HBO Max decides to temporarily remove ‘Gone With the Wind’

HBO Max has removed from its catalog “Gone With the Wind,” the 1939 movie long considered a triumph of American cinema but one that romanticizes the Civil War-era South while glossing over its racial sins.

The streaming service pledged to eventually bring the film back “with a discussion of its historical context” while denouncing its racial missteps, a spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday.

Set on a plantation and in Atlanta, the film won multiple Academy Awards, including best picture and best supporting actress for Hattie McDaniel, the first African American to win an Oscar, and it remains among the most celebrated movies in cinematic history. But its rose-tinted depiction of the antebellum South and its blindness to the horrors of slavery have long been criticized, and that scrutiny was renewed this week as protests over police brutality and the death of George Floyd continued to pull the United States into a wide-ranging conversation about race.

“‘Gone With the Wind’ is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society,” an HBO Max spokesperson said in a statement. “These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”

HBO Max, owned by AT&T, pulled the film Tuesday, one day after John Ridley, the screenwriter of “12 Years a Slave,” wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times calling for its removal. Ridley said he understood that films were snapshots of their moment in history, but that “Gone With the Wind” was still used to “give cover to those who falsely claim that clinging to the iconography of the plantation era is a matter of ‘heritage, not hate.’”

By several measures, the film was one of the most successful in American history. It received eight competitive Academy Awards and remains the highest-grossing film ever when adjusting for inflation. In 1998, it placed sixth on the American Film Institute’s list of greatest films of all time.

Based on a 1936 book by Margaret Mitchell, the film chronicles the love affair of Scarlett O’Hara, the daughter of a plantation owner, and Rhett Butler, a charming gambler.

AP 1939 Spotlights frame the Tara facade of the Loew’s Grand Theater on Peachtree Street for the movie premiere of “Gone With the Wind” in Atlanta.