Gone with the wind 70th Anniversary
- Official Gone With The Wind 70th DVD site [Warner Bros]
- VIDEOS
- Related News
- Gone With The Wind 70th Anniversary Launch Event (Photo Gallery)
- It’s All Greek Tragedy to Me - Gone with the Wind: 70th Anniversary Edition (1939) (DVD review)
- A restored and remastered 'Gone With the Wind': Digital software helps keep the 1939 film, now on Blu-ray, looking as good as ever. [Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2009]
- Marietta to re-premiere ‘Gone With the Wind' [Access Atlanta]
- 'Gone with the Wind' returning in Marietta [Marietta Daily Journal, November 8]
- A nostalgic day set for Marietta November 13 [Marietta Daily Journal]
- 'Wind' actress recalls movie, Atlanta's past November 14 [Marietta Daily Journal]
- Gone with the record November 14 [Marietta Daily Journal]
- Southern accents: At 70, ‘Gone With the Wind’ still sparks debate about Scarlett, sex and slavery [New York Post, November 8, 2009]
- Clark Gable dancing in the movies
- The Associated Press story featuring Ann Rutherford [Kuwait Times, November 17, 2009]
- Scarlett's sis remembers the making of a legend [MiamiHerald.com, Nov 16, 2009]
- The Stars are Everywhere! Scarlett O'Hara.org's Webmistress Leigh Mills Report on her GWTW 70th experience.
Georgia, beyond Tara
Following Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind around the Peach State
AUTHOR: Mitchell Smyth
SOURCE: National Post
PUBLISHED ON: Friday, November 13, 2009
ATLANTA, GA - The Remington portable typewriter sits in a desk by the window. Nearby is a stack of manila folders. A towel is draped over the back of a chair.
"This is where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With The Wind, says Joanna Arrietta of the Atlanta History Center. "She wrote it over 10 years. She put the pages in the folders and if anyone dropped in she threw the towel over the lot because she wanted to keep it a secret.''
We're in the basement apartment at 990 Peachtree St., where Mitchell - known to friends as Peggy - lived from 1925 until 1932, pecking away at her typewriter on a book that only her husband, John Marsh, knew existed. Mitchell, a former Atlanta Constitution feature writer, hated the place - she called it "the dump'' - but it was all she and Marsh, a PR man, could afford.
The apartment was in a house that is now the Mitchell Museum, and the spotlight is on it this fall and winter with the 70th anniversary of the premier, in Atlanta, of David O. Selznick's Gone With the Wind, which opened in Loew's Theater (long since demolished) on Dec. 15, 1939.
To commemorate the anniversary, the Atlanta History Center, which operates the museum, will display the famous green "curtain dress'' worn by Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh). Behind the Mitchell house there's a museum devoted to the movie. Artifacts include the doorway of Tara. For more information on both museums, visit margaretmitchellhouse.com.
The house is one stop on a (mostly walking) tour of Margaret Mitchell sites in downtown Atlanta. A sampling:
The Georgian Terrace Hotel (659 Peachtree St.) is where Mitchell - miffed when a "friend'' scoffed at the idea that Peggy Mitchell could write a book - gave her manuscript to literary scout Harold Latham of publishers Macmillan. Peggy once scandalized blueblood Atlanta society in the ballroom by performing the risqué French apache dance with (horror of horrors!) a Jewish boy.
On Peachtree Street at 13th, on Aug. 11, 1949, Mitchell darted into the path of a car speeding around the curve. She died in hospital five days later. The driver, an off-duty cabbie, was jailed for 11 months, although witnesses generally agreed that Mitchell was at fault.
The Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, at Peachtree at Forsyth, is on the site of the former Carnegie Library where Mitchell did much of her research. There's a Gone With the Wind exhibit on the third floor that includes many of the books she used for research, her typewriter (the one in "the dump"' is not the original), her 1937 Pulitzer Prize and a photocopy of one of the pages of the manuscript.
Margaret Mitchell Square, across the street from the library, has a fountain and a sculpture symbolizing the columns of Tara, the plantation house in GWTW. Mitchell probably wouldn't have been pleased, for the columned house was a Hollywood invention: She insisted that Tara "had no columns, no architectural plan and was very ugly.''
Gravesite. Mitchell is buried in Oakland Cemetery (240 Oakland Ave. SE), beneath a simple headstone with the word Marsh in the middle, and her name, and husband John's, on either side. He died in 1952. A map is available at the cemetery office.
In Marietta, 30 km north of Atlanta, there's another GWTW museum, Scarlett on the Square (mariettasquare.com). It is staging a pre-anniversary gala on Nov. 13 and 14 that will feature minor players from the film, including Cammie King, who played Scarlett and Rhett Butler's daughter, Bonnie Blue. The movie will be screened in the restored Art Deco building, the Earl Smith Strand Theatre.
The Road To Tara Museum (visitscarlett.com) in Jonesboro, 30 km south of Atlanta, will open its doors Dec. 11-13 to mark the anniversary. On display, among other artifacts, will be the "pantalets" (long drawers) that viewers may recall from the scene where the slave Mammy (Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel) cinches Scarlett's corset before the barbecue at Seven Oaks.
Movies Gone With the Wind Museum honors film’s anniversary
AUTHOR: KAY POWELL
SOURCE: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
PUBLISHED ON: Friday, February 13, 2009
Marietta museum being filmed by documentary crew as ‘GWTW’ turns 70
That most enduring of love stories - Scarlet O’Hara and Rhett Butler - celebrates 70 years on the big screen this year. Marietta’s Gone With the Wind Museum is to be part of that celebration.
Warner Bros. plans to issue a special edition DVD boxed set of the movie and a documentary about the film that premiered in Atlanta on Dec. 15, 1939, said museum director Connie Sutherland.
Connie Sutherland, director of the Gone With the Wind Museum will be filmed for a Warner Bros. documentary for the 70th anniversary of the film, which premiered in Atlanta.
"Gone With the Wind,"the book, was written by Atlanta’s Margaret Mitchell. Published in 1936, it is the most widely read book in America after the Bible.
The Marietta museum, host to 10,000 visitors a year, houses memorabilia on Mitchell, her book, the movie and cast. Only there can Windies — as die-hard GWTW fans are called — see an original dress worn by Vivian Leigh as Scarlett in the movie.
Referred to as the bengaline honeymoon gown, it’s the one Scarlett wore when she married Rhett Butler. It is the only original dress worn by Leigh as Scarlett that is on display for the public to view, Sutherland said. Every few years, she and Dr. Christopher Sullivan of Akron, Ohio, owner of the museum’s collection, carefully pack up the dress and other artifacts for loan to other exhibits.
Recently, two chairs from the Scarlett and Rhett dining room scene were added to the museum’s collection.
"We are kind of a mecca for Windies,"Sutherland said. "They count on us. We’re somewhat the keepers of the flame."
That’s why the documentary crew is to be in Marietta Feb. 27 to interview Sutherland and film the museum. Sutherland helped the film crew locate several of the remaining cast members. The hope is that some cast members can be at the museum to be included in the documentary, she said.
Sutherland admits she has lost track but has read the book at least six times and seen the entire movie about 25 times. The movie plays daily at the museum.
"I’ve always been a ‘Gone With the Wind’ fan. Mainly, I’m a Margaret Mitchell fan. I’ve always had a connection with her,"Sutherland said. "In the movie, the person I think was the core of the story is Hattie McDaniel. She’s so different than Mammy. She was the one person who knew Scarlett for who she was, for how she was.”
"There is something mystical and magic about ‘Gone With the Wind,"she said. "The reason people come here is the romance. Rhett and Scarlett didn’t even wind up together at the end of the movie. People will assume they went back together because Scarlett got everything else she wanted.”
IF YOU GO
Gone With the Wind Museum
18 Whitlock Ave., Marietta, 770-794-5145
www.gwwmarietta.com
Museum and gift shop open Monday - Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Admission rates vary from $4 to $7
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