Dec 8, 2018 3 min read

Some movies are made by the seat of their pants. The classic movie “Casablanca,” set during World War II, was filmed during the war, so the scriptwriters would occasionally ad lib, borrowing from the day’s headlines in writing upcoming scenes.

Then there was another classic, “Gone with the Wind,” set during the Civil War, which producer David Selznick paid a then-unheard of $50,000 for the film rights. He hired George Cukor as his director, but a year later the script, written mostly by screenwriter Sidney Howard, was an unsatisfactory mish-mash (in Howard’s defense, turning a 1,000-page novel of such epic proportions into a two-hour-plus movie was no picnic). Further, despite a nationwide casting call in which 1,400 actresses were interviewed and 31 were given screen tests, at a cost of $100,000, Selznick had no actress to play the lead character, Scarlet O’Hara. He finally got Clark Gable to play Rhett Butler, but only because financial pressures forced him to sell the film’s worldwide distribution rights to MGM Studio for $1.5 million, so MGM, who had Gable under contract, consented to him playing Butler.

Things were so disorganized that an actress to play Scarlet O’Hara still hadn’t been cast when the first scene was shot – Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s burning of Atlanta.

Finally, having seen British actress Vivien Leigh in several movies, Selznick thought she might be right for the part and, serendipitously, her agent was Myron Selznick, David’s brother.

She got the part and filming began, but immediately Clark Gable clashed with Cukor, and Cukor was replaced by director Victor Fleming, who didn’t like the script, forcing Selznick to hire another screenwriter, Ben Hecht, to rewrite the entire script in five days. Hecht rewrote the first half, Selznick (ironically, with Sidney Howard’s help) rewrote the second half, and finally the movie was filmed, edited and finished.

It premiered this week (Dec. 15) in 1939, in Atlanta, and was a huge success, earning nearly $400 million, receiving 13 Academy Award nominations and winning eight, including a best supporting actress Oscar for Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American so honored.

As a postscript: To this day the most famous scene in the movie – the American Film Institute deemed it the number-one movie line of all time – is when Scarlett beseeches Rhett not to leave her, asking him, “Where shall I go?”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” he replies before leaving. Fearing the word “damn” would be censored – moral standards were different back then – Fleming re-shot the scene with Butler saying, “Frankly, my dear, I just don’t care.”

The censors allowed the “damn,” but it being a curse word, fined Selznick $5,000 for including it.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.