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TO newly discovered script for Gone with the Wind has revealed the bitter consequences of the presentation of slavery in the controversial 1939 blockbuster.
The documents shed new light on arguments between production staff and writers over how he covered the race before filming it.
It includes missing scenes, as well as correspondence between workers on set, who raised issues at every step of its production.
The script was now purchased at auction by historian David Vincent Kimel for $15,000, who estimated it to be one of half a dozen of its kind, according to the anklet.
It’s one of the legendary ‘Rainbow Scripts’ of the film’s production, named for the different colored pages on which the film’s obsessive producer, David O. Selznick, demanded different sections of the script to be printed.
After production, Selznick demanded that all copies of the script be destroyed. Kimel, a self-proclaimed Gone with the Wind obsessive, said the few that remain reveal the many changes the four-hour film underwent, but the copy he purchased revealed a trove of previously unknown insights into how the team dealt with his depiction of slavery. and race relations.
The newly discovered Gone with the Wind. It is said that there are about six left
Clarke Gable and Vivien Leigh play Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind
Racist names and descriptions in the recently discovered Gone with the Wind script
According to Kimel, the script revealed the many ways in which Selznick and his writers wrangled over whether to portray slavery in brutal and honest terms, or lean toward sympathetic narratives and portray a romantic antebellum southern landscape.
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 a scene from the script, the protagonist threatens the slave Prissy with a beating and threatens to sell her so she will never see her family again.
I’ll sell you down the river. You will never see your mother or anyone you know again and I will also sell you for a farmhand,” the script says, according to Kimel.
Although the line was cut from the final film, Scarlett offers similar threats, and even slaps Prissy, but the harshness of the interaction was reduced considerably, according to the historian.
The script is also littered with racist character descriptions, some of which were taken from Margaret Mitchell’s novel of the same name, from which the film was adapted.
In the book, Mitchell described a black man who attacks Scarlett as “a stocky black man with shoulders and chest like a gorilla.”
The same character in Rainbow Script appears as ‘Black Gorilla’ and, as in the book, is described in the script as ‘squatty and square, with shoulders and chest like a gorilla’.
He is also accompanied by a ‘White Degenerate’, who despite being ‘rags’ and evidently unintelligent orders the black man around.
Included in Rainbow Script was correspondence between Selznick and his publicist Val Lewton about whether or not to include the n-word in the film, a move he was in favor of, as long as it was uttered by ‘the best blacks’.
Selznick requested that Lewton consult “some local black leaders on the matter.” Lewton responded by saying “blacks resent being called black,” Kimel said.
Producer David O. Selznick was notoriously detail-obsessed on Gone with the Wind.
A cut scene in which Scarlett O’Hara is particularly brutal with one of her slaves, Prissy.
Correspondence between Selznick and his publicist on whether to include the n-word
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s recommendations on how to portray a romantic slave-owning South
The Rainbow Script also includes contributions from The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was hired on the film project as a writer and tasked with writing in-life romanticized interpretations of the pre-Civil War South.
In one correspondence, Fitzgerald could be seen writing recommendations to Selznick on how the film’s opening scenes might best convey a dank Antebellum southern perspective.
“To immediately suggest the romance of the old South… I would like to see a two or three minute montage of the most beautiful shots imaginable before the war… I would like to see… blacks singing…
Then we could enter the story of disappointed love, the betrayed foremen, the blacks who toil and the girls who fight.
Fitzgerald was ultimately fired from the film after Selznick decided that he was not capable enough to write humor.
The script also cut scenes showing freed black slaves reveling in the misery of their former masters.
Such instances included a moment where Prissy “nods happily” at the news that a character’s son was injured in battle, and a description that the black characters “enjoyed the drama of the disaster”.
And as Scarlett wallows in the misery of her newfound poverty, Rainbow Script described the black characters with a “haunted despair” and “obvious delight” at the situation, and expressed a “sad delight at the bad news.”
A cut scene in which Rhett Butler considers committing suicide. it was cut from the movie
A scene where Scarlett O’Hara is cruel to her slave Prissy. It was cut from the final scene.
The script also revealed many other scenes, some of which were filmed, before being cut from the final production.
One scene showed a drunken Rhett Butler contemplating suicide before being interrupted by another character, and another showed a man dressed as a woman stealing a large handful of dresses as looters ransacked Atlanta.
A cut scene showed the looters carrying off the carcasses of the pigs as Atlanta burned in the background, rendering their silhouettes with “a strange effect of half-human, half-animal figures”.
There was a scene cut from the end of the film that provided a flashback to Butler and O’Hara’s relationship, along with a scene where a young Scarlett burped and her sister called her a pig and slapped her.