In mid-2020, the HBO Max
streaming
platform removed
Gone with the Wind
from its catalogue.
The 1939 classic then succumbed to a Hollywood marked by political correctness and racial tensions.
The entertainment giant said the blockbuster, considered one of the best movies ever, glorified America's slave-owning past and avoided criticism of the segregation suffered in the South.
The film directed by Victor Fleming, George Cukor and Sam Wood -these last two did not appear in the credits- returned to the service days later with a legend that warns of the historical context in which the plot takes place.
In the digital age, this type of message already accompanies many productions of the past.
A script used during filming sheds light on the slavery-related clashes that took place within the production team, headed by the legendary David O. Selznick.
A Yale doctoral historian, David Vincent Kimel, assures that the script, which includes scenes that were later edited, indicates that a real "civil war" took place between the producer, a dozen screenwriters (among whom was F. Scott Fitzgerald), the black cast and organizations against racism.
Between these blocks there was a tense tug of war with two opposing positions: on the one hand, those who considered it necessary to realistically portray the harshness of slavery and, on the other, those who preferred to stick to what the writer Margaret Mitchell had captured in the novel that served as the basis for the tape,
Kimel found the script by chance in an online bookstore and bought it for $15,000 (14,100 euros).
It is a rare script of 301 colored pages that was used in the filming, which lasted several months in 1939. Several of this type were used, baptized as rainbow scripts because of the colored sheets that marked the changes to the technical team. in the different versions that were made of history.
According to Kimel, the one he bought belonged to
casting
director Fred Schuessler and has been authenticated by Bonhams auction house.
It is an almost unique document.
Miraculously, only a handful survived Selznick's order to destroy them.
“The erroneous and romantic vision of slavery, which has become the central legacy of the famous film, looms large in the production from start to finish, prevailing in many of the scenes cut from the rainbow script,” says the historian. in a text for The Ankler, a
newsletter
about the film industry.
McDaniel displays the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (the statuette has been awarded since 1943).
That prize was stolen at the end of the 60s and to this date it is still missing.
Bettmann (Bettmann Archive)
One of the deleted scenes shows Rhett Butler, the character played by Clark Gable, sitting in front of a bottle of whiskey and stroking a firearm, considering a possible suicide.
Someone knocks on the door of the room he is in and distracts him from his thoughts.
He stows the pistol in one of his riding boots and scrambles to a stop, revealing that he is quite drunk.
Kimel assures that some of the deleted scenes were filmed, according to some photographs taken during filming.
This material would have come out of the final footage in one of the later editions.
In another sequence that was later cut, the riots in Atlanta are shown, the Georgia city where the action of the film takes place, set during the Civil War.
The camera movement showed Butler on horseback moving through a destroyed city.
The animal braked violently in the midst of the chaos.
There were men and women looting shops and carrying the products they had taken from the shops.
“Everything has an atmosphere of disorder and drunkenness, a city descending into chaos as its end approaches,” says the script, which also included a cross-dressing man running in front of a wagon carrying dresses.
Most of the settings reflected in Schuessler's script are made on the plantation owned by Scarlett O'Hara, the female character played by Vivien Leigh.
Selznick asked to cut out some details that might have shown more realistically how blacks were treated in the slaveholding South.
This left out of the film references to brutal beatings, the threat to fire Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) for being lazy, as well as other displays of physical and emotional violence.
To understand what led the legendary producer, himself a Jew who fought rampant anti-Semitism in Los Angeles, to do without this material, David Vincent Kimel went to review the filmmaker's documents at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas.
The center's archive reflects that Selznick not only showed concern for the pace and quality of the dialogue, but also for sticking as closely as possible to the novel published in 1936.
In a communication to one of the writers who participated in the script, Val Lewton, the producer regrets not being able to use the word "nigger"
,
which is unpronounceable in the United States today.
"Maybe it's not too late to save using it two or three times," Selznick tells Lewton, who he asks him to investigate whether using that word, which appears in the novel, would lead them to violate any censorship laws.
Lewton replies that it's best to avoid her because she creates too many problems.
And he adds: "Niggas resent being called niggers."
The researcher points out, however, that Selznick never wanted to make a racist film and that he was always "very careful" that his team portrayed African-Americans in the best possible light.
Despite his fidelity to the source material, the production never had much help from the author, Margaret Mitchell, who won the Pulitzer for the book.
The producer ended up on several occasions removing dialogue, rewriting lines or diluting the tone in some of the scenes.
The rainbow script shows a downgraded version of a scene in which the charismatic Scarlet O'Hara threatens to sell Prissy, one of her servants.
Selznick also deleted a scene where Prissy is pinched and told to shut up.
But he also omitted a starter that would have glorified the slaveholding army of the South and an opening painting that would have shown the Confederate flag.
The documents that are kept in the Harry Ransom center also support another Hollywood legend.
The arrival of F. Scott Fitzgerald to the chaotic shoot, which claimed two directors before Fleming and several writers.
The writer arrived in Los Angeles in 1937, when the fame generated by the publication of The Great Gatsby
, which hit the shelves in 1925, was
already distant. Bitter and with alcohol problems, Selznick hired him to replace two screenwriters,
Sidney Howard (who got the final credit) and Oliver Garrett.
The writer found that he could only use the words of Margaret Mitchell as sculpting material.
One of the few suggestions from him was a boot showing life in the old South.
He was fired and then the legendary Ben Hecht, famous in Hollywood for redirecting stories that were going nowhere, arrived.
Fitzgerald died in 1940 drunk in a drab West Hollywood apartment.
But
Gone with the Wind
continues to spark debate 84 years later.