Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936) Don't miss our film screening extravaganza!  Sunday, Nov. 19, from 7-11 p.m., location TBA.  Invite your friends.  Come in costume. Snacks will be served.

Published in 1936 and topping the hardcover best-seller list for two consecutive years, Gone With the Wind also won the Pulitzer Prize and is still one of the best-selling American books of the 20th Century.  David Selznick's movie version was first released in 1939; coincidentally, Fine Line Cinema reissued it last summer (July 1998) in "glorious new technicolor" (it is not "colorized"; the movie was always in technicolor but the color has been refurbished) and with "digitally remastered sound."  We'll be screening the brand-new DVD version this Sunday.  Below we have put some links, some images, and some ideas that might get you started thinking critically about this book and this movie, on which we will spend the next two class weeks.
 

Click here for a link to the Internet Movie Database, which will search information about the film version. It also, however, is chock-full of advertisements.

Click here for a link to Barnes and Noble.com, who are selling book "tie-ins" to coincide with the reissue of GWTW in the summer of 1998. It reproduces two different covers, as well as some critical and historical books about GWTW. For instance, you might think about the fact that the familiar book cover above, the edition we are reading for this course, reproduces a film poster from 1969, not the original film poster.

As some of you may be aware, Ted Turner now owns the MGM film archives. There is a poster floating somewhere out in cyberspace (which now, unfortunately, we can't find again, but extra credit points to anyone who finds it and saves the address) which reproduces one of the original movie posters, and which has below it the legend "copyright 1939, Ted Turner" or "Turner Classic Movies" or something. The point, of course, is that neither was Ted Turner alive nor had he created a film corporation in 1939. When he "bought" MGM, he changed its name. It is worth thinking about the ways in which current means of mass reproduction (the web included) allow Turner to rewrite history, and to imply that he has always been around and in charge.

Click here for the story of MGM's acquisition of the film rights to the book.

Click here for links to many of the other film posters. Below are reproductions of a few of them. You might think about the different representations--what are they selling, and how?
 
 
 

Click here for a link to "Sherrie's Home Page," which debates the rival merits of Gone With the Wind (the film) and Titanic. Sherrie also has a good selection of interesting film links, including "the making of the film."

Click here for "Scarlett Fever," including "Windie news" and "GWTW classifieds."

Click here for "franklymydear.com" and think about the way that phrase has entered the language (remembering that the censors almost wouldn't allow Clark Gable to say "damn" on film at all). This site includes a "Margaret Mitchell House and Tara Virtual Tour."

Below is an etching of the change in  female fashions from 1860-1870, the decade covered by the book:

Below are female fashions from the 1930s, the decade in which the book and movie were released:

Mattel's Barbie and Ken as Scarlett O' Hara and Rhett Butler (released in 1994):