Word: novels
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...streamed a privileged 2,031 who were going to see the picture whose title Hollywood had been abbreviating for three years as G With the W. They were conscious of participating in a national event, of seeing a picture it had taken three yea~s to make from a novel it had taken seven years to write. They knew it had taken two years and something akin to genius to find a girl to play Scarlett O'Hara. They knew it had cost more ($3,850,000) to produce the picture than any other in cinema history except...
Selznick read the synopsis. With the sad fate of So Red the Rose in mind, he was in no hurry to pay $50,000 for another Civil War book, and a first novel to boot. But when Selznick International's Board Chairman John Jay ("Jock") Whitney offered to buy the novel on his own, Selznick, saying, "I'll be damned if you do," closed the deal. Then he took the book on an ocean voyage to Honolulu to see what he had bought...
Script-Tease. First trouble was to reduce the 1,037-page novel to a workable Hollywood script...
Scarlett. Midway in producing G With the W, Producer Selznick decided he was in no hurry to get going. The novel was too fresh in people's minds, which meant that they would be critical of any picturization no matter how good. Selznick still had nobody to play Scarlett O'Hara, and for more than two years he maintained himself in this useful and exciting dilemma with tenacity and an astute sense of showmanship. Polls were taken, scouts were despatched, a play about the search was written, had been running two months-and still no Scarlett...
...Picture. No great shakes as literature, the novel had been dropped on the floor by most literary critics as soon as it dropped in their laps. They thought its love story a bore, its history sectional, its length pretentious, its writing as drab as a bolt of butternut shoddy. The destruction of the South's civilization in the War between the States, told as the case history of two plantation families, the red-blooded O'Haras and the blue-blooded Wilkeses, had been better told before. The overlapping loves of Scarlett O'Hara for Ashley Wilkes, Rhett...