Frankly, my dear, they toned down the horrors of slavery
In the opening scenes of Gone With The Wind, the audience is told of an American Old South where ‘‘gallantry took its last bow’’. This vision of an era when black people lived under crushing oppression became more controversial with each passing decade, and has complicated the legacy of a film that smashed box office records and is still widely considered one of the greatest ever made.
A historian and fan of the film has found an early script, however, which shows – in scenes that never made the final edit – a tug-of-war between the writers who produced the screenplay over how slavery should be depicted.
It offers a tantalising suggestion that Gone With The Wind could have provided a more realistic portrait of race relations in scenes that were cut from the finished film.
David Vincent Kimel, a PhD candidate who studies ancient history, noticed the script on a usedbook website in 2020, and bought it for US$15,000 (NZ$24,000). It had belonged to Fred Schuessler, a casting director.
‘‘There was one page where there was content that I knew was not in the movie,’’ Kimel said. ‘‘I was banking on the idea that this was one of the last surviving ‘rainbow scripts’.’’
The scripts were given this name because of the multicoloured pages inserted to reflect changes ordered by David O Selznick, the film’s demanding producer. After the film was finished, Selznick ordered that all of them be destroyed.
‘‘There may be half a dozen in existence,’’ Kimel said. ‘‘I know of only three.’’
One that was sold at Sotheby’s had a less compelling version of the film’s most famous line, with Rhett Butler saying: ‘‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t care.’’
Kimel believes his script was one of the last produced before the film was shot.
‘‘The depiction of slavery is much harsher than what’s seen in the movie,’’ he said. There were descriptions of beatings and threats.
Kimel said he also saw evidence of a struggle between the many writers Selznick hired, fired and sometimes rehired, who held different perspectives on slavery.
Among the realists was Oliver Garrett, who added scenes absent from the novel by Margaret Mitchell, of Scarlett O’Hara beating house slave Prissy.
Kimel said he was fascinated to see that ‘‘the fight over the interpretation of American history’’ was going on even as Gone With The Wind was made.
Until the 1960s, its version of history was broadly in line with mainstream opinion, he said, but even during the film’s production ‘‘people were starting to think more about, ‘Should we use the n-word? Should we have a consultant of colour on set’?’’
Dr Kimberly Nichele Brown, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the latest revelations were ‘‘useful’’ to place the film in its historical context, and widened contemporary discussion. She referred to HBO Max’s decision to remove Gone With The Wind from its streaming service for ‘‘racist depictions’’.
‘‘Even when this film was being produced, you had people debating the things that we are talking about now, like romanticism versus realism.’’