The most successful motion picture of the classical Hollywood period is Gone with the Wind. For almost a quarter of a century after its release in the final month of 1939, this film surpassed every record established at the box office and at award ceremonies of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Its virtual sweep of the 1939 Academy Awards which were presented in February 1940—only weeks after this picture premiered—appears all the more impressive in view of the strength of the major competitors—Dark Victory, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, and Wuthering Heights—which were released earlier during this annus mirabilis of American filmmaking.

In addition to its producer David O. Selznick receiving the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for "consistently high quality of motion picture production," Gone with the Wind won Oscars for best picture, best actress (Vivien Leigh for her portrayal of Scarlett O'Hara; see Figure 1), best supporting actress (Hattie McDaniel for "Mammy"), best screenplay (Sidney Howard), best direction (Victor Fleming), best interior decoration (art director Lyle Wheeler), best color cinematography (director of photography Ernest Haller and Technicolor associates Ray Rennahan and Wilfred Cline), and best film editing (Hal Kern and associate James Newcom). A special award also was presented to production designer William Cameron Menzies for "outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood." Until very recently, in terms of theatrical box office performance (in figures adjusted for inflation), Selzmck's adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's "story of the Old South" remained incontestably the greatest draw in the history of the cinema.

Although this film's success may be attributed to a remarkable confluence of individual and contextual elements—not the least of which are a star-studded cast and a phenomenally best-selling novel from which the movie was adapted—David O. Selznick himself was a most significant influence, supervising every major aspect of the picture's making, from scriptwriting and production to editing and marketing. Paradoxically, the extent of this producer's involvement in the creation of what is regarded widely as the most "Hollywood" of movies was both exemplary and exceptional with regard to the conventions of the film industry. What appears to be indisputable is that Gone with the Wind is Selznick's magnum opus and that it epitomizes classical Hollywood cinema.

While praise as the "greatest motion picture ever made" has been questioned by critics for some time and although classical Hollywood produced a number of excellent motion pictures, few—if any—have offered an aura equal to that generated by Gone with the Wind. Two decades after Selznick undertook to produce this picture, Bosley Crowther, senior film critic for the New York Times, observed that "of all the motion pictures produced since the screen began, [Gone with the Wind was] the one that has reached the most people and may fairly be judged the most popular:" Ten years later, in 1967, Crowther was even more enthusiastic in his appraisal of this work's stature in his book The Great Films: Fifty Golden Years of Motion Pictures, in which he claimed:

Of all the American motion pictures entitled to be designated great on the basis of all their qualifications, including the extent of the excitement they have caused, Gone with the Wind] towers above all the rest.... Never before or since its making has so much attention been fixed upon the urgency and the responsibility of bringing a film into being. Never has the public's interest been so attracted in the preparation stage, and never has a national volition been so generously fulfilled and satisfied.... There have been more ambitious, more expensive and longer historical-spectacle films made in the years since this one. And there have been a few that have had more critical riclame. But there has never been one more effective than Gone with the Wind. There may never be.

When polled in 1977 to select the "greatest American film of all time," 35,000 members of the American Film Institute awarded this honor to Gone with the Wind (Citizen Kane [1941] and Casablanca [1943] were elected to second and third place, respectively). Selznick's epic picture had been broadcast for the first time on national network television the previous year and had received unchallenged ratings, earning it the additional distinction of being the "most popular film ever shown on U.S. television," according to a movie-related Guinness record book. In 1979, it was considered the "only film in history which could be profitably revived for forty years." Half a century after its premiere and on the occasion of the release of a newly restored Technicolor print in 1989, noted newspaper and television critic Roger Ebert observed that Gone with the Wind remained "one of the greatest of all Hollywood productions." The film also has been lauded variously as the "quintessential Hollywood studio system product," the "Sistine chapel among movies," and the "single most beloved entertainment ever produced." As a motion picture, television, and videographic presentation, it has been described—albeit wryly—as the "eternal flame of popular culture" in Time, whose reviewer speculated that "it is a safe bet that somewhere in the world, day and night, Clark Gable's Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara flicker across a screen."

Another measure of the film's ongoing popular fascination is the secondary market that developed over the last two decades with the publication of a large number of histories of the picture's production. Many of these books' titles incorporated such prefixes and phrases as the following: The Filming of..., The Making of..., The Art of... , The Ultimate Pictorial Treasury of.... as well as The Official ... Companion, The Complete Reference, The Complete ... Sourcebook, and The Complete ... Trivia Book. In some cases, the film title's mere initials, GWTW served for effective exploitation. However appealing these volumes may be to the film's many fans, few have served the study of film history beyond publishing production stills (i.e., photographs of players receiving direction and/or of technicians operating on the shooting sets); many repackaged previously published information and anecdotes involving the film's stars and have perpetuated a received knowledge of the production itself. In 1989, in a review of several of these books on the fiftieth anniversary of the film's premiere, David Finkle, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, pragmatically identified the primary value of these "redundant tributes" for their public. "Whether the contents of the books are 100 percent authentic may be beside the point," Finkle admitted, "for it's apparent that to the bona fide fan [these] books are not, first and foremost, books ... they are collectibles."

In the majority of these volumes, the making of the film adaptation is related in a manner that imitates the epic dimensions of Mitchell's novel. Framed by the legends of the book's history and of the film's premiere in Atlanta, the story line begins with Selzmck's acquisition of the screen rights in the face of much skepticism expressed by other Hollywood studio chiefs and continues with anecdotes about the pursuit of an actress to portray Scarlett, for which a highly publicized national talent search was undertaken, together with auditions of numerous starlets. The deal with MGM for the loan of Clark Gable and Selznick's difficulties with screenwriters and directors also serve to complicate the plot. Scarce attention is given generally to the creative and interpretative aspects of screenwriting, production design, cinematography, directing, and editing. Instead, only the same few technical details are recounted at any length—for example, a common subject is the filming of the celebrated mobile aerial view of Scarlett's crossing of the Atlanta railyard, which is crowded with prostrated, wounded Confederate soldiers (a shot which—one reads—exhausted the resources of Central Casting and required use of great numbers of dummies and construction of a concrete drive so that a mechanical crane, from which the camera was suspended, would roll smoothly backward during the filming).

Another characteristic of the majority of these publications is their dismissal of Selznick. Invariably, these treatments rely on negative testimony and hearsay to affirm the producer's egotism and the degree of chaos engendered by his domination of others on and off the sets. Arguments are informed almost exclusively by the opinions of a selected number of Selznick's surviving subordinates without either modification of these claims in view of practices characteristic of other studios' producers or their verification by closer examination of the specific filmmaking acts in question (for example, there is no analysis of the development of a particular scene in order to determine its progress or degradation after executive influence). Production documents (including correspondence, script drafts, call sheets, production logs, and continuity and set designs) are analyzed rarely to a satisfactory degree but, rather, are presented in the manner of mute reliquaries. To date, the making of the most popular film in history has been presented by commentators—with few exceptions—as the creation of a "natural" screen entertainment which achieved its incomparable degree of success in great part despite the industry of the man most responsible for its realization. The result has been that, notwithstanding the many books published on the filming of Gone with the Wind, neither the producer nor the production itself have been understood adequately or accurately.

Although Margaret Mitchell persistently declined to participate in her novel's adaptation, the reputation of her best-selling book is credited by implication in many of these accounts for the film's enormously favorable reception. The picture's success is attributed also to the exploitation of its stars and of its early Technicolor format and to the post-Depression, pre-World War II period of its American premiere. In contrast, Selznick is characterized as a meddler and tinkerer. The reader of many of these histories is informed that Selznick suffered from indecision and as a result, hired and fired directors, cameramen, and screenwriters throughout the film's lengthy period of production. At the same time, the producer's insistence upon his adaptation's fidelity to the novel is portrayed as having posed a serious limitation to the more creative contributions of his collaborators.

In contrast with Margaret Mitchell, who willed that the manuscript and all drafts of her novel were to be destroyed following her death (in 1949), Selznick preserved approximately half a million documents pertaining to this film's production. His personal archives, comprising over three million items covering in detail most of the motion pictures that he produced during the course of his career, were acquired by the University of Texas at Austin in 1980 for the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Ironically, many scholars may be biased against Gone with the Wind as an appropriate subject for academic inquiry because of the exploitative, commercial nature of most of the popular books published on this film's making and the bold aesthetic claims that have attended the picture's release.

This negative attitude has been fostered also in part by the ascendancy and persistence of auteurism, a trend in American film criticism introduced by Andrew Sarris in 1962. Accordingly, the director has been privileged over other participants in the filmmaking enterprise to the extent that film authorship is bestowed repeatedly upon a technician whose primary influence on classical studio productions was the direction of actors. The fact that scenes in Gone with the Wind were directed by at least four individuals compromised its artistic integrity in many critics' minds. More recently, the orientation of Marxist psychoanalytic semiology, which succeeded auteurism as the dominant theoretical scheme in film studies, eschewed attributions of authorship and traditional hermeneutics altogether as valid pursuits and addressed issues involving reception and ideology rather than those of production. The analyses of documents from the adaptation of Gone with the Wind that are offered in this book challenge the prejudices of the above-mentioned conventional points of view and raise significant questions concerning the creation of motion pictures.

Consider, for example, the making of the "fire" sequence—the most spectacular episode in the film, in which Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler escape the burning of Atlanta on the eve of its invasion. Most commentaries have noted that this sequence's production required the destruction of great numbers of preexisting sets on the studio lot (made over to simulate street scenes in Atlanta) and that it inaugurated the picture's filming on the evening of December 10,1938, at which time Selznick also was introduced to Vivien Leigh by his brother, the agent Myron Selznick. Unacknowledged is the fact that the fire episode in Mitchell's novel was severely abbreviated in Sidney Howard's initial scripts because the screenwriter doubted the value of this scene to the film presentation.

In contrast, Selznick recognized its potential for spectacle and enlisted production designer William Cameron Menzies and several screenwriters—including Ben Hecht—to embellish on what Mitchell had written. The producer also considered filming much of its action in a pioneer widescreen format, although ultimately this idea was rejected. For the most part, the picture's initial director, George Cukor, observed the pyrotechnical drama from the sidelines that evening as the staging of several pairs of doubles was directed by Menzies, following specific continuity designs, before seven Technicolor cameras—the total number available for lease by studios at the time. Close-ups of Leigh and Gable were filmed the following year under the direction of Cukor's successor, Victor Fleming, and the sequence itself was revised many times under Selznick's supervision. The result was identified by a Gallup poll as the film's most memorable scene.

In view of the abundance of documentation concerning the many changes made to the fire sequence and to other scenes in Gone with the Wind, the contributions of the principal creative technicians-the directors, the screenwriters, the production designer, the art director, the special-effects director, the cinematographers, and the editors-may be examined now vis-à-vis those of the "executive producer" (a title which purportedly was coined a few years earlier by Selznick himself). In this book, successive versions of the screenplay by different authors, dramatic continuity designs and "storyboard" sketches credited to the first production designer in film history, and the producer's correspondence and memoranda are analyzed in this concerted manner, emending the history of this film's making, establishing the critical importance of Selznick's central role, and disclosing both chaotic and creative aspects of his collaboration with his staff. The value of the documents in the Selznick archives to an understanding of how Gone with the Wind and other classical Hollywood films were produced argues for the publication of another book on this film.

David O. Selznick and "Prestige Unit" Film Production

Selznick firmly believed that producers should dictate and monitor every aspect of the filmmaking enterprise and not delegate responsibility for the supervision of production details to middle managers, or associate producers, on whom the major studios' central managers had relied routinely during the early part of the classical Hollywood era. Irving Thalberg (production chief of MGM from 1923 to 1933) and Darryl F. Zanuck (production chief of Warner Bros. from 1929 to 1933 and of 20th Century-Fox from 1935 to 1956) were notable central producers. In contrast, Selznick championed the use of "unit" production, which allowed individual producers to devote full attention to a limited number of film projects and to perfect their own work. Although renowned principally as the "producer of Gone with the Wind," Selznick already had risen dramatically as a motion picture producer at Paramount between 1927 and 1931, at RKO from 1931 to 1933, and at MGM from 1933 to 1935 before going independent with Selznick International Pictures (SIP), from 1936 to 1940, and David O. Selznick Productions, from 1940 to 1949. At Paramount, Selznick served as the executive assistant to Ben Schulberg, the managing director of production, and was responsible for reorganizing the story department and dictating script development policies during the studio's transition from silent to sound film production. During the final year of his tenure (1931), forty of the sixty-five films that Paramount produced were supervised personally by Selznick, who, never idle or immodest, professed to Schulberg that at MGM "the equivalent of my work is handled by no less than six high-salaried executives." Schulberg's son, Budd, who befriended Selznick and who parodied Hollywood in the novel What Makes Sammy Run?, recalled in his autobiography that, contrary to the "major studio 'factory' system ... with 'supervisors' standing in for the studio chief but never completely responsible for the finished product, [Selznick] advocated a personal approach, with supervisors becoming full-fledged producers heading their own independent units"—a new mode of film production which was viewed as a "system of creative decontrol."

Nevertheless, at the age of 29, Selznick himself assumed the duties of a central manager when he was hired as production chief of RKO, a major film studio formed in 1928 by David Sarnoff, president of RCA, and Boston financier Joseph Kennedy. Whereas Irving Thalberg waived the right to acknowledgment of his influence as production chief in the credits of MGM releases, Selznick publicized his own authority as RKO pictures' "executive producer." Although his responsibilities as vice president in charge of production were administrative, Selznick closely monitored and influenced the development of A Bill of Divorcement and What Price Hollywood? both of which were directed by George Cukor in 1932; in fact, the basic story line of the latter film derived from his own original idea. Selznick resigned from RKO when the financial office and ownership in New York refused to grant him the freedom that Thalberg enjoyed from Nicholas Schenck, president of Loew's (the Manhattan-based theater chain which owned the MGM film studio in Southern California), and instead expected the deference that Ben Schulberg had given Paramount. Discontented with this arrangement, Selznick demanded the "final word in story purchase and assignment, as well as in all production matters."

Ironically, Thalberg's poor health between 1932 and 1933 and the desire of Schenck and Louis B. mayer to reestablish control over their own studio made Selznick's employment as a "prestige unit" producer extremely appealing to MGM. Although the quip "the son-in-law also rises" was circulated for a time (Selznick had married Mayer's younger daughter, Irene, in 1930), the company benefited immensely from his productions. His first film, Dinner at Eight (1933), was an auspicious beginning and was directed by George Cukor (who was hired from RKO by MGM following completion of Little Women, much of which Selznick himself had planned before his own departure). Over the next two years, this producer also supervised three literary adaptations—David Copperfield (directed by Cukor), A Tale of Two Cities (featuring Ronald Colman), and Anna Karenina (played by Greta Garbo)—as well as three Clark Gable vehicles—Night Flight, Dancing Lady (with Joan Crawford), and Manhattan Melodrama (with William Powell and Myrna Loy).

High financing from John Hay ("Jock") Whitney and his family (who also had invested heavily in Technicolor), the availability for rental of the RKO-Pathé studio (which was located in the proximity of MGM facilities in Culver City), and a distribution contract with United Artists afforded Selznick the means of forming his own production company. In addition to making Gone with the Wind (distributed by MGM, which bore half of the initial budget and allowed the services of Clark Gable), SIP produced such classic films between 1936 and 1940 as Rebecca (1940; directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine), A Star is Born (1937; the first of several remakes of What Price Hollywood?), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937; featuring Ronald Colman and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), Nothing Sacred (1937; starring Carole Lombard and Fredric March), Made for Each Other (1939; with Carole Lombard and James Stewart), and Intermezzo (1939; which introduced Ingrid Bergman to American audiences).

Gone with the Wind and Rebecca won back-to-back Academy Awards for best picture of 1939 and 1940, respectively, and established Selznick as Hollywood's most successful film producer at the zenith of the industry's classical period. Although the major studios distributed as many as one feature per week each, none of these companies were rewarded with figures comparable to those that SIP earned from its smaller number of releases. Ironically, this independent studio was too small for its profits to have been amortized or defrayed in the manner of the majors, and thus it was liquidated for tax purposes in August 1940. In addition, Selznick's intense participation in his films' making had aged him considerably.

Although he quickly formed another production company which created a number of popular films, including three starring his second wife, Jennifer Jones—Since You Went Away (1944), Duel in the Sun (1947), and Portrait of Jennie (1949)—as well as Spellbound (1945), which was directed by Hitchcock, Selznick's attempts to achieve the phenomenal level of success that had been attained between 1939 and 1940 proved to be in vain. The critical consensus to date is represented by Douglas Gomery's report in Movie History: A Survey that, "after Gone with the Wind, Selznick then squandered his career by spending the rest of his life unsuccessfully trying to make a film to best it." More harshly, it was proclaimed by Ezra Goodman in The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood, published in 1961, that by this same date, Selznick himself was "'Gone with the Wind' as far as Hollywood is concerned." (The producer died of heart failure four years later in 1965.)

Much less professed is the fact that during the latter half of his career, Selznick had shifted his principal activity from producing independent films to "packaging" film projects—that is, acquiring literary properties which he sold at a profit to major studios for both production and distribution. Selznick continued to develop the filmscripts, to contract directors, and to cast the principal roles. Two examples of this form of enterprise are Jane Eyre (starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles) and Notorious (starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant and directed by Alfred Hitchcock), which were produced by 20th Century-Fox and RKO in 1944 and 1946, respectively. Although his exploitation of "packaging" was an inspired career move and provided the industry with a model for practice, his influence on a project waned after a studio acquired a property, and the responsibility for production was assumed by others who often were less qualified and who were wary of the "overproduced" reputation of Selznick's own films.

In particular, the producer resented 20th Century-Fox's reluctance to invest in its 1962 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night along the dimensions that he had envisioned and their characterization of his aspirations as extravagant and as ars gratia artis. "I have never gone after 'honors instead of dollars,'" he remonstrated in his letter of December 8,1961, to studio president Spyros Skouras. "But I have understood the relationship between the two." Selznick continued with an assessment of his reputation as a film producer and a résumé of his professional philosophy:

No pictures in the history of the industry ever received, picture for picture, as many honors as my own; no pictures in the history of the industry, picture for picture, have ever achieved comparable grosses or comparable profits.... I have seen studio administration after administration go under, because of the failure to realize that honors in the picture business are not only a satisfaction to the recipients, and proper rewards for work well done, but (a) worth millions in gross; (b) an incentive to better work; (c) invaluable to a studio's morale, and to its commercial—that is, "dollars," not "honors"—results on an over-all basis.

In another letter to Skouras on January 16,1962, Selznick admitted the limitations of "packaging" and defended the contributions of creative producers.

You continue to believe that if you hire a good director, and get a good title and put down a couple of casting names on paper, the picture is made. You fail to realize, apparently, that ... great producers have not achieved their reputations in this fashion; that picture after picture is a failure despite these elements, because they have not been produced (whether by producer/director or by producer) with the skill and the experience and the showmanship to know what pays off, dramatically and commercially.

Summing up his own beliefs, Selznick argued that "great films, successful films, are made in their every detail according to the vision of one man, and through supporting that one man, not in buying part of what he has done."

Criticism of Selznick's Influence on Filmmaking as Producer

Ironically, Selznick's profession of a single "vision" was expressed in the same year as the publication of Andrew Sarris's "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962" in Film Culture. Although this producer's opinion paralleled Sarris's critical approach with respect to the issue of an individual personality's domination of a filmmaking enterprise, "auteur theory" designated the director as the legitimate "author" of a film text. Since Andrew Sarris's application of auteurist policy in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, a film's success has been determined to a significant degree by the director's mastery of the production system and influence on the shooting set. "The auteur theory derives its ratioaanale from the fact that the cinema could not be a completely personal art under even the best conditions," Sarris admitted. "The auteur theory values the personality of a director precisely because of the barriers to its expression," he explained. "It is as if a few brave spirits had managed to overcome the gravitational pull of the mass of movies."

Sarris recognized that Gone with the Wind presented a "notable exception to the notion of directorial authorship" because of Selznick's employment of at least four directors on this production, and the producer was slighted by the critic for "incessant interference with a project that was always too big to be controlled by a single directorial style." This attitude has continued to influence the film's critical reception. For example, although it is conceded in this producer's entry in A Biographical Dictionary of Film that Gone with the Wind resounds with the power of "vast entrepreneurial aplomb," the author David Thomson posited that the film is, "not surprisingly, void of creative personality"; he declared also that while "Gone with the Wind is film history, ... Rebecca is a masterpiece without qualification," presumably because of Hitchcock's direction.

Sarris was not the first critic to devalue Selznick's role. In a 1944 edition of Time, James Agee described Margaret Mitchell's novel as "perhaps the greatest entertainment natural in screen history" and added that the "duck that hatched a swan was lucky compared to ... Selznick [who] hatched Gone with the Wind and has been trying to hatch another ever since." Still prejudice against this producer burgeoned from auteurism's influence. Citing the many directors and writers employed on Gone with the Wind, Leslie Fiedler described the film in The Inadvertent Epic: From "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Roots" as a "patchwork job with no controlling intelligence behind it.." The most vitriolic invective came from Richard Schickel, who declaimed:

Selznick, whose devotion to literacy was largely self-proclaimed (in Hollywood in those days anyone who could read without straining was like the one-eyed man in the blind kingdom) and belied by a career-long devotion to talky kitsch ... busied himself with his insufferable memos, fretting over such trivia as sets, costumes, and make-up and guaranteeing that men of independence would not stay long at his side. The result was a film entirely worthy of its source—glossy, sentimental, chuckleheaded—not one that would transcend, as have so many that have been pulled from literature's bottom drawers, the original work."

"No movie role has been so idolized, denigrated, or misrepresented as that of the producer," acknowledged Michael Webb in his catalog of an exhibition organized in 1986 by the Smithsonian Institution and entitled, Hollywood: Legend and Reality. Noting the fictional Monroe Stahr in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Last Tycoon (reputedly inspired by Thalberg) and Sammy Glick in Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, Webb admitted that "a favorite image is the cigar-chomping philistine, fondling flesh and spouting figures, fawned upon by acolytes as he takes a meeting beside a pool in Beverly Hills." The casting of Selznick among this ilk is found in at least two historical surveys—namely, Philip French's The Movie Moguls and Norman Zierold's The Moguls. "Contempt for these men comes easily, and the terms to describe them—mogul, cinemogul, tycoon, czar and the rest—have a certain sneer about them, conjuring up as they do an unfavorable image of a cigar-chewing, language fracturing, power-mad, philistine ignoramus," wrote French, who added that "this image unfortunately is not entirely without foundation in fact."

In contrast, Bob Thomas's biography of Selznick in 1970 echoed Bosley Crowther's assessment that accompanied the producer's obituary in the New York Times and stated that Selznick's principal contribution to filmmaking was the promotion and embodiment of the role of the "creative producer." Proclaiming that "nearly all of the Hollywood films were the product of the big-studio factory-like system" and "had the look of manufactured entertainment," Thomas lauded Selznick for having believed that "a motion picture was like a painting that had to be painted and signed by a single artist." More specifically, this biographer postulated that Selznick was convinced that the artist must necessarily be the producer and he felt that he had proved his theory with Gone with the Wind.

Thomas's accounts of Selznick's film productions were supplemented two years later by Rudy Behlmer, who published a representative sampling of the extensive professional memoranda in Selzmck's archives under the title Memo from David O. Selznick. Acknowledging that "the story of the creation of each of Selznick's films could fill its own book," Behlmer chose Gone with the Wind to serve as the principal "in-depth example" of this producer's oeuvre. The inordinate extent of Selznick's personal supervision of most of the motion pictures that he produced is represented satisfactorily by the documents that are reprinted in the 550-page Memo, and that span his career. Most importantly, the selection demonstrates that Selznick's memo writing was crucial to his modus operandi as a creative producer. All the same, it was a source of chronic irritation to his directors—among whom (in addition to George Cukor, Victor Fleming, William Cameron Menzies, and Sam Wood on Gone with the Wind and on other films) were William Dieterle, Howard Hawks, John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, King Vidor, and William Wellman—and as such formed the basis of much of the general disdain for this producer by auteurists.

David Thomson professed in his 1992 biography, Showman, that the documents reproduced in Memo comprised only a "tiny selection" of the extensive memoranda preserved among the "three million items, 57,000 pounds of paper, [and] some 6,000 Hollinger boxes" that form Selznick's total archival collection. According to Thomson, Behlmer's sample "emphasized the trait of decisiveness ... whereas the full weight of the memos reveals a less certain and more beleagured man, compelled sometimes to take decisions." While acknowledging that "no one who worked for [Selznick] ever doubted that he had all the power on a project," Thomson posited that the producer's authority "never helped him make up his mind" and that his work should be evaluated as the "weary, frustrated product of indecision, confusion, luck, and accident."

Pace Thomson, it should be recognized that Selznick relished multiple choices and that he eagerly sought menus of options when making decisions. To characterize this producer as "indecisive" is to deny the definite record of his achievements. The medium of the memo was one that Selznick radically exploited in order to petition superiors, to query subordinates, and to prescribe details, thereby advancing his own career. "I honestly don't remember in all the time I was working at MGM—or for that matter ... [at] most other studios (except Paramount)—seeing a single memo written from one executive to another when these executives were in offices anywhere near [each other]," admitted Selznick, whose own prolixity with memoranda was described in 1942 in an article for the Saturday Evening Post wryly entitled "The Great Dictater."

In 1958 Life magazine published a sample of the ten thousand memos purportedly generated by Selznick during his 1957 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms—the last motion picture which he personally produced and one which followed a hiatus from full-scale filmmaking of almost ten years. It was noted in this publication that "[Selznick's] memos have been famous in Hollywood for their content, range of interest and staggering volume. Those on Farewell, from 30 pages to a single sentence in length, give a revealing and fascinating look at both a movie and the perfectionist who, absorbed in every detail, made it." Ironically, this article proved to be poor publicity for both the picture and its producer. "I take credit for my pictures when they are good, so I must take the blame when they are disappointing," Selznick himself acknowledged afterward, adding that A Farewell to Arms was "not one of the jobs of which I am most proud."

Tension between producer and director reached a climax during this film's making when the director, John Huston, resigned following receipt of a typed, single-spaced, sixteen-page letter from Selznick on March 19, 1957 (a portion of which appeared in Life). In his letter, Selznick argued that Huston was not "entitled to the privileges of an artist with an investment" because of the director's salary. The producer admitted that he himself "would be up against an even more serious situation than when Cukor left Gone with the Wind" if Huston left the project. "But I can only be true to myself—and this is my show—and you yourself have repeatedly stated that it is my show," he reiterated. "I can only say what I said to Cukor: 'If this picture is going to fail, it must fail on my mistakes, not yours.'" Huston dismissed A Farewell to Arms in his autobiography as a "debacle."

The opinion that Selznick's memo writing was a counterproductive practice (which Huston may have perceived rightly on A Farewell to Arms) has biased many accounts of this producer's contributions to Gone with the Wind. This erroneous view of his supervision of the earlier production may account for the sardonic tenor that characterizes the commentaries of Gavin Lambert's GWTW, Roland Flamini's Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands, and William Pratt's Scarlett Fever. For example, Lambert observed that Selznick "found time to rewrite practically all the scenes himself," adding that "of course, he regarded the film of Gone with the Wind as entirely his own conception, and perhaps it seemed logical to him that he could personally solve every problem." Selznick's posture during this time was "like God creating the world," although the producer was described also as "besieged, drugged, chain-smoking, [and] sleepless." Despite their belittlement of Selznick, these books were marketed plainly to the film's fans. "Every now and again an editor or writer in one of these texts will murmur something about scholarship and history and the study of film, but the heart isn't in it," observed Michael Wood in his criticism in the New York Review of Books of several film books, including Lambert's GWTW. "Good old soupy nostalgia is what these books are about."

In contrast, David O. Sehnick's Hollywood, by Ronald Haver, late film curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, reads seriously and accurately. Haver's educated use of documents in the producer's archives was supplemented by analysis of materials from additional sources. Of comparable value is the work of Richard Harwell, late curator of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Georgia at Athens. Harwell edited an anthology of essays entitled "Gone with the Wind" as Book and Film, and provided the preface for an unauthoritative, composite version of various states of Sidney Howard's filmscript published as GWTW: The Screenplay. To a degree, his attitude toward Selmick and the preparation of the film's script was biased by the opinions of the subjects of two other compilations which he also edited—namely, Margaret Mitchell (Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind" Letters) and Susan Myrick (White Columns in Hollywood). Upon Mitchell's recommendation, Selznick had hired Myrick as a technical advisor on the Southern dialect and had retained her in this capacity in the hope of enlisting the novelist's collaboration in the film enterprise. Indicative of a wry attitude toward the novel's adaptation, Myrick related to Mitchell on January 11, 1939, that "producers and what they do with scripts is like a chef making soup." She elaborated:

The chef gets an idea from a soup he ate. He spends days making a stock that is just right. He tastes, adds seasonings, tastes again, adds again. Perfect. Then he does more things to it until he has the finest soup in the universe. Whereupon, he calls in the other chefs and they all stand around and pee in it! And this, the treasonable ones of us seem to agree is what happened about GWTW."

Much Selznick-bashing and exploitation of this film's celebrity has continued under the guise of documentation and research. Herb Bridges' collection of multilingual editions of the novel, production and publicity photographs, and memorabilia is represented by three separate publications, yet the contents of the commentaries offered in these books are derived more from previously published material than from analysis of the materials reproduced therein. This same criticism may be made of the preface written by Bridges and Terryl C. Boodman to a problematic version of the filmscript entitled "Gone with the Wind": The Screenplay. With respect to the quality of research exhibited in these publications—including the deluxe The Art of "Gone with the Wind": The Making of a Legend by Judy Cameron and Paul J. Christman and the exploitative The Complete "Gone with the Wind" Trivia Book by Pauline Bartel—it was observed in the New York Times Book Review's already-cited critique of the "Gone with the Wind industry" that such accounts "don't seem to be turning up new ground so much as plowing one another's fields."

The culmination of this trend is found in the 1988 documentary video "Gone with the Wind": The Making of a Legend, written by David Thomson and produced by Turner Entertainment, a subsidiary of Time Warner, which presently owns the motion picture. "Real history is often accidental and muddled," the narrator, Christopher Plummer, announces at the beginning of this video. "The truth is that Gone with the Wind came out of chaos and confusion, blind faith, and great good luck." The authority of this declamation emanates not only from the actor's impressive vocal apparatus but also from a covert anti-industrial source—that of auteurism—for the purpose of portraying Selznick as a false creator. "Finally, in his cutting room, Selznick was supreme," the viewer is informed in one of many instances of mockery. "Here, with no writers or directors to annoy or confuse him, he could vacillate to his heart's content." Thus the cutting of a 20,000-foot picture from half a million feet in less than half a year is deemed a "demented process" rather than a Herculean labor. Although the presentation acknowledges this film's unique, universal appeal, as well as Selznick's dominant role in its production, the potshots are many and obvious.

Authority in Classical Hollywood Film Production

The producer, directors, and writers of Gone with the Wind are factors of a filmmaking equation which exhausts simplistic notions of film authorship. Selznick's insistence upon a faithful adaptation of a bestselling novel, which was undertaken via a series of filmscripts by numerous authors and which was realized with the assistance of several directors, should be examined also in the context of the conventions and vicissitudes exhibited by other productions of the major studios. For example, one should inquire how many writers were employed normally on the adaptation of a literary work for a major film production, what variations of this norm existed, and what specific responsibilities defined the roles of the producer and director.

In the case of Gone with the Wind, the development of the narrative from book through numerous intermediary filmscript versions by various authors—including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oliver H. P Garrett, Ben Hecht, and Sidney Howard (the last being the only one credited)—has never been explored satisfactorily, nor has the relationship been analyzed between composition and continuity of this film's shots and visualization of imagery via the "storyboarding" attributed to production designer William Cameron Menzies. Closer examination of the integral progress of this film's screenplay and production design substantially enriches an understanding of the production of a motion picture which was directed by no fewer than four individuals yet is credited to the vision and supervision of its producer. Contextual analysis of scripts, storyboards, and other production documents also demonstrates that industrial routines and prerogatives of executive management are critical factors for consideration in cinema studies.

Principal authority for a film's creation has been assumed by individuals employed in different roles throughout the development of the motion-picture industry. In The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Janet Staiger chronicled the six management systems that have characterized American film production at different times in its chronology—namely, structures organized around the cameraman (prior to 1907), around the director (from 1907), around the director-unit (after 1909), around the central producer (after 1914), around the producer-unit (from the early 1930s), and around the package-unit (from the early 1940s and dominant by the 1950s). Staiger observed that although each successive system differed from the one that preceded it, each retained something of the predecessor's organization and suggested that the "tendency to attempt to attribute particular stylistic innovations to a single worker (producer, director, writer) may have reinforced the hierachical system." Staiger further argued that the introduction of unit production and of packaging—both pioneered by Selznick—promoted the "ideological attitude toward authorship ... of assuming that one individual ought to control almost all aspects of the filming so that that individual's personal vision can be created." In opposition to the tenet of individual authorship, Staiger proposed that

what was valuable in the Hollywood mode of production was its combination of the expertise of multiple crafts. Groups of specialists, although in divided labor, made films which just seem difficult to conceive having been created by workers in other work arrangements."

In other words, Hollywood filmmaking resembled neither the intensive labor of a solitary artist nor the assembly-line procedures of a Ford manufacturing plant (except for release-print manufacturing). However, until recently, studio documents remained inaccessible to academic researchers—a condition which permitted growth of auteuristic criticism and semiological analysis. "The fact is that the history of the American film industry is extremely difficult to write, because many of the basic materials that would be needed are simply not available," wrote Edward Buscombe in 1975, in Screen. "The result is that when Hollywood has been written about its industrial dimension has been ignored."

The Classical Hollywood Cinema, which appeared in 1985 and on which Staiger collaborated with David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, derived from research of production documents, trade publications, and a statistically random film selection and attempted to synthesize analysis and history in a contextual manner—or, in the scholars' own words, to "historicize textual analysis and connect the history of film style to the history of the motion picture industry." Specifically, these three authors analyzed classical Hollywood film production as a "distinct mode of film practice with its own cinematic style and industrial conditions of existence." They propose that "the Hollywood mode of film practice constitutes an integral system, including persons and groups but also rules, films, machinery, documents, institutions, work processes, and theoretical concepts." Because of its scope and integrity of research and analysis, The Classical Hollywood Cinema represents a watershed of American film studies.

A similar attitude is exhibited by Thomas Schatz in The Genius of the System. "The quality and artistry of all these films were the product not simply of individual expression, but of a melding of institutional forces," Schatz acknowledged. "In each case the 'style' of a writer, director, star—or even a cinematographer, art director, or costume designer—fused with the studio's production operations and management structure, its resources and talent pool, its narrative traditions and market strategy." However, the author asserted that "studio filmmaking was less a process of collaboration than of negotiation and struggle—occasionally approaching armed conflict" and proposed that "the chief architects of a studio's style were its executives," whom he described as the "most misunderstood and undervalued figures in American film history."

Schatz's comparison of the professional roles of Selznick and Hitchcock and of their respective contributions to the films which they undertook—together and separately—serves to dramatize much of the industrial process of filmmaking. He also observed that, in contrast to the operations of the five major motion-picture companies (MGM, Paramount, RKO, 20th Century-Fox, and Warner Bros.) which dominated the market in which the three "minor" companies (Columbia, United Artists, and Universal) also competed, Selznick's productions were indeed "another story altogether." While the large studios pursued efficiency and productivity, Selznick and other major independents—such as Sam Goldwyn and Walt Disney—undertook only a few "high-cost, high-yield" films annually. "These filmmakers were in a class by themselves, turning out prestige pictures that often tested the economic constraints and the creative limits of the system, or challenged its usual division of labor and hierarchy of authority," wrote Schatz, who proposed a symbiotic relationship between independent and major studio production. "The independents needed the system for its resources and its theaters, while the system needed them to cultivate the 'high end' of the market and to keep the first-run theaters stocked with quality product—an obvious benefit to the majors since they took a sizable exhibitor's fee on these releases."

Leonard J. Leff, in Hitchcock and Selznick, also observed that the number of annual releases by each of the major studios (i.e., approximately one feature per week from each in the latter half of the 1930s) "militated against a chief executive interesting himself in each film." Leff acknowledged that, contrary to the managerial routines of the major companies, Selznick "influenced everything that he touched, and he touched almost everything, from the acquisition of the literary property to screenplay development, cast selection, preproduction, production, post-production, distribution, exhibition, rerelease, and, near the end of his life, the recutting for television." With reference to the traditional southern colonial facade of Selznick's Culver City studio (which formerly belonged to directorproducer Thomas Ince, who developed the "continuity script" in 1912 as a instrument of executive control), the author remarked cleverly that "this plantation owner knew cotton from seed to the shirt." However, while he argued that the "dynamics of the relationship served both men," and that "Hitchcock did not succeed despite Selznick any more than Selznick succeeded because of Hitchcock," with respect to Selznick's production of three films which Hitchcock directed, Leff sided with auteurism when he professed that, in his opinion, "history subsequently proved that Selznick needed Hitchcock more than Hitchcock needed Selznick."

As a critical practice, auteurism discredited the record of producers' influence on classical Hollywood filmmaking. Sarris's primary tenet—that the director's preeminence is a principal condition of a superior motion picture-was promoted to a popular audience in 1971 by Frank Capra in his autobiography, The Name above the Title. "I knew of no great book or play, no classic painting or sculpture, no lasting monument to art in any form, that was ever created by a committee—with the possible exception of the Gothic cathedrals," he professed. "In art, it is 'one man, one painting—one statue—one book—one film.'"

After two decades of advancement in scholarship, this claim appears distended with respect to films of the classical Hollywood era. In his 1992 biography of this director, Joseph McBride professed that Capra "enjoyed the adulation of young, antiestablishment idealists, who helped him re-create his reputation" without adequate acknowledgment of producer Harry Cohn (who ruled Columbia Pictures as owner and president and for whose studio Capra was the most important "house director"), of cinematographer Joseph Walker (who filmed all of Capra's classic movies at Columbia and It's a Wonderful Life [1946]), or of screenwriter Robert Riskin (who wrote most of Capra's best works, including It Happened One Night [1934], Mr. Deeds Goes to Town [1936], and Meet John Doe [1941]). McBride wrote, "A probably apocryphal story has Riskin, angered in the late thirties by all the talk about 'The Capra Touch,' marching into Capra's office, dropping 120 pages of blank paper on the director's desk, and demanding, 'Here! Give that "The Capra Touch"!'" He propounded that "what Capra called his 'formula' did not emerge until he began working with Riskin material in the early 1930s," and that "once the formula had been established, Capra was content to repeat it, with minor embellishment, for the rest of his career, eventually to diminishing effect."

While identified as the "maker of Gone with the Wind" in his subsequent pictures' publicity, Selznick never failed to acknowledge the value of others' creative assistance. "The production of Gone with the Wind represents the complete devotion to their respective jobs, and the coordinated efforts, of a hundred artists, technicians, and department heads," he avowed in the program prepared for this film's premiere. Recognizing that "filmmaking in the era of the studio system is typically described as a collaborative process," Tino Balio argued in Grand Design that "it might be more accurate to say that filmmaking was a group effort involving a strict division of labor with a producer at the helm." Joan Didion questioned references to Hollywood movie-making as a "collaborative medium" earlier and in stronger terms. "A finished picture defies all attempts to analyze what makes it work or not work: the responsibility for its every frame is clouded not only in the accidents and compromises of production but in the clauses of its financing," she wrote in the 1970s. "To read David O. Selznick's instruction to his directors, writers, actors and department heads in Memo from David 0. Selznick is to come very close to the spirit of actually making a picture, a spirit not of collaboration but of armed conflict in which one antagonist has a contract assuring him nuclear capability."

Although Selznick's authority in the making of what remains arguably the world's most successful film is not contested, what is allowed rarely is the proposition that this producer's influence was beneficial. Drawing from materials preserved in Selznick's archives, the following chapter offers an inventory and analysis of Sidney Howard's successive versions of the screenplay and demonstrates that Selznick's monitoring of its progress and interaction in its development were critical to the success of Gone with the Wind—-contrary to most commentaries, which relate that the scriptwriting was unmanageable and that Selznick's interference was counterproductive. Previously undiscovered in the archives, the manuscript of Howard's initial draft, dated February 1937, is compared with this screenwriter's preliminary notes of December 1936, and with subsequent filmscript revisions of April, August, and November 1937. The mistaken notion that the original scenario was almost twice its actual length—and as such would have corresponded to a running time on the screen of six hours—has plagued the majority of the histories of this film's production. This fallacious claim is not as trivial as it may appear, because it supports the erroneous thesis that both Howard and Selznick were overwhelmed by the magnitude of Mitchell's text and that they were unable to abridge the narrative in any organized fashion. On the contrary, the threat of excessive duration was posed less by the filmscript's length than it was by predictions of Cukor's pacing of the performances.

In the manner of many Hollywood film productions, the screenwriting of Gone with the Wind continued through the period of its filming. In fact, filmmaking activities were not restricted by the conventional stages of Hollywood film production—namely, preproduction (or preparation), production (or filming), and post-production (or editing); for example, scenes featuring Vivien Leigh and portions of scenes requiring the use of doubles were retaken at the producer's command during the editing of the film. Nevertheless, in spite of most commentators' characterization of this film's production as a purely chaotic venture, script development may be represented reasonably by three groups of documents, all of which are available for comparison in the Selznick collection at the University of Texas at Austin. These documents consist of Howard's early drafts; revisions made by Selznick and Oliver Garrett as late as January 1939; and a revised shooting script (after George Cukor was replaced as director by Victor Fleming), the pages of which date through the final day of "principal photography" and are the work of a number of contributors, including Selznick and Ben Hecht. Also preserved are three successive states of the cutting continuity which document stages of the film's editing.

In his memoranda Selmick offered two reasons for delegating to the production designer, William Cameron Menzies, the "complete" delineation of the filmscript in the form of continuity designs and storyboard drawings; according to Selznick, he did so (1) to reduce set construction by implementation of special-effects cinematography; and (2) to "pre-cut" the film prior to its shooting, in order to minimize expenses anticipated because of the picture's size and use of Technicolor (a process which required multiple negatives). With respect to the latter purpose, a comparison in chapter 3 of extant continuity drawings and various states of the scenario of the celebrated fire sequence discloses that while a significant portion of the artwork does correspond to a specific script version, the linkage of shots that comprises this episode was revised subsequently with little influence from these production designs.

The legend that the various directors and technicians faithfully followed a "complete script in sketch form" is confuted also in chapter 4. Although most of the continuity designs for Gone with the Wind correspond to descriptions of shots specified in various versions of the filmscript, application of these drawings to the production remained subject to their acceptance by the producer, directors, and screenwriters. Ultimately, Menzies' unprecedented assignment to "storyboard" the entire film remained a tentative program which Selznick exploited—much as he did the filmscript's development—for the purpose of controlling the picture and its directors. In spite of the plethora of documentation of others' creative contributions that was preserved by the producer, all technical and artistic interpretations of narrative and imagery were subject to Selznick's executive authority. The studio remained his atelier, and the producer used his decision-making prowess to exercise his mastery of the collective filmmaking enterprise on and off the shooting sets.

In summary, this book's purpose is threefold. Analyses of materials preserved from the making of Gone with the Wind—namely, scripts, artwork, and production documents—correct the record of the novel's adaptation that has been offered in previous commentaries. In view of this emended history, Selznick's contributions are reappraised also, and the role played by this executive is acknowledged as having been a major creative force in the film's production. Finally, the complexity of the producer's collaboration with the many principal technical personnel employed on this project (i.e., the screenwriters, directors, cinematographers, as well as the art director and production designer) is examined in order to ameliorate an understanding of the conflict, chaos, and creativity involved not only in this particular effort but in classical Hollywood film production generally.

In contrast to Selznick's view of filmmaking as the "vision of one man," cinema had been described by the art historian Erwin Panofsky as a collaborative or collective enterprise during the period of this producer's greatest triumphs. In his essay "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," which was written in 1934 and revised in 1947, Panofsky provided the metaphor of cathedral building to which Capra referred much later. Panofsky proposed:

It might be said that a film, called into being by a cooperative effort in which all contributions have the same degree of permanence, is the nearest modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral; the role of the producer corresponding, more or less, to that of the bishop or archbishop; that of the director to that of the architect in chief; that of the scenario writers to that of the scholastic advisers establishing the iconographical program; and that of the actors, cameramen, cutters, sound men, make-up men and the diverse technicians to that of those whose work provided the physical entity of the finished product, from the sculptors, glass painters, bronze casters, carpenters and skilled masons down to the quarry men and woodsmen. And if you speak to any one of these collaborators he will tell you, with perfect bona fides, that his is really the most important job-which is quite true to the extent that it is indispensable.

However, the fact that the directors played a limited role when Selmick delegated responsibilities to them during a film's production also may call to mind the technical nature of the duties assumed by the generally anonymous architect or architects and other craftsmen attending the abbot Suger, who, in the twelfth century, supervised the construction of the cathedral of St.-Denis, a monumental undertaking on which Panofsky himself devoted specific study and writing elsewhere. The popular historian Will Durant provided a concise account of this extraordinary cleric's influence on the building of this earliest masterpiece of Gothic architecture:

In 1133 [Suger] brought together artists and artisans "from all lands" to raise and adorn a new home for France's patron St. Denis, and to house the tombs of the kings of France; he persuaded King Louis VII and the court to contribute the necessary funds.... We picture him rising early to superintend the construction, from the felling of the trees that he chose for timbers to the installation of the stained glass whose subjects he had selected and whose inscriptions he had composed.

A comparison of Selznick's approach to filmmaking with Suger's manner of introducing the Gothic style to western art is not meant to overlook differences between these two figures—their religious backgrounds differed enormously, as did their daily routines (there are accounts that the film producer habitually slept late into the morning, having worked long hours during the night); nor is any equation suggested, in terms of their value to our culture, between Selznick's memoranda and the abbot's Liber de Rebus in Administratione Sua Gestis—or, for that matter, between Gone with the Wind and St.-Denis, or between Selznick and Suger. (However, if one were to liken films to monuments, very few motion pictures come as quickly to mind as Gone with the Wind.) The point is that Selznick was a remarkable man within his own sphere of activity and that he utilized numerous artists and technicians in the creation of at least one work of epic dimension. The comparison is meant to suggest that his method is worthy of scholarly inquiry and serious discussion.