Hollywood Codebreakers: ‘Gone With the Wind’ Goes on Trial

Gone With the Wind was delayed so many times, it was a running joke. Although producer David O. Selznick acquired the rights to Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling book in 1936, it took three years for the movie to reach theaters — at a time when most movies took a few months. On February 9, 1938, Variety ran an article on the growing trend of Civil War dramas with the headline, “Better Hurry, David.” Just a week later, the paper went even cattier with a parody piece called, “Babe LeRoy as Rhett Butler in 1950.” The article reported from the imagined scene of the Gone With the Wind premiere, sometime in the very distant future of 1950. “As we limped our way through the lobby we were nearly run over by Dave Selznick’s wheel chair, whose beard got caught in the wheel chair of Clark Gable,” the paper quipped. That September, Clare Boothe Luce opened a new comedy on Broadway about the endless quest to cast Scarlett O’Hara — or, as she’s known in this play, Velvet O’Toole.

But when it finally arrived, Gone With the Wind altered the cinematic landscape. It didn’t just redefine box office success, or showcase the potential of Technicolor. It created a new loophole in the Motion Picture Production Code, one that was won only after Selznick took the dramatic step of appealing his case to the board of the MPPDA.

Selznick and Joseph Breen were already established sparring partners. The pair previously argued over Anna Karenina (Breen hated the adultery and suicide, but allowed them once Selznick cut Anna’s bastard kid) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Selznick, in a peak moment of pettiness, gave Breen’s notes on the boys’ swimming trunks to the Museum of Modern Art for an exhibit on filmmaking). Before the two could start fighting about Gone With the Wind, however, Selznick had to make it. And that took some doing.

The process of finding Scarlett O’Hara was just as laborious as Luce’s play implied. Selznick struck a deal with MGM to loan Clark Gable in exchange for distribution rights by 1938, but the Scarlett search took longer. Over the course of two years, seemingly every female star in town was considered. Trade papers claimed Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, and Paulette Goddard were all up for the role. Norma Shearer withdrew from consideration after “letters from fans saying she is unsuited for the part.” Picturegoer Weekly, in another bit of parody performance art, reported rumors that Selznick was “waiting for Shirley Temple to grow up.” (She was 10.) The role finally went to Vivien Leigh, at the time a little-known British actress, in early 1939. But that didn’t mean the call sheet was set. Selznick would cycle through two cinematographers, three directors, and over a dozen screenwriters before the film wrapped.

Gone With the Wind opens in antebellum Georgia. Scarlett O’Hara has just discovered that the love of her life, Ashley Wilkes, is engaged to Melanie Hamilton. She confesses her feelings to him, to no avail. But she will not give up on Ashley. Scarlett pursues Ashley through war, a string of her own marriages, and the birth of his children, as well as her own. She does not realize the hopelessness of her situation fully until Melanie dies and Ashley still rejects her. But it’s too late — Scarlett’s latest husband and constant suitor, Rhett Butler, is leaving. And he doesn’t give a damn what happens to her.

The four-hour movie contains a wealth of Code-breaking content. Some of it was simply a minor headache for Breen — like the character Belle Watling, the madam of the Red Horse brothel whose profession was subsequently obscured. The rest of it proved to be a much more difficult compromise.

One of the more controversial sequences was the “husbandly rape.” In the scene, Scarlett comes downstairs to find Rhett drunk and angry. He pressures her to drink brandy, refuses to let her go to bed, and yells at her about Ashley Wilkes. “Observe my hands, my dear,” he tells Scarlett after roughly pushing her back into her seat. “I could tear you to pieces with ’em. And I’d do it if it could take Ashley out of your mind forever. But it wouldn’t. So I’ll remove him from your mind forever this way. I’ll put my hands so, one on each side of your head, and I’ll smash your skull between them like a walnut. That’ll block him out.” Scarlett tries again to leave, but Rhett follows her to the stairs, grabs her arm, and kisses her as she struggles. “This is one night you’re not turning me out!” he yells, before scooping her up in his arms and carrying her up the stairs. Scarlett flails her arms and gasps, but awakens the next day with an enormous grin on her face.

Setting aside the obvious issues with this rape fantasy, it was also an explicit Code violation. Rape “should never be more than suggested, and only when essential for the plot, and even then never shown by explicit method,” as stipulated in the “Sex” section. Breen objected to the scene as early as 1937, suggesting that Rhett “gently” start with Scarlett to the bedroom but “not go so far as to throw her on the bed.” Breen also emphasized that Scarlett should not cry out, implying that an enjoyable sexual encounter was fine, as long as it was consensual. This wasn’t exactly keeping with the Code’s prudish views on sex, but Breen proved to be surprisingly lenient on this sequence. It was not only blatant about what Rhett and Scarlett did after they climbed the stairs, but also retained unmistakable implications of rape, even if Scarlett is blissful the next day.

Breen was less lenient on Melanie’s difficult childbirth. The Code banned “scenes of actual child birth, in fact or in silhouette” for another distinctly Catholic and distinctly paternalistic reason. Breen and his censors were concerned that any realistic depictions of the pain of childbirth would undermine the glory of motherhood and scare young women. This was a view shared by multiple local censor boards, who balked at even a mention or suggestion of pregnancy, let alone birth. The general idea was to keep the gory details, or even basic biology, out of the process.

In his letters, Breen recommended that Selznick “endeavor to delete, wherever you can, such action and dialogue which throws emphasis upon the pain and suffering of childbirth.” He advised against “moaning or loud crying” and shots showing her teeth “biting her lower lip till it bleeds; her holding on to Scarlett’s hands in desperation; [and] all of the business of tying the towel to the foot of the bed.” Scarlett should ask Melanie how she feels, not how bad she feels, and not mention the tools they required: scissors and a ball of twine.

Selznick implemented some of the notes, but not all. Melanie still wails for Scarlett, who fans her as she struggles through labor. The actual birth is shown briefly in dark lighting, with little drama or noise. The line about the scissors and ball of twine also remains intact — a line that Scarlett screams at her slave Prissy, whom she berates and slaps throughout the entire ordeal.

Racism is core to Gone With the Wind, so it’s little surprise that the original script contained liberal use of the N-word. Although the term was not specifically mentioned in the Code, it was added to a list of unacceptable phrases circulated internally in industry groups. This was only after Breen approved a script for Carolina that contained the phrase in 1934. When the movie opened, black moviegoers threw bricks at the screen in five cities.

In Breen’s view, it was alright to use the word in Gone With the Wind, depending on who said it. “It seems to us to be acceptable if the negro characters use the expression; the word should not be put in the mouth of white people,” he wrote. But the black actors on set had no interest in saying the slur. Butterfly McQueen, who played Prissy, and Hattie McDaniel, who became the first black person to ever win an Oscar for her performance as Mammy, both objected. Earl Morris, a journalist for the black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, also published a series of scathing editorials that reached Selznick’s desk. The producer had largely ignored concerns from black critics early on. Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, wrote to Selznick in 1938 asking him to employ a black consultant, one who could counter Mitchell’s skewed perspective on the Civil War. Selznick hired two white technical advisors instead. But bending on the N-word was a comparatively easy token he could throw to critics. When Breen ordered the word removed entirely, Selznick regretted the “loss” and insisted that his usage would “do nothing but glorify the negroes,” but conceded that fight so he could argue for a different word.

The line that would land Selznick on trial — MPPDA trial, at least — was Rhett Butler’s famous parting words. The producer was adamant that “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” remain in the final script. Breen insisted that “My dear, I don’t care” worked just as well. Director Victor Fleming shot both versions, but Selznick had no interest in using his protection footage. He knew what the Code said, that “pointed profanity (this includes the words God, Lord, Jesus, Christ — unless used reverently — Hell, S.O.B., damn, Gawd)… is forbidden.” But he would appeal his case to the MPPDA board of directors, amazingly with Breen’s tacit approval. Although Breen could not approve the line, he saw Selznick’s point about the dramatic power of “damn.” A ruling from the board on this matter could also provide more clarity to the work of the PCA. So when Selznick filed an appeal in October of 1939, Breen didn’t protest. In his case, Selznick cited the 1937 short film The Man Without a Country, which included the line, “Damn the United States! I never want to hear that name again!” If something so unpatriotic could win PCA approval, Selznick reasoned, why couldn’t the closing line from the most celebrated book of the moment?

The board sided with Selznick, but to prevent a feared tsunami of profane scripts, it created a new rule. Exceptions could be made for the words “damn” and “hell” if their use “shall be essential and required for portrayal, in proper historical context, of any scene or dialogue based upon historical fact or folklore, or for any presentation in proper literary context of a Biblical, or other religious quotation, or a quotation from a literary work provided that no such use shall be permitted which is intrinsically objectionable or offends good taste.” Gone With the Wind would be the model.

You probably know how the release went. It was mammoth, historic, one of the most universally loved movies of all time — or at least, universally loved by white people. Gone With the Wind broke down barriers for the industry in terms of censorship, but it did so at the expense of black people. They had no enshrined protections from debasement in the Code, the same Code that shielded Nazis through its “national feelings” clause protecting foreigners from ridicule.

Gone With the Wind was a turning point in the battle against the PCA, but it’s also a turning point in this series, as it closes out the 1930s. Next week, I’ll give a little more context about where American movies and culture were at the end of this decade, and a peak at some of the sources I’ve been using to make these essays. That’ll prep us for our first movie of the 1940s, another Selznick production named Rebecca.

Hollywood Codebreakers is a weekly TinyLetter covering the classic films that destroyed the industry’s first system of censorship, the Hays Code. Subscribe here!