“Gone With The Wind” returns to Charleston

Getting ‘Gone’ on the big screen once again

By: Bill Thompson

It was to be the grandest of the grand, a landmark motion picture so perfectly realized that it would cast a giant shadow over the sweep of film history.

Producer David O. Selznick wanted the screen adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” writ as large as could be in the public mind. More, he wanted a movie that would look as “absolutely modern” in the future as it would in 1939.

Selznick, as legendary for his obsessiveness and chronic disorganization as for his spendthrift ways, had filmmaking in his bones. He knew precisely how to get what he wanted. Money was no object. The fact that he “stole” the rights to the book in 1936 for a mere $50,000, a comparatively modest sum even then, didn’t stop him from lavishing a mammoth budget on the production, one of the largest and most elaborate film shoots before or since.

The question enthralling Hollywood was, “Can he pull it off?”

In those days, the cost of a top-of-the-line “A” movie — costume epics such as Selznick’s own “David Copperfield” and “Prisoner of Zenda” — was $1.5 million. But the 37-year-old Selznick’s vision for “GWTW” was that of “the longest picture ever made,” bequeathing fervent audiences “as much of the book as it is endurable at one sitting.” He did exactly that for a record-shattering $4,250,000.

Sixty-nine years on, it still casts that shadow — for length, innovation, technique, photography, impeccable casting and performance. In fact, for excellence in every department of the art of the film. Few movies can rival it for audience devotion, generation after generation. That it was achieved at the very apex of Hollywood’s Golden Age — its Oscar competitors that year included “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Stagecoach,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “Wuthering Heights” — lends “GWTW” even greater luster.

All this despite early production problems, a host of different screenwriters, wrangling over historical accuracy and the usually unsettling crisis of a change in directors, Victor Fleming (Clark Gable’s hunting buddy) being the fourth and final artist assigned to take the helm.

For the first time in an estimated 34 years — sources differ, and the 1998 big-screen reissue oddly failed to appear in Charleston — “Gone With The Wind” returns to the cinema for a one-week engagement Friday through June 19 at the Terrace Theater.

“We had wanted to run the movie and wondered how long it had been since it had been seen in a Charleston theater,” says Terrace owner Mike Furlinger. “We consulted locally with Mark Tiedje and John Coles, who operate the historical Web site www.scmovietheatres.com, and they said they thought the last time was in 1974.

“Why play it now? Because in the next couple of years you will see the end of literal film — physical prints on reels — because theaters are going to digital (delivery). And real movie buffs want to see a film like ‘Gone With the Wind’ on real 35 mm film, not on DVD or some other digital means. Either prints won’t be available in the years to come or there will be few theaters able to play them.”

Apart from Friday’s 2 p.m. premiere screening — frankly, my dear, already sold out — the opening night showing at 6:30 doubles as a benefit for the Gibbes Museum of Art, held in concert with the museum’s current exhibition, “Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art.” The screening will be preceded at 6 p.m. by live music from the Mark Sterbank Jazz Trio. Tickets are $25 for Gibbes members and $35 for nonmembers. All proceeds benefit education and outreach programs at the Gibbes.

For the remainder of the run, show times will be at 2 and 7:15 p.m.

The Gibbes’ exhibit is a comprehensive exploration of plantation images in the American South that also contains original “GWTW” artifacts on loan from the Atlanta History Center.

By December 1940, “GWTW” had been playing in theaters for a full year, had captured a then-record 10 Oscars and had grossed $14 million. Box office is no real measure of artistic caliber, but if the income earned over the years by “GWTW” was adjusted for inflation, it would rank well ahead of “Star Wars” and a fraction behind “Titanic.”

Selznick, who had micromanaged every decision, would be beaming. The romanticism and excesses of the movie matched his own. It was even he who wrote the prologue, of a “land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields,” now vanished, of a “Civilization gone with the wind.”

Let it blow back into your imagination.

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