O'Slisnick was Jewish. I thought I would just call that out. Wow. So it wasn't her. Actresses who were actually in the running to play Scarlet, though,

included Betty Davis, who seems like she was an early frontrunner, although she kind of took herself out of the race by refusing to play opposite Errol Flynn, who was potentially being considered when they weren't sure if they could get Clark Gable. Catherine Hepburn was also considered. Tallulah Bankhead, Norma Shearer, and Mommy Dearest herself, Joan Crawford. Oh, Joan.

Can you imagine? You know Joan got in consideration as well. They're also all too old, though. Everybody that we just listed is not... She's like 16 when this starts. Yes, all of the girls are very young, and Ashley Wilkes is a mummified course. Oh, poor Leslie Howard. Yeah, he's like 40 years old.

He looks a little rough. I mean, it works after the war, but before the war, when he's got all the makeup, you can still see every line in his face. It's a little rough. Oh, Ashley. Apparently also sent to read for the part at one point was a very, very young Lucille Ball. Although, when asked to take the meeting, she apparently replied, are you kidding? Good for Lucille.

Very smart. She was like, I'll do it. but what? Casting Melanie was a little bit easier. They ran through some hot actresses of the time, but it was when they brought Joan Fontaine in that they finally found their Melanie. She thought she was reading for Scarlet.

But when she showed up and found out it was for Mealy-Mowellie Mellie, she said, no thank you, and offered up her sister, Olivia de Havilland, instead. A little bit of side note, these sisters had a lifelong feud that we will probably explore at some point. So this might not have been a favor. I don't really know.

Interesting. Yeah. So another problem, though, Olivia was under contract at Warner Brothers. However, this is one thing to note about Olivia to Havelin forever and for always. She is not to be fucked with. And unlike Clark Gable, she really wanted the part. So she decided to go straight to not Mr. Warner, but Mr. Warner's wife. And she cried over tea about how desperately she wanted the part and needed it. And it worked. They agreed to loan her to Selznick for this. Well, and Mellie's kind of like the only decent character in the whole movie. Also, she's really good. She's great. She's very good. All of the actors are very good, I think. They are.

I think Melanie is a part that could so easily be really annoying, and she manages to not make it that. Yeah. Britt Leslie Howard was actually everyone's choice for Ashley, despite being a mummified corpse, as Chris said. But he, like Clark Gable, did not want to do this. his reason was different. He thought the source material was crap. Yeah. Well, he was like, I don't like this.

Wasn't wrong. I mean, he never read it. They did, however, offer him a package deal, which would give him a path to becoming a producer, which is something that they knew he wanted. So he took the role saying in a letter to his daughter, quote, money is the mission here and who am I to refuse it? Also. Real scarlet move right there. Did he even try to do a Southern accent? I feel that the answer is no, because he's very British, like it's very British. Like, very much. clearly British. But that works as like a passable Southern accent, I feel like at the time. Whatever. They round out the cast of supporting characters, including someone very important to this story, Hattie McDaniel as Mammy. So tons of people auditioned for this role, including some white actresses who showed up

in Blackface. That's how badly they wanted this part. Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR even wrote in personally requesting that their actual maid, get the part. I thought you were going to say that Eleanor Roosevelt had Blackface to try to go. No, not that I know of. So Hattie was a pretty incredible singer-songwriter, as well as at this point a very established actress, mostly known for comedic roles. And because of that, she wasn't really sure she would get this one.

She was the child of two formerly enslaved parents. Her father fought bravely for the Union in the Civil War, including in the Battle of Nashville in 1864. Some sources say that Clark Gable, who was already a very good friend of Hattie's at this point, recommended her for the role. Others say it was her brother's friend Bing Crosby may have put in a good word for her to Selznick. Most likely, though, it was that she absolutely killed her audition, which she showed up to in a period-appropriate costume. Wow. I mean, she's amazing. She is amazing. It must have been so hard to do it, given her background and where the country was at the time. Yeah. What is interesting is she doesn't share very many scenes with Clark Gable,

but when they do share scenes together, it does seem like they have a very natural rapport. Like they're very, very good together. And it does seem like she genuinely does not like Scarlett. Yeah. Which I thought was great too. She genuinely was like, this dumb bee is the ruin of this family. She was the only person with any sense.

She's great. And I agree with you that they really light up the screen when she's on with Clark Gable. And I think that that is absolutely because they truly were friends. And that was, I think, important to the story for a couple of reasons. So McDaniel heartbreakingly has said, I can be a maid for $7 a week or I can play a maid for $700 a week. And that was pretty much what she was relegated to in her career. And we're going to talk quite a lot more about Hattie throughout this. Meanwhile, with no scarlet in hand and time to run down on his distribution rights,

Selsnick turns to the script. He employs Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sidney Howard. the only person who gets credit for it. But Selznick had a concern, which is that he really wanted to be able to pester the writers literally every day whenever he wanted to, and Sidney Howard was a New York City playwright, and he was like, nope, I'm going to come out and sign the papers,

and then I'm just going to book it back to New York City and write this, which is what he does. Selzick's not happy about this. He comes back with a screenplay. Can you guess how long the runtime of it would have been, Chris? Oh, seven hours. Six hours. Great. Merely six hours.

So at first, Selznick wants to try and make it into two movies, but theater owners are like, no, we don't want that. So then he asks Howard to come out and see what else they can remove from the text. And among the things that they remove, they are all of Scarlett's extra babies. She has children with both previous husbands. She clearly does not care about any of them. So let's just get them out of there. Yeah, got to go ahead and get rid of those. Any extra O'Hara family, not at Tara, in the book, there's.

There's like a million extra people. There's so many extra plantations, like, get it out of there. At this point, Howard seems to kind of bounce, and then Selznick takes on the script himself. And he remembered complaining that Margaret Mitchell had done everything twice in the book. So he had story editors go through and literally mark every passage with repeated information so they could just pick the best ones. So he's doing like a forensic audit of the material.

I believe he did a lot of amphetamines. Oh, we're going to get to that. Okay, great. Oh, he did. He's also doing, like, a shit ton of speed. He's on a lot of drugs. He's on a lot of drugs. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Got it. Oh, yes. He's moving very fast, very fast. Yeah, exactly. And then it shows up again. Just wait. Actually, I just started the book over. Chris, this movie is so crazy.

Like, I did not know how crazy this was going to get. It's at this point that he starts bringing in just a rotating carousel of writers. He would bring them in for, like, a week or two weeks at a time, and then just send them on their way. they all were like, we had no idea what we wrote if it was going to make it into the movie until they saw the final movie. He's also aware that he really needs to get a move on. So he creates an entire production schedule before he has either Scarlet or a final script. He's like, don't need either. Just gotta putta boom, bada bing.

Keep it moving. He's literally having costume designers design scarlet's dresses without a scarlet. Yeah, just stick a hat on it. It'll work. Yeah, I mean, they're in corsets. You can probably squeeze it down to the right size as needed. So he's like, all right, we're going to get the ball rolling without ret, a script. But you know what?

Okay, we do actually need a scarlet. I guess we need to squeeze someone into the corsets. So he settles on Paulette Goddard, who was Charlie Chaplin's muse at the time. One little problem. News had just publicly broken that Paulette and Chaplin were living together and were almost certainly not married. When they were unable to produce a marriage certificate, Selsnik was convinced by everyone at his studio. to look for someone else. They were like,

this is not what we need for Gone with the Wind. It's going to make all the Southern ladies angry. Yeah, you know, slavery, fine, kick a KKK. Great. We love it.

Let's hide it. Make people love them. Living in sin. I swear to God, it's going to be a riot. Can't do it. So he also plans to start shooting before Clark Gable becomes available

with the burning of the, with the burning of Atlanta sequence. He goes ahead and films this on December 10th, 1938 with no Rhett, no George Cucor, by the way. This is actually the production designer, William Menzies, who we're going to talk to a little bit, who directed this. And no Scarlet even cast yet.

So the people that you see dragging that horse in front of the burning buildings, it's all doubles. Everything is a double throughout this. A big silhouette shot of... More than that. All of the stuff where they're trying to get out of Atlanta, it's not either of them. It's like clearly rear projection or something where when they're on the carriage,

and it's like there's the stuff happening behind them. That seemed like that might have been filmed separate, is my point. Oh, when you can see their faces? Yes, when you can see their faces. Yeah, and they're talking. And it's like, oh, they filmed that burning before. Vivianly wasn't even cast yet. So despite several people telling Selznick that they could achieve these shots with models,

he says, no, I'm on a lot of speed. I'm going to burn down an entire set. He burns down the old King Kong and Garden of Alla sets. They used seven technicolor cameras that were in position, since they had one shot to get this right, as they were literally burning down half of Culper City. Pipes full of gasoline had been run underneath the old sets. That's how they were like,

just light them up. 25 cops, 50 firemen, and over 200 studio workers were standing by with 500 gallon tanks of water in case they, you know, lit Culver City on fire. Yeah, which was very possible. For those who don't know, it's dry. It's a very dry area. They burn it down. The flames scared the crap out of everybody in L.A. Some people literally packed their bags, got in their cars, and left because they thought that the city was burning down. But no, it was just David O. Selznick. So it is on this night, however, that Selznick's Scarlet finally arrives. David's brother and fellow producer Myron arrived late to the big event of burning down Culver City, very drunk as he had been entertaining clients. He grabbed his brother and drunkenly said,

me to Scott it. And David turned around and saw Lawrence Olivier, and next to him, a young British actress named Vivian Lee. Now, Vivian and Lawrence Olivier were romantically involved at this point and would be married in 1940, although she was technically married to someone else at this point, and so was he. But apparently they don't care about this one because they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we promise you, we're going to divorce them and get married. It probably helps that she was literally standing in front of the burning of Atlanta, but whatever it was, Selsnik was sold.

The next day he brought her in to meet with George Kukor. Lee was an accomplished theater actress at this point with some British films. And I think like one small Hollywood movie to her name, but she was nowhere near the level of the many names that they had tested before her. She's also, like Leslie Howard, very British. She screen tested opposite Hattie McDaniel the day after that. You can see these on YouTube. They're pretty fun to watch.

It's very close to the final product. Like there's no question that it's her. Interesting. And apparently another actress had tested right before those to the point where the costumes she pulled on were still warm from that person. I guess she must have immediately just pulled them on. Literally. It was like five minutes.

They ripped this thing off of one lady, put it on Vivian leave. It's not you. Leave. Please leave. It's not you. Thanks for warming him up. Thank you. So after she and Lawrence Olivier promised that they were going to divorce everybody

else and marry each other, She was cast beginning a contract that would keep her under Selznick until 1945 Chris's. Chris is... I'm just like this world is so insane. There's no morality. I'm so lost. No. Having a good time.

She was paid $30,000 for the project, which is not very much. They build the facade of Terra on the sets that they burned down, trucking in carloads of red dirt. They filmed the rest on studio lots, gardens in the valley, and in Pasadena. Nothing is filmed in Georgia because that's not how they did that. Despite hiring a historian of the... the South to consult on what it was supposed to look like, Margaret Mitchell apparently laughed her ass off when she saw what the plantations were looking like on film. They were just, they're very Hollywood. I mean, this is like a kind of a Cleopatra situation. Despite assembling the largest team of

workers and specialists ever on a movie set, they still have a major problem, which is that the script is an absolute train wreck. Selsnick continued to bring in more writers, telling them to only use Mitchell's dialogue, but then sometimes also requesting scenes that didn't exist. in the book, so I don't know how you get that, unceremoniously firing them after only a few days or weeks. Now, one of these writers, who he just blew off and fired, was F. Scott Fitzgerald's. For sure, deserved it. A bastard.

I mean... Get out of here, you get a get speed, piece of shit. Did you really think that David O'Seltznik that the shit that you're scribbling down on speed is better than F. Scott Fitzgerald? I read your book. It's garbage. I don't know why I made him sound New York, but that's David O'Slznick in my mind. This is actually kind of sad. According to at least one source, this was sort of the final blow for Fitzgerald and sent him back into a spiral of heavy drinking that killed him not long thereafter.

It did, however, inspire him to begin writing his last novel, The Last Tycoon, which I really want to read and which is partially inspired by his time with David O'Slzolznik. So, you mentioned that he might have been on amphetamines. Selsnik would stay up for 72 hours straight, repeatedly, on a diet of benzadrine and thyroid extract to turn new pages around with whatever writer he'd hired that minute. And then, instead of going to sleep at the end of that, he would actually just go out to a gambling house. That's how he like to unwind. Benzidrine and thyroid extra. Got it.

Okay. Yep. Just switch that together in a pot and you're good to go. According to one colleague, it was safer. to work for Selznick than to relax with him. That makes sense. Yeah. Like, I could see relaxing with him.

Like, he just pulls out a gun randomly and he's like, who wants to play Russian roulette? No, I'm not going out for a night on the town with this man. One more thing on the script. I mentioned this earlier, but it originally contained what must have been a somewhat substantial use of the N-word, because that is all over the book.

We have Haddy McDaniel, the N-A-CP, and a writer named Earl Earl Morris at the Pittsburgh Courier to thank for the fact that what he called the hate word did not make it into the final product. Selsnik originally pushed back, and this is likely to do with his loyalty to Margaret Mitchell's text, quote unquote, but the bad press that Earl was turning up, along with Hattie McDaniel behind the scenes refusing to say it, finally forced him to remove it. And thank God this would have been unwatchable if that, I mean, it's already rough. Still is.

It's still pretty rough, but I don't think that this would have endured the way that it has if that had been included. Yeah, but again, even at the time. Yes, people knew. People knew. So, filming begins January 26, 1939, with all of the cast in place, finally. George Kukor begins shooting scenes like Scarlett on the porch at Tara, the birth of Melanie's child, the Union Soldier who shows up and Scarlett kills. I did like that scene. A lot of the stuff he shot is really good.

Yeah, because also her introduction is very good at the beginning on the porch as well. Yep. Rhett bringing Scarlet that hideous green hat from Paris. Her outfits are so fugly in this movie. And then finally, one day of shooting the ball in Atlanta, it's at this point, only two and a half weeks into principal photography that Selznick just fires him. Bye. Why?

There's a couple of theories as to why. Kukor said he was never really sure why and wasn't. really given an explanation, but many believe it was Clark Gable who had given him the boot. One thing was that Cuechor had wanted more of a southern accent for the southern gentleman, and Gable had pushed back, likely because he felt he couldn't do it, and he was a little insecure about his acting abilities. Other rumors said Gable was concerned that Cucor was a, quote, woman's director, you know, and that he might lean more. Yes, Chris, a woman's director. Okay.

Yes, and that he might lean the movie in Vivian Lee's favor. Wow. There's another rumor, though, that ties to that one. These first two rumors are very Vindeezzly, is what I'd say. There's some Vindisely energy to Clark Cable. Yeah. I can't lose a fight. I have to land as many punches as the other guy. And I can't do a southern accent.

Yeah, I can't do an accent. Okay, well, here's the one that I think ties a little bow on all of this and frankly makes the most sense. It was an open secret in Hollywood that George Kukor was gay. And rumor has it that Clark Gable may have spent some time as a male escort in his early days in Hollywood. Oh, interesting. And Kukor recognized him. Oh.

So he was immediately uncomfortable, wanted him off the set. The woman's director thing is interesting. That feels like a bit of a jab. I choose to believe the third reason. I think all may be true. But yes. I also say, yeah, I think all are probably collectively true. Yeah, and there's one more that I think is true as well,

which is likely the fact that the script Kukor was directing was bad, and he did not have the heart to tell his longtime collaborator and friend, David O. Selsnick. Because it really was Selsnick writing this at this point, and he was not a writer. He's getting cocaine pages just like fed every day. The script was just like this weird pile of like mushy, different colored pages that like, Selznick would just be like, you know, rattling through, just like pulling a page out. Don't feel too bad for George, though. He would go on to make a Philadelphia story, Gaslight, and a Star is Born, which I love Gaslight.

It's amazing. And I mean, I guess you could call all of those women's pictures. He was adept at telling stories with women at the forefront. Also, Gaslight, of course, is the origin of the term to Gaslight Someone. That's right. And it is a great movie. One person who mourned the loss of Kukor in particular was Olivia De Havillan. She pointed out that the detail in the scenes that he had shot,

like Scarlet eating the chicken leg on the stairs, and said that the rest of the film really lacked that element of richness. It was sort of known that he was interested in the more intimate, interpersonal moments and the moments that felt more like real life and not the kind of grand spectacle of it. And he was fired for that. Yeah, because it becomes really sweeping melodrama by the back half of the movie. Yes, it does.

She's like, can we get another kid killed? Let's do it. Yep, line him up. But Kukor never really left the film. Because unbeknownst to everyone else, some of the actors continued to spend hours with him working on their scenes. Olivia De Havland, who had alongside Vivian Lee begged Selznick to bring Kukar back, continued visiting him secretly to get direction. One day, she asked him if she was doing something wrong by not telling Vivian Lee,

and he told her, you know, maybe you would be if Vivian weren't doing the exact same thing. So they were both going. Vivian Lee wrote to her then husband, still not Lawrence Olivier, at this point of Cucor, saying, quote, he was my last hope of enjoying the picture. He was quite right as the head office suddenly decided that the script written by one of America's best dramatists, which they had for two years, wasn't good enough and started writing one themselves. So you can imagine what the dialogue is like. She was just like, this is garbage trash. It's at this point that Selznick gives Gable the choice of which director he wants to succeed, I think, lending credence to the third rumor we discussed there. And Gable chose noted man's director, Victor Fleming. Now, you have heard that name before. It is on our Wizard of Oz episode. That's because he's the delightful creature who slapped Judy Garland in the face for laughing.

Yep. She was like 15. They yanked him off of Wizard of Oz, actually, to do this, and then George Cucor briefly stepped in there because apparently there were like two directors available, and that was it. Olivia was freaking out to her then boyfriend, Howard Hughes, and Hughes said, I know.

There were also only 12 people in the world at this point in time. Well, specifically 12 men. That's right. That's all you had to choose from. He said, don't worry. Everything is going to be all right. With George and Victor, it's the same talent. Only Victor's is strained through a courser sieve.

And then he got in a plane and he flew away. And then he put tissue boxes on his feet and shuffled off down the hallway. That's right. So as you might be able to guess, Victor Fleming was, by most accounts, not a pleasant man. He was openly anti-Semitic and rude. But he was also the only person willing to tell David that his script sucked ass saying, quote, David, your fucking scripts, no fucking good.

Probably because he was anti-Semitic. David Stelznik was Jewish. Who knows? shocked to learn that the script that he's been writing in, you know, benzadrine-fueled thyroid rages is not great. He's like, the cocaine, like, slowly falls. And he's just like, oh, my God, what have I done? Literally, he hires his friend Ben Hect, a script doctor, to come and fix it up.

But Ben Hect is like, I got one week, buddy, between projects. I don't have time to read this thousand page book. So Selsnick's like, that's fine. I'm going to drive you over. and then we're just going to do a performance of the book for you. So Selznick and Fleming, who also, by the way, had not read the book, but he had read the script, basically give him a SparkNotes version with David playing Scarlet and Fleming playing Rhett. And then they send in like 50 secretaries who haven't slept in weeks, and they're like, get to work.

This is insane. It's insane. It's at this point. It's the least efficient way of making anything. Yes, it's not good. It is at this point, though, that Fleming and Hecht are both like, buddy, this movie makes absolutely no sense. Yeah.

And then Selznick suddenly remembers Sidney Howard's draft of the script, like 900 writers ago. And he's like, he sends some long-suffering secretary to go dig that one out. And he's like, ah, this is pretty good. And I love how he probably thought he was a genius for thinking of that script. Yes. When it's like his fault that it disappeared to be in one. They literally had a working script.

I've had the most brilliant idea. Yeah. had one that worked, had to bring in Scott Fitzgerald and literally kill him in the meantime. Yeah, exactly. Over the next week, Hecht just really cut down the original script, working in 12 to 24 hours stretches. Selznick also insisted they only be fed peanuts and bananas, believing that food would slow them down. Did they on like an elephant diet? Like, what the hell is going on? On day five, while shoving a nanner in his face hole, Selznick collapsed and had to be revived by a doctor. On day six, Victor Fleming had a blood vessel burst in his eye.

And on day seven, they finally had a script. That's all it took, Chris. Wow. Great. Young writers out there, if you need to know what you're missing, just it's speed, bananas, and peanuts. All the guys going into the Silver Lake coffee shop, tilting their final draft so other people can see that they're working on a script.

You don't know how it's really done. One person who was openly not happy about Victor Fleming joining was, Scarlett O'Hara herself. She'd had a connection with Kukor and viewed him as an artist. Also, as we said, he was interested in the intimate human moments. Fleming was not. He said he said he would frequently give her the direction to ham it up. That's literally what he said. He was like... He did it. Like he made it a melodrama. It feels like a melodrama in the back half big time. It totally does. And I think it's a testament to her that she pulls it off. Like I don't really know how she did it. but she was very much determined and on her own to make the movie make sense.

She would carry around a copy of the book, furiously referring to it and speaking her mind when she disagreed with both Selznick and Fleming, something they certainly were not used to seeing from actresses, let alone one who was not remotely established at this point. At one point, frustrated with Lee's attention to detail, Fleming told her to shove the script up her royal British ass. Great. Yeah. Some people said he was the, quote, real Rhett Butler.

And one does have to wonder if his energy was kind of key to the Scarlet-Ret dynamic that comes through on screen because she didn't seem to have a lot of interaction with Clark Gable, but she did with Victor Fleming. And again, George Cucor kept coaching both of them, both Melanie and Scarlet behind the scenes all the way through. He didn't really film anything with Clark Gable and Vivian Lee that made it into the movie, I don't think. This is my biggest problem from a dramatic perspective, and this explains it in my mind. I believed that Rhett cared about and wanted to be with Scarlett O'Hara. Yes. I never felt that there was ever a question that she wanted to be with Ashley Wilkes.

It is she never, there seems to be nothing flowing back from her toward Rhett. is my point. I never felt any affection. I agree. I think Victor Fleming, though, pushed it so far that, so for me, she has this about face at the very end of the film where he leaves. And so now she seems to want him. Maybe this is intentional.

It just makes it feel like she is continuing to exist as a child, and she is only interested in things that she cannot have. And so when he leaves. I think that's intentional. I think that's the reading that Victor Fleming had of this. And I also think, like, the way. way that they shot the scene that really is, I mean, I don't know how else to describe it other than marital rape. Yeah, yeah, no, that is that scene. Yeah, he just like takes her up the stairs and he's like,

I'm going to be Ashley Wilkes, basically. He's like, you need this. I know you're saying no, but you're going to do it and you're going to like it. And then that's the turn. That's how they it's really weird. It's so weird. It doesn't, and then like the next morning she's like, oh. Yeah. And then it's interesting, though, that Rhett Butler after that is apologizes. I do think that Rhett Butler is, in many ways, the more nuanced character here. And I wonder if that's because that's who they were more interested in. That's what I'm saying. I think they didn't give her the opportunity because there was...

I never got any sense that she was even intrigued by his character, even though she steadfastly says she loved Ashley Wilkes. Yeah, it didn't feel very compelling at the end when she had that turn. I blame Victor Fleming. I do too. I think Vivian Lee had a really hard time on this. Olivia DeHavillan said, quote, she gave something to that film that I don't think she ever got back.

She was polite to Clark Gable, but he was Victor Fleming's buddy, so they were always somewhat at odds. And again, Clark Gable, very interesting. He had this reputation as a man's man, sort of romantic, sexy, you know, swashbuckling, Lethario. But in reality, he was very, very private. He wore fake teeth. He's, like, girdled through a lot of this movie. He's very handsome, but he feels like he's overcompensating for something. The scene that scared of...

Which kind of works in the movie It does. It does. It does. But he was uncomfortable with a lot of the Rett Butler character. In particular, the scene where Melanie tells him

about Scarlett's miscarriage, he did not want to cry. He didn't want to do the scene. He asked them to cut it. He asked them to rewrite it. And I will say, credit to Victor Fleming. He is the only person

who convinced Clark Gable to give the kind of emotional performance that he does give in that scene. And it's really good. I mean, it's stuff that I think you don't see from Clark Gable before or after this movie. Vivian Lee and Clark Gable weren't the only cast members who didn't exactly see eye to eye. Butterfly McQueen, who plays Prissy, was understandably really not happy with the way her character was being written and portrayed.

Her character's written horribly. Yeah. For no reason either. Yeah. She said it was really demeaning and she's right. She would intentionally flub lines and protest and also demanded an apology after Vivian Lee slapped her way too hard, which you can still see in the movie. You can see in the movie, yeah. She just turns and smacks her on the stairs. You can tell that it's a real hit. Yeah. There's no cut. Yeah, they totally mistreated her character. Yes. She plays the young house slave in the movie who is written as if she's a complete buffoon. Right. But for comic relief and it. It's a, it's a, It's really weird.

It's really bad. It doesn't fit in the movie. It feels really weird and out of place in my mind, too. It's hard to watch, but there's one scene where it does seem like she is maybe playing it up to get out of stuff. Like that's one potential sort of read of it. But yes, it's very offensive. No, I think she does as good a job as she can. I'm saying, but she's still operating within the restrictions of just some rough dialogue.

Totally. According to McQueen McDaniel pulled her aside and warned her that she, She needed to be quiet, saying, quote, you'll never come back to Hollywood. You complain too much. Of the film, Butterfly would later say, I hated it. The part of Prissy was so backward. I was always whining and complaining, but now I'm very glad I made the film. I make a living off of it.

She did remain critical of her role in the film, but proud of the ground that she broke as a black actress at the time. So let's talk about that crazy crane shot where Scarlett is walking through all of the wounded soldiers. Selznick was demanding crazier and crazier shots at scales never before seen in Hollywood at this point. The Screen Actors Guild did not even have enough extras for this shot. Selznick wanted 2,500. They only had 1,500, so he fills out the rest with a thousand dummies, which you can tell. They also had to rent a crane from a construction company because a big enough one literally didn't exist in Hollywood. And they built a concrete ramp and then created the iconic shot. But that just gives you an idea of like, this is the shit he's asking for on a daily basis.

It's an incredible shot. It is. From a technical perspective, it's very breathtaking when you watch it. And again, it's at a scale. It's like what they wanted to do in Cleopatra, but couldn't. You know what I mean? And they really, it's crazy. Yeah.

At one point, Victor Fleming allegedly had a nervous collapse and told his wife he'd contemplated suicide. It turns out this might have been a little bit of an exaggeration because what he really wanted was to get, Selznick's attention. Selsnik had been watching him like a hawk and checking him if he even deviated slightly from their already messy script. Selsnick also had a habit of directing via memo. It is said that he did this because no one could interrupt a memo. You had to read it. An article published in 1942 claimed that he wrote over 1.5 million words of memos during Gone With the Wind. Cocaine's a hell of a drug. I don't even know if it was cocaine. Whatever whatever his little thyroid feed mix was.

At one point, Clark Gable, a huge star, by the way, was yanked out of bed at 3 a.m. with a gigantic memo about Rhett Butler from a motorcycle messenger and told he had to read it before showing up at work that day. Vivian Lee reportedly received a half pound of memos at one point, which she then took 10 days to reply to, spelling out an answer to every single one. This was one of the only times that Selsnick actually retracted his statements, which I think is interesting. Gable apparently rallied everyone together to put a 9 p.m. curfew on his memos. You couldn't send a memo after 9 p.m. Wow. So let's get back to Victor Fleming's nervous breakdown, which you

might be able to understand after 1.5 million words of memos. Do you think that David O'Sulls-Nick takes the hint, maybe becomes more collaborative, perhaps more open to working with people, Chris? No, he's like, I'm going to kill this motherfucker. I'm going to work him to death. That's correct. He replaces Victor Fleming. A young British director named Sam Wood steps in, but by all accounts at this point, it becomes David O'Sullsnik's show from here on out. Yeah, it must just be like a, you know, honor, a name only position. Kind of. Yeah, I mean, I think he did contribute something, but yes. Sure. Selznick is really calling all the shots.

He then brings Victor Fleming back two weeks later, but doesn't fire Sam Wood. So now there are basically three directors, four, if you count George Kukor, who is still coaching Vivian, and Olivia DeHavalin behind the scenes. And then the poor production designer, William Menzies, had to match everything across all of their scenes. He's also the one who shot the burning of Atlanta, at least. He may have shot more. That was something that came up in a couple of different places.

So we're talking about five directors at this point. Meanwhile, Selznick is still writing thousands of memos if they so much as dare to move a camera placement. He would fly into a rage. So just like we've seen a... on movies like Titanic, as Gone with the Wind ran over budget and over schedule and rumors about Selznick's behavior start to get to the press. The press had a field day. They called it a turkey. They called it Selznick's Folly. Everybody is building up this thing to be a giant stinker.

We're almost done, Chris, with the, at least the filming part of it. What's the most famous line in the entire movie? Frankly, dear, I could give a damn. That's wrong, but it's close. Is I got a close? Come on. It's close. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. I like my version better, Salsnik. Okay. Well, that almost did not make it into the film.

So they actually shot that scene two ways. One, with frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. And frankly, my dear, I don't care. Not as good. Not as good. And the reason for that is a little thing called the Hays Code. The Hays Code was a sort of Code of Conduct on movies in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and I think maybe early 60s. But basically, it restricted what you could say and do on screen.

I think we talked about it a little bit in the Birds episode maybe as it pertained to Rebecca, also with David O. Selsnick production. But Selsnick fought all the way up until November of 1939 to get damn in the movie because he knew that audiences would be pissed if that famous line from the book wasn't there. Oh, that was a line from the book. It was a line from the book, yes. It was not from his thyroid-addled mind. No, no. Line came. Got it.

To be fair, I think he was fine throwing out all of his thyroid ideas, but he was not fine with throwing out anything from Margaret Mitchell's original material. So it's been shot. They have, you know, done more speed all through post-production, and they got it all together. That was honestly also a mess. I couldn't even get into it. There's apparently like assisted editors who were pissed and stole parts of the film. Coleman, like, I don't even know.

But on December 15th, the 1939, only a month after they finally get the last line of the movie settled, the film premieres. And this is only how many months after they started filming? Oh, not many. They started filming in January of 1939. It's now December 15th, and it is premiering. So in 11 months, they've created this entire movie. Yes, that's insane.

One of the biggest movies ever made. At this point, this was the biggest movie ever. made and they cranked it out. It must have been. So again, a hell of a drug. It premieres in Atlanta, Georgia. The premiere was packed, and a crowd of 300,000 people crowded the streets outside of the theater. Notably absent were Victor Fleming and Leslie Howard. Howard had returned to England because they had just declared war with Germany.

And Fleming was just pissed. Selznick had gone around saying that all the directors of the film had been supervised by him. Probably at this point, he was both. by the incredibly successful previews that they had already had. Clark Gable and Vivian Lee arrived in separate planes. Lee and most of the cast with Selznick and then Gable with the MGM bigwigs and a plane that said, Gone with the Wind, painted on the fuselage. Wow.

Yeah. He's weird. He's a weird guy. Clearly. Margaret Mitchell, as promised, she had had no involvement prior to the premiere, and this was the first time she saw it, and she loved it. But there's a very important person who was not in attendance at the premiere, and that is Hattie McDaniel. Along with Butterfly McQueen, Hattie McDaniel was not allowed to attend the White's only premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta.

Despite Selznick being very aware of how important she, Butterfly, Oscar Polk, and Everett Brown had been to the success of the film, he agreed to the city of Atlanta's demands that no black actors attend the premiere. Clark Gable, who, as we've mentioned, was a longtime friend of Hattie McDaniels, was pissed when he found out that she was not going to be there, and he said, if she can't go, I'm not going. But when it was clear that Selsnick and Atlanta were not going to budge on this, Hattie McDaniel convinced Gable to go without her, saying it was his movie and he had to be there. Immediately following the premiere, it was not Selsnick, but Margaret Mitchell, who sent McDaniel a telegram saying, I wish you could have heard the applause. Wow. Guess what, though? Even though none of the black cast members were allowed to attend, there was an all-black choir from Ebenezer Baptist Church

who sang ahead of the premiere. A 10-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. was among them, and they were dressed as slaves. Oh, my God. You can see pictures of this. It's terrible. McDaniel faced criticism from the black community and NAACP as well, though, being criticized for her choice to play roles like Mamie,

which they felt, understandably, may have furthered McDaniel's personal career, but had reinforced stereotypes instead of breaking them. She'd also been used by the studio during filming to reassure black audiences that the movie wouldn't further stereotypes, all while privately fighting battles on set, including, as we mentioned, against the usage of the N-word in the film. I can't, like, she's in the most. She's in an impossible position. No way to win. I cannot imagine what she went through throughout her whole career, but particularly on this. She's really fascinating.

There's a biography of her by Jill Watts called Haddy McDaniel, Black Ambition, White Hollywood, that I very much want to read. You all should check it out if you want to learn more about her. So two months after the premiere in February of 1940, Haddy McDaniel dumped a stack of Gone with the Wind reviews on Selznick's desk. He got the message and submitted her for an Academy Award nomination alongside Clark Gable, Vivian Lee, and Olivia DeHavland. By the way, in the same category as Olivia DeHavland.

Oh, wow. Contributing to a record 13 nominations for the film, and all four were nominated. The ceremony took place at the Coconut Grove Hotel in Beverly Hills. This time, Selznick did insist that McDaniel be present, but she didn't get to sit with him, Olivia, Vivian, or her good friend, Clark. She sat at a table at the back of the theater with her agent. Much to everyone's surprise, not least of which, her co-star Olivia DeHavalin, though, had he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Wow. And I would like to play the clip of Faye Bainter presenting her with the award and then Hattie's speech.

I'm really especially happy that I'm chosen to present this particular plaque. To me it seems more than duster plaque of gold. It opens the doors of this room, moves back the walls, and it enables us to embrace the whole of America, an America that we love, an America that almost alone. the world today recognizes and pays tribute to those who give her their best, regardless of creed, race or color. It is with the knowledge that this entire nation will stand and salute the presentation of this plaque that I present the Academy Award for the best performance of an actress in supporting roles during 1939 to Hattie McDaniel.

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. Fellow members of the Motion Picture Arts and of the motion picture industry and honored guests. This is one of the happiest moments of my life. And I want to thank each one of you who had a part in selecting me for one of the awards. For your kindness, it has made me feel very, very humble. And I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything that I may be able to do in the future.

I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel. And may I say thank you. God bless you. Wow. Yeah. It's heartbreaking.

Yeah, it's, she's obviously an incredible performer. On the one hand, I'm sure, that's obviously a huge barrier to break, but on the other hand, for a movie like this. I know. It's such a complicated legacy, obviously,

for her as an actress. I think it would be easy to say, oh, this movie has a happy ending. Hadda McDaniel, one that's supporting actress. I think that's an easy out for this movie. And so I think we need to obviously refrain from making that claim. Right. Yeah, it's extremely complicated, and it would continue to be for the rest of her career. Olivia DeHavilland was by many accounts disappointed,

although she seemed to come around pretty quickly to the historic significance of Hattie's win. And she also told Entertainment Weekly many years later that she felt fine about it because she'd simply belonged in the best actress category all along. Olivia! Humble. She is not. She is not. It was nominated for 13 awards. It took home eight, including Best Actress for Vivian Lee, Best Director for Victor Fleming, best screenplay for Sidney Howard, and Best Picture.

Wow. Yeah. All in all, there were 59 leading and supporting characters in over 2,400 extras in total. There was 449,000 feet of film shot with an approximate ratio of film shot to film used at 20 to 1. Wow. At least 750,000 hours were worked, and I'm sure that's not counting David O'Sulls-Nex crack-fueled writing binges. The film had cost $4.2 million to make. which was double their estimated budget. The cost of the advertising,

technicolor prints and distribution then ran above $8 million equal to about $169 million in today's money. But, Chris, do you know the box office total for its original run? I don't think I know for its original run. I thought, well, I know that inflation adjusted, it's still the highest grossing film of all time.

It is. I'm going to give you these numbers because they are crazy. According to box office... I thought it was like over $300 million. It is. It is. Okay.

According to Box Office Mojo, its original release was $189 million, with a total all-time gross of around $393 million, adjusted for inflation. As Chris said, that is the highest grossing movie of all time at over $3 billion. Two avatars. No, not anymore. Avatar's close. Two Avengers. Selznick would claim that 80% of the writing and structure was his, with the

mostly belonging to Sidney Howard, except no one seems to credit the person who actually wrote it, Margaret Mitchell. Right. Vivian Lee would eventually turn against Scarlett saying she never cared for her and that she didn't really want the role, although by most accounts she had fought very hard for it. Lee would win her second Oscar 11 years later for the Broken Southern Bell role that she claimed tipped her over into madness, which is, of course, Blanche Dubois opposite Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams, a streetcar named Desire.

Lee would struggle both publicly and privately with bipolar disorder throughout her life, something that was neither understood nor compassionately treated at the time, and she died of tuberculosis at only 53 years old. Hattie McDaniel, despite breaking historic ground with her Oscar, would continue to receive maid roles for most of her career. In many ways, her career actually flatlined after Gone with the Wind, with Hollywood not offering her much of anything. She also became enmeshed in a public battle with Walter White,

the head of the NAACP, who took issue with the stereotypes, He felt she was furthering with the roles that she accepted. She did play a crucial role in a very important real estate discrimination case in her neighborhood of West Adams in Los Angeles. When white neighbors tried to sue to remove Haddy, a fucking Oscar winner at this point, mind you. And many of the other African Americans who had moved in, Haddy fought back publicly and she won.

When she died in 1952, she requested that she'd be buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, but in yet another asshole blow, they refused. She is buried at the Angeles Rosedale Cemetery instead, but Hollywood Forever does now have a plaque honoring her. Leslie Howard tragically died in 1943, only four years after the release of this film, when his plane from Lisbon to Bristol was shot down by the German Luftwaffe. Some actually suspect Leslie may have been the target of this attack. He was a huge supporter of his homeland's fight and a symbol of British resolve. He'd been in Portugal promoting the British cause.

Clark Gable, following the tragic death of his wife, Carol Lombard, in Lill, in the Air Force during World War II. He did see combat. This was not just, I think he actually very much wanted to see more combat, and the film studios were trying to kind of relegate him to just making movies for the Army alongside other actors like Jimmy Stewart, who had enlisted. He died of a heart attack in 1960. David O'Sullsnick would never really reach the success that he reached here ever again.

I was wondering, because it didn't seem like there would ever, anything ever came close to this in his filmography. No, I mean, he did a bit of a one-two punch in that he released Rebecca the following year. Right, that was 1940. 1940, which we do talk about in The Birds. And that was definitely a hit. Commercially and critically, it was an Oscar winner as well. But the scale of it, it just doesn't even come close to this.

And then nothing he did after this came even remotely close. Olivia DeHavalin would outlive them all, maintaining an extremely successful career and dying at the age of 104 in 2020. Wow. Also, she was under a seven-year contract at Warner Brothers during this time, but after Gone with the Wind, she'd hoped that they would start giving her more interesting roles. It's why she had fought for this one. She was pissed when they did not, and they kept giving her boring ingenue parts. So when her contract had run out and they tried to renew it for additional time, she sued them and she won. It's known as the Havelin decision, and it was actually an early nail in the coffin for the studio system.

Wow. So go Olivia go, except not when you're trying to take back Hattie McDaniel's Oscar Win. The win of your co-worker's Oscar. Oh, boy. Yeah, she's interesting. That wraps up Gone with the Wind. It is a lot.

I missed a lot, I'm sure. It's a movie that I think you could teach an entire course on because I still don't really understand. Like, I just, it's, it's so crazy to me that they would make, that they would make a movie like this, even in 1939. I mean, strange, strange to me that we as a country were okay with this. They lost. Like, we lost, we fought a whole war over this. They lost. And instead of dealing with that, as you said, the way that Germany did, our culture very much, I think, kind of tried to act like it hadn't happened or act like it hadn't happened because of the issue of slavery.

I can't tell you how many times I was told growing up it was a war over states' rights. The key part being left out is that it was a war over states' rights to own slaves. Yeah, this is weird. This is a really weird moment in history that I think it's honestly very important, and I think everybody should look at this. I agree. We're obviously culturally dealing with a lot of cultural issues over how to talk about history and art right now.

I think what I've appreciated in learning about this movie, which I still think technically is remarkable. Yeah, it is. And it really captures a moment in time in Hollywood from that perspective. I think it's important whether this movie is a favorite of yours or whether you hate it. I hope that this was educational for you guys. I know it was for me. But I hope that you would take the time, dear audience, to go on HBO Max and listen to the introduction.

to the introduction that's provided, that gives the historical context for the film, and to understand and appreciate that it's a complicated work of cultural significance. And it comes with a lot of baggage. And I think it's important for us to understand that. When we're talking about movies and art, again, I'm glad HBO Max put it back on their platform eventually, and I'm glad that they did it in the way that they did.

Well, and also I want to say about that op-ed by John Ridley that I called out, he explicitly said, like, don't shelve this. Don't pull this into a vault. Like, it should be available to be seen. It just needs some context. And I... Exactly. I think having grown up where I did, having seen this movie when I was younger,

without that context, there was a lot that just didn't... I mean, I knew it was... I knew it was, there were parts of it that were wrong, but as a whole, it didn't sink into me what they were doing with this movie. And, you know, you see, you see so many echoes of Scarlett O'Hara in, in sort of, you know, the sort of Southern Bell culture with people having weddings at plantations. And I think there's just, there's something that happened here that really allowed them to paint over how horrifying this was. And it definitely had Alaska effect. Well, thank you, Lizzie, for walking us through the horrifying drug-fueled production

of gone with the man. I can't believe they made it. Like, I can't. I don't understand how it's a movie, let alone a pretty good movie by the time this thing is done. Should we do our final What Went Right? Yeah, let's do What Went Right. All right. Lizzie, why don't you start? In terms of what went right, I have to go with the performances and particularly the women in this movie. I think Vivian Lee, Olivia DeHavland and Hattie McDaniel turn in some pretty remarkable performances that are very unlike anything you were able to see at the time. For me, I think the what went right, I'm going to have to give it to the production designer who you mentioned also directed a number of scenes or at least shots. And I think the movie has a lot of scope and scale and I think it looks amazing. I think

it's really does. It really does. But a lot of it's just that the sets are very intricate and fully realized so you could do these wonderful big master shots and see a lot of the world. Yeah. So kudos to the production design. He's amazing. He actually won an honorary Oscar for this as well for his work with Technicolor because it was a very new thing. That's right. It's a new medium. And colors register different in black and white than they do in color. So that's, you had to relearn how you're going to present things on screen. And with different film stocks, what looks yellow, you know, for example, to you and persons could look very different on. Technicolor. So, yeah. Lizzie, thank you again for walking us through Gone with the Wind. Guys,

we know that this title obviously has a very complicated history. If we got anything wrong or... Oh, I'm sure I did. Yeah. Please feel free to email us. Like, we're always open to being educated as well. The point of this podcast is for us to educate ourselves, hopefully as well as you guys.

So thanks again for listening. And as promised on our Patreon tiers, we have to say a big thank you to our favorite podcast full stop patrons. Solman Cheyani and Tom Kristen. Thank you very much for your support. You kept me going through my many, many depressing hours of research on Gone with the Wind. Keep on. Keep on. Keep listening. Keep being. Chris, help me out here. Thank you.

Keep those fingers on the keyboard and don't pull an F. Scott Fitzgerald. No. We believe in you. Yes. Thank you for believing in us. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, video content, and more. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthonauos.