Gone With The Wind could have been even MORE controversial
a newly discovered script from Gone With The Wind has revealed the bitter consequences of the presentation of slavery in the controversial 1939 blockbuster.
The documents shed new light on the rows between production staff and writers over how the race treated before filming.
It features lost scenes and correspondence between workers on set – who raised issues during every step of production.
The script has now been bought at auction by historian David Vincent Kimel for $15,000, who estimated it to be one of a half dozen of its kind, according to the single.
It is one of the legendary ‘Rainbow Scripts’ from the film’s production, so named for the different colored pages on which the film’s obsessive producer, David O. Selznick, demanded that different parts of the script be printed.
After production, Selznick demanded that all copies of the script be destroyed. Kimel – a self-confessed Gone with the Wind obsessive – said the few that remain reveal the many changes the four-hour film underwent, but the copy he obtained revealed a wealth of previously unknown insights into how the crew struggled with the depiction of slavery and race relations.
The newly discovered Gone with the Wind script. There are reportedly six left
Clarke Gable and Vivien Leigh play Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind
Racist names and descriptions in the recently discovered Gone with the Wind Script
According to Kimel, the script revealed the many ways Selznick and his writers argued over whether to portray slavery in brutal, honest terms, or to lean into sympathetic storytelling and portray a romantic antebellum Southern landscape.
The Rainbow script he got his hands on tended to show racism in a more brutal setting, with scenes of Scarlett O’Hara being cruel to her slaves.
In one scene from the script, the protagonist threatened slave girl Prissy with lashes and threatened to sell her so she would never see her family again.
‘I’ll sell you down the river. You will never see your mother or anyone you know again and I will also sell you for a field boy,” the script reads, according to Kimel.
Although the line was cut from the final film, Scarlett offers similar threats — even slapping Prissy — but the harshness of the interaction was significantly reduced, according to the historian.
The script is also full of racist descriptions of characters, some of which are taken from Margaret Mitchell’s bestseller of the same name from which the film was adapted.
In the book, Mitchell described a black man who attacks Scarlett as “a stocky black nigger with shoulders and chest like a gorilla.”
The same character in the Rainbow script is listed as “Gorilla Negro” and, as in the book, is described in the script as “squatting and square, with shoulders and chest like a gorilla.”
He is also joined by a “degenerate white man,” who, despite being “ragged” and apparently unintelligent, commands the black man.
Inside the Rainbow Script was correspondence between Selznick and his publicist Val Lewton about whether or not to include the n-word in the film—a move he favored, as long as it was uttered by “the better niggers.”
Selznick requested that Lewton consult “some local Negro leaders on this subject.” Lewton responded by saying that “the n***s hate being called ‘n***s,'” Kimel said.
Producer David O. Selznick was notoriously obsessed with details in Gone with the Wind
A cut scene in which Scarlett O’Hara is particularly brutal to one of her slaves, Prissy
Correspondence between Selznick and his publicist regarding the inclusion of the n-word
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Recommendations on How to Depict Romantic Slaveholding in the South
The Rainbow Script also features contributions from F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, who was hired as a writer for the film project and tasked with writing romantic interpretations of the pre-Civil War South.
One correspondence saw Fitzgerald writing recommendations to Selznick on how best to convey a dewy perspective from Antebellum to the South for the film’s opening scenes.
“To immediately suggest the romance of the old South… I’d like to see a two or three minute montage of the finest pre-war shots imaginable… I’d like… to see niggers sing…
“Then we could go into the story of disappointed love, betrayed overseers, toiling negroes and quarreling girls.”
Fitzgerald was eventually fired from the film after Selznick decided he wasn’t capable enough at humor writing.
The script also cut scenes showing freed black slaves enjoying the misery of the former masters.
Such examples included a moment where Prissy “nodded happily” at the news that a character’s son was injured in battle, and a description that the black characters “revel in the drama of disaster.”
And as Scarlett wallows in the squalor of her newfound poverty, the Rainbow Script described black characters as holding “enraptured despair” and “plain joy” at the situation, and expressed “sorrowful joy at the bad news.”