Gone with the Wind Quiz: Test Your Knowledge!

Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American epic historical romance film produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming. The film is based on the 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell. It tells the story of Scarlett O'Hara, the strong-willed daughter of a Georgia plantation owner, and her romantic pursuit of Ashley Wilkes, who is married to his cousin, Melanie Hamilton, and her subsequent marriage to Rhett Butler. The film had a troubled production and the role of Scarlett was difficult to cast, with 1,400 unknown women interviewed for the part. The film received generally positive reviews upon its release and received ten Academy Awards from thirteen nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actress. It became the highest-earning film made up to that point and held the record for over a quarter of a century. When adjusted for monetary inflation, it is still the highest-grossing film in history. Although the film has been criticized as historical negationism, it has been credited with triggering changes in the way in which African Americans were depicted cinematically. The casting of the two lead roles became a complex, two-year endeavor, with Clark Gable eventually being cast as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh being cast as Scarlett O'Hara. The studio believed that if the Southern accent was not accurately depicted, it could prove detrimental to the film's success, so Susan Myrick and Will A. Price were hired to coach the actors on speaking with a Southern drawl. Sidney Howard was the original screenplay writer, and the final script was remarkably close to his version. The fact that Howard's name alone appears on the credits may have been as much a gesture to his memory as to his writing, for in 1939 Sidney Howard died at age 48 in a farm-tractor accident, and before the movie's premiere.Gone with the Wind: A Summary

The screenplay for the film was written by various writers, with David O. Selznick overseeing the project.
Screenwriter Ben Hecht was brought in to write the final screenplay in just seven days, working up to 20 hours a day with Selznick and director Victor Fleming.
Principal photography began on January 26, 1939, and ended on July 1, with post-production work continuing until November 11, 1939.
Director George Cukor was replaced by Victor Fleming after only three weeks of shooting due to disagreements with Selznick and Clark Gable's discomfort at working with him.
Cinematographer Lee Garmes was replaced by Ernest Haller after a month of shooting footage that was considered too dark.
Most of the filming was done on the Selznick studio lot, with location scenes shot in California.
The film was estimated to have cost $3.85 million to produce, making it the second most expensive film made up to that point.
The film's score was composed by Max Steiner, who spent twelve weeks working on it and drew on folk and patriotic music for inspiration.
The film premiered at the Loew's Grand Theatre in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, and was attended by an estimated 300,000 people.
The film was re-released several times, with the 1954 reissue being the first time it was shown in widescreen and the 1989 reissue receiving a complete audio and video restoration.
The film made its U.S. television debut in 1976 on HBO, and its network television debut later that year on NBC, becoming the highest-rated television program ever presented on a single network.
The film has received generally positive reviews, with some reviewers finding it too long and others criticizing its portrayal of race and slavery.Gone with the Wind is a film that has received mixed reactions from critics, with many praising its casting and fidelity to the novel, but criticizing its lengthy running time and weak second half. The film won a record-breaking eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress, and was the most profitable film ever made up to that point. However, the film has also been criticized for its depiction of black people and its "whitewashing" of the issue of slavery. Despite this, the film broke attendance records and sold an estimated sixty million tickets across the United States within four years of its release. It has remained immensely popular with audiences and has been voted the most popular film in two nationwide polls of Americans undertaken by Harris Interactive in 2008 and 2014. However, in the 1970s, some critics re-evaluated the film and found it to be forgettable and badly written, with limited rewatch value and lacking a sense of being "created" or "directed".Analysis of 'Gone with the Wind'
The film was described as "the best and most durable piece of popular entertainment to have come off the Hollywood assembly lines" in a review by Richard Schickel.
The film has been ranked 235th in Sight & Sound's prestigious decennial critics poll in 2012 and 97th best American film by sixty-two international film critics polled by the BBC in 2015.
In 1977, the American Film Institute voted it the most popular film, ranked fourth on its "100 Greatest Movies" list in 1998, and sixth place in the tenth anniversary edition in 2007.
The film was voted 322nd in the 2012 edition of the decennial Sight & Sound poll and selected as the ninth best "directorial achievement" in a Directors Guild of America members poll.
In 2014, it placed fifteenth in an extensive poll undertaken by The Hollywood Reporter, which balloted every studio, agency, publicity firm, and production house in the Hollywood region.
The film was one of the twenty-five inaugural films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress in 1989.
The film has been criticized for perpetuating Civil War myths and black stereotypes, with the white women being elegant, menfolk noble, and black slaves dutiful and content.
The film has been described as a "regression" that promotes both the myth of the black rapist and the honorable and defensive role of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.
The film has been accused of combining romance and rape by making them indistinguishable from each other, and of reinforcing a notion about forced sex: that women secretly enjoy it.
The film has been explicitly referenced, satirized, dramatized, and analyzed on numerous occasions across a range of media.
Margaret Mitchell, the author of the novel, resisted pressure to write a sequel from Selznick and MGM, and her brother authorized a sequel that would be jointly produced by MGM and Universal Studios on a budget of $12 million in 1975.
The idea was revived in the 1990s, and a sequel was finally produced in 1994 in the form of a television miniseries titled Scarlett.