Get the latest gossip

Gone With the Wind’s Secrets, Scandals and Lost Scenes: How the Film Struggled With Historical Realities

David Vincent Kimel opens up about the controversy surrounding Gone With the Wind and revisiting the film's message in this exclusive interview with Closer.

Eighty-five years ago, Gone With the Wind bowed in theaters and breathed Technicolor life into the tragic romance of Rhett and Scarlett O’Hara set amid the Civil War and Reconstruction periods of American history. “In earlier drafts, the producer entertained the idea of showing a much more brutal depiction of slavery, more violent and cruel than what we see in the book,” Kimel, a historian who is writing Lie, Steal, Cheat, or Kill, about the making of GWTW, tells Closer. Gone With the Wind ’s credits list only one writer, Sidney Howard, but it was an open secret that many scribes worked on the project, including literary lion F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was brought in to bring some humor to the role of Scarlett’s Aunt Pittypat.

Get the Android app