Gone With the Wind, released in 1939, is considered the most profitable film of all time. The Guinness World Records estimates its global adjusted gross box office at $3.75 billion in 2022.

Based on the 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell, the three-hour and forty-two-minute epic is set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. It tells the story of the headstrong Scarlett O’Hara, daughter of a plantation owner, and her romance with a war profiteer named Rhett Butler.

The film was a passion project of producer David O. Selznick, of Selznick International Pictures. He bought the rights from Mitchell for $50,000 in 1936, a month after the book was published. It took 15 scriptwriters to wrestle the novel into a screenplay. Three directors worked on the film.

The casting of Clark Gable held up production for two years. Gable was under contract to MGM, which was run by Selznick’s father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, with whom he had a strained relationship. Eventually, Mayer agreed to lend Gable to GWTW if Selznick would let MGM finance half the budget and distribute the film worldwide for half the profits. Selznick agreed, as he didn’t have the money. But he had to wait till the end of 1938, when his distribution deal with United Artists expired.

Then, Gable put up a fight. An insecure actor, he didn’t feel he could live up to the hype of the role. But he was contracted to MGM and couldn’t risk suspension as he was in the middle of an expensive divorce and impatient to marry his new lover, Carole Lombard. He signed.

Still, it was the casting of Scarlett that took most of the headlines. The role required an actress to play from ages 16 to 28. As soon as the announcement of the film’s production was made in 1937, Selznick announced a nationwide casting call to drum up publicity and keep the picture in the headlines till he was ready for production.

Talent scouts were sent to theaters, drama schools, and small towns in the South. Advertisements were placed in local newspapers. Selznick received thousands of letters from women proclaiming themselves to be his Scarlett. 1,400 unknowns were interviewed at a cost of $100,000. Fans and fan clubs sent letters to Selznick demanding their favorite actress be cast.

In a contest run by a fan magazine, Bette Davis got 40% of the public’s vote. One hopeful and determined woman had herself wrapped in a package and delivered to Selznick’s home on Christmas day. She emerged from the packaging, which was a replica of the novel, dressed as a Southern belle and announced to Selznick that she was his Scarlett.

Many Hollywood stars lobbied for the role, including Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. The latter was particularly aggressive and told Selznick, “I am Scarlett O’Hara! The role is practically written for me,” according to Charles Higham in “Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn. Selznick reportedly replied “I can’t imagine Rhett Butler chasing you for 12 years.”

128 actresses were auditioned. Of those, 32 were given screen tests – including Joan Bennett, Lana Turner, Miriam Hopkins, Loretta Young, Susan Hayward, and Tallulah Bankhead. The two finalists were Paulette Goddard and Vivien Leigh. They rose to the next level of the selection process and got to be screen tested in Technicolor. Goddard ended up losing the role partly because of her liaison with Charlie Chaplin. The two were only married in common law and Selznick was afraid of the backlash from the public if he cast an actress who was considered by many as Chaplin’s mistress.

Selznick had seen Leigh’s movies Fire Over England and A Yank at Oxford but had dismissed the possibility of casting a British actress in the coveted role of Scarlett. But Leigh was determined to be considered and came to the US, ostensibly to be with her lover, Laurence Olivier, who was shooting Wuthering Heights in Los Angeles.

Myron Selznick, the producer’s brother, had a talent agency that represented Olivier in the United Kingdom. Leigh asked him to introduce her to his brother. Myron took her to the Culver City set of the burning of Atlanta, where sets from King Kong, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Garden of Allah were repainted and set on fire. That day was December 10, 1938, before principal photography had started. Myron said to his brother “I want you to meet your Scarlett O’Hara.” The producer would recall the encounter in indelible terms: “If you have a picture of someone in mind and then, suddenly, you see that person, no more evidence is necessary … I’ll never recover from that first look.”

Selznick must have been aware that Leigh was having an affair with Olivier. Both were married at the time as well, he to actress Jill Esmond, she to Leigh Holman, with whom she had a daughter. Both took pains to assure him that they were getting divorced and intended to marry each other, but Selznick posted a guard outside their house to make sure no one found out about their living arrangements.

Director George Cukor took to Leigh at once. He had said he was looking for an actress “charged with electricity who seemed possessed of the devil.” Leigh’s three screen tests proved to him that she had the requisite passion and wildness to play Scarlett. He told her on Christmas day at a party at his house that she had the role.

Along with the role was a noose around her neck – a seven-year contract with Selznick that she was forced to take. She was to be paid $30,000 for the role, for which she worked a total of 125 hours. Clark Gable was getting his usual MGM salary of $4,000 a week. He made about $120,000 for 71 days of work.

Selznick’s publicity department went to work to win over the public in Leigh’s favor. A biography of Leigh was sent out to the press saying “Vivien Leigh, whose father is French and mother Irish, will play Scarlett O’Hara, whose father was Irish and mother French . . . In her physical characteristics as well as her ancestry, Miss Leigh resembles the heroine of Miss Mitchell’s book. She is five feet three, weighs 103 pounds, has green eyes, brown hair with a touch of red, and even possesses Scarlett’s pointed chin.”

Eighteen days after Leigh started work, Cukor was fired. Aside from the fact that he worked too slowly for Selznick, Gable wanted him gone. Fearing that Cukor, who was known as a ‘woman’s director,’ was focusing too much on Leigh, he made Selznick replace him with Victor Fleming, a typical he-man who made Leigh’s working life miserable, forcing her do takes over and over again, binding her breasts tightly to give her more of a cleavage, and making her put up with Gable’s false teeth and bad breath in the kissing scenes.

They had a very uneasy working relationship and he is reported to have once told her, “Miss Leigh, you can stick this script up your royal British ass.” (Leigh and Olivia de Havilland would work in secret with Cukor, who continued coaching them through the movie.)

 

Selznick, in the meantime, was unraveling under the stress. He would stay up for days without sleeping fueled by Benzedrine and barbiturates. He would dictate endless memos telling the director and actors his criticisms of their work, and compulsively rewrite the script daily despite the fact that 15 different screenwriters had already worked on it (including F. Scott Fitzgerald). He was also an inveterate gambler and would unwind by playing poker for enormous sums at gambling establishments in Hollywood.

Leigh was also under enormous stress, working with a director she didn’t care for. She felt exhausted from the long hours on the set, sometimes seven days a week. She was coping with the public backlash for getting the role. The long distance from Olivier, who was doing a play in New York, didn’t help matters. Symptoms of what would later be diagnosed as bipolar disorder appeared with mood swings and breakdowns on the set, the type of behavior that the charming actress had never displayed before. (Olivier would divorce her in 1960, writing in his autobiography, “Throughout her possession by that uncanny evil monster, manic depression, with its ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness – an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me, for whom she could hardly be expected to take the trouble.”)

In spite of all this, she turned in one of the all-time great movie performances, making the selfish, self-centered, beautiful Scarlett a survivor that audiences identified with and cheered for through the decades.

 

Fleming, suffering from acute fatigue, was reported to have taken vitamin shots in the morning and downers to sleep at night. In spite of all this concierge care, the director nearly drove off a cliff on his way to work. He was given a two-week break to recuperate. Sam Wood, an MGM director, the third on the film, took over for 18 days. Nevertheless, Fleming was responsible for at least 60% of the film. Some of Cukor’s scenes survived as well.

The reviews were ecstatic once the film was released. Variety said presciently, “a great picture poised for grosses which may be second to none in the history of the business.” The New York Times exclaimed: “The greatest motion mural we have seen and the most ambitious film-making venture in Hollywood’s spectacular history.” As for Leigh’s performance, the New York Times said she was the “pivot of the picture” and believed her to be “so perfectly designed for the part by art and nature that any other actress in the role would be inconceivable.”

25 million people saw Gone With the Wind in its first year. Selznick was fully vindicated when the film got thirteen nominations and won ten Oscars on February 28, 1940, at the Ambassador Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove – more than any other film to date. Those accolades included Best Picture; Best Actress for Leigh; Best Supporting Actress for Hattie McDaniel, the first one for a Black actor; Best Director for Fleming (who didn’t show); and Best Screenplay for Sidney Howard (who died before the film opened). In addition, the prestigious Irving Thalberg Memorial Award was handed to Selznick “for the most consistently high level of production achievement by an individual producer.”

Leigh beat out Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, Greer Garson in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Bette Davis in Dark Victory, and Irene Dunne in Love Affair. She said in her acceptance speech, “Ladies and gentlemen, please forgive me if my words are inadequate in thanking you for your very great kindness. If I were to mention all those who have shown me such wonderful generosity through Gone with the Wind, I should have to entertain you with an oration as long as Gone with the Wind itself. So, if I may, I should like to devote my thanks on this occasion to that composite figure of energy, courage, and very great kindness, in whom all points of Gone with the Wind meet – Mr. David Selznick.”