Nolte: More Stupid Attacks on ‘Gone with the Wind’

The shallow, conformist, reactionary, provincial entertainment media are outraged at Gone with the Wind … again.

Yawn.

And once again, they are not only getting it wrong but proving they know nothing about storytelling, art, or even propaganda. The sheer idiocy behind these attacks goes a long way toward explaining why movies and television are so ham-handed and shallow today.

So some guy purchased what’s known as Gone with the Wind’s “rainbow” script. A “rainbow” script is a script that keeps track of all the screenplay changes once the movie starts production. As rewrites come in, they arrive on different colored paper, so you know which pages to shoot.

Gone with the Wind producer David O. Selznick was a genius and a notorious meddler. For example… Generally, the director is the filmmaker, and what you end up with is, say, an “Alfred Hitchcock movie.” That wasn’t the case with Selznick. Once he went out alone with Selznick International, what he produced is remembered as “Selznick pictures.” That even includes the films he made with Hitchcock, like the Oscar–winner Rebecca. This is the long way of saying that there were a ton of rewrites on Gone With the Wind during production, so there would be a lot of material in the rainbow script.

What has the idiotic entertainment media up in arms today is the discovery that the rainbow script proves that early Gone With the Wind drafts showed slavery in a much harsher light than the finished film did.

Here’s TheWrap in their favorite position — beside themselves:

The screenwriters working on “Gone With the Wind” went to “war” over the depiction of slavery – with more disturbing and violent elements eventually being cut from the 1939 blockbuster, according to a historian who discovered the scenes in an extremely rare original shooting script.

The man who holds the script “says several writers pushed for a more realistic depiction of slavery and race relations during the Civil War and Reconstruction, but the scenes they wrote were ultimately cut.”

And so, TheWrap reminds us that one of the greatest movies ever made “has been criticized for decades over its sanitized version of slavery in the Antebellum South.” So awful is this sanitation, explains TheWrap, that the fascists (my word) at “HBO Max added a disclaimer to the film in 2020, saying it ignores ‘the horrors of slavery, as well as its legacies of racial inequality.’”

So, egads! You mean Selznick had the opportunity to depict American slavery as brutal and chose not to??? He had the pages right there in his hand and tossed them away?!?!

What a monster!

Except…

Let’s start with the fact that none of this is surprising. Anyone familiar with the torturous process Selznick put himself and everyone else through is well aware that he was highly sensitive to the story’s racial issues and worked closely with the NAACP. Even TheWrap admits this:

Film historians have known for years about Selznick negotiating with [b]lack cast members and advocacy groups like the NAACP over things like the inclusion of racial slurs and the KKK (which didn’t make the cut either). But Kimel’s account is believed to be the first to shed light on the producer’s struggle over whether to include harsh depictions of slavery – and his eventual decision to cut them.

So what does TheWrap think, that Selznick respected the NAACP’s concerns on certain issues and decided to ignore the others?

Again, anyone familiar with just how concerned Selznick was with the reaction to Gone with the Wind among black Americans knows that didn’t happen. And once you understand the FULL CONTEXT of the cut scenes, you understand exactly what happened. So here’s a quick rundown of what was wisely axed:

The Rainbow Script he got his hands on tended to show racism in a more brutal setting, with scenes of Scarlett O’Hara being cruel to her slaves.

In one scene from the script, the protagonist threatened the slave-girl Prissy with a whipping, and threatened to sell her so she would never see her family again.

‘I’ll sell you down the river. You’ll never see your mother again or anybody you know and I’ll sell you for a field hand too[.]’

So the cut scenes would have shown Scarlett O’Hara brutalizing her slaves…

On what planet would that be a moral thing to portray?

Scarlett is Gone with the Wind’s heroine; she’s the character the filmmakers wanted Depression-era audiences—most especially women—to relate to, identify with, and emulate. Yes, Scarlett was a flawed character, wildly flawed, which is why, 84 years later, everyone still knows who she is. Nevertheless, Scarlett O’Hara is one of the greatest characters ever conceived. She is timeless in large part due to her flaws. So ask yourself this… What message would it send to 1939 audiences if the story’s heroine abused and terrorized her slaves? Unless Scarlett were to apologize and repent for this behavior later (and there are no reports of that in the early drafts, and if she did apologize, it would betray a character who never admitted she was wrong about anything), the movie would be saying this behavior was necessary and justified in order for our heroine to prevail and march onward.

That is a monstrous message to send, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the NAACP opposed the idea of the story’s heroine abusing her slaves as much as they opposed the movie using the slur “n***er.”

Gone With the Wind has its issues, but in 84 years, a lot of the so-called racially-enlightened garbage produced today will look “problematic” for many of the same reasons, especially the racial condescension we see everywhere. But anyone with a half-brain knows Selznick did the right thing here.

Selznick was no saint — far from it — but he did the right thing.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.