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

In a scene that didn’t make the final cut of 1939’s Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler sits alone in his bedroom, drinking and fondling a gun. A knock at his door interrupts him from his dark thoughts. He rises and finds Melanie Hamilton standing there.

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. The movie “comes to the screen as one of the truly great films, destined for record-breaking box office business everywhere,” gushed John C. Flinn Sr. in Variety on December 19, 1939, noting that despite its three-hour-37-minute running time, “it demonstrates again that in entertainment, the best is the most easily sold.”

As of 2020, GWTW was still the highest-grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation) due in part to its legendary performances by Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. In 1976, 47 percent of all American TV viewers tuned in for its NBC debut.

In recent years, a backlash against GWTW’s sugarcoated depiction of slavery and the use of racist stereotypes has grown louder. HBO even pulled the film from its streaming library in 2020 to add a new introduction providing historical context. What modern audiences and even longtime “Windies,” a.k.a Gone With the Wind superfans, might not know is that the filmmakers struggled with how to bring the complex, racially charged contents of Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the big screen from the beginning.

Breaking Down Gone With the Wind’s Depiction of the Old South

Around the same time as HBO’s action, Yale graduate student David Vincent Kimel purchased an original GWTW shooting script and discovered it contained several scenes that never made it into the movie. Many of them depicted a more realistic view of slavery. “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. “Producer David O. Selznick agonized that he didn’t want to create a monument of hate” toward Black people.

As early as 1936, a representative of the NAACP contacted Selznick urging him to avoid some of the most offensive content of the novel. It seems that the producer took some of this criticism to heart by eliminating the n-word, which appears in Mitchell’s novel and early versions of the script. “Selznick took the word out as well as explicit references to the KKK,” says Kimel.

He also added a few moments that appear to condemn slavery — although they are subtle. “For example, enslaved workers forced to dig ditches for the South sing “Go Down Moses” with the refrain ‘Let my people go,’” says Kimel.

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. Other writers also came and went. “The version of the script that showed slavery at its most brutal was written by a passionate but clumsy writer,” explains Kimel. “The filmmakers ultimately leaned in to a more romanticized view of the Old South that would be popular with white audiences and make Scarlett less unsympathetic.”

Vivien Leigh Was ‘At Her Best’ in the Film

Would GWTW have been as successful if audiences weren’t rooting for Scarlett? It’s unlikely. Vivien is at her best in the film when conveying the heroine’s grit, courage and determination against terrible odds. Likewise, if Clark’s Rhett weren’t a man whose cavalier charm masked a good heart, generations of women wouldn’t have swooned over him. Selznick created a timeless love story with flawed but relatable characters, even if his other choices reflected a soft-focus antebellum South that never existed.

Mickey Kuhn, who played Beau Wilkes in the film and died in 2022 at age 90, was able to reconcile art with GWTW’s inaccuracies. “Yes, it’s probably prejudiced,” he told Closer, “but it was one of the first truly great movies that came out of Hollywood. There wasn’t another studio that had the guts to do it.”

Even if you don’t agree with the filmmaker’s choices, GWTW might still have something to offer nearly a century after its debut. “Sometimes the most important art to revisit is art that infuriates and challenges us,” says Kimel, “not just art that affirms what we already believe.”