Word: scarlette
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...still counting. The 3 3/4-hour movie, owned by Ted Turner since he bought the MGM film library in 1985, has become the eternal flame of popular culture. It is a safe bet that somewhere in the world, day and night, Clark Gable's Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara flicker across a screen...
...follow, even for Mitchell, who died in 1949 after she was struck by a car on Peachtree Street. She had steadfastly refused to write a sequel, preferring the icy finality of Rhett's, "My dear, I don't give a damn" (Gable threw in the "Frankly"). Yet Scarlett's final aria, "Tomorrow is another day," left the door open...
Where it has remained on rusting hinges until last week. Scarlett (Warner Books; 823 pages; $24.95), the carefully prepared, shrewdly promoted novel by Alexandra Ripley, is finally out in the U.S. and 40 other countries. Warner Books paid $4.9 million for the American rights and has backed up its bet with print orders totaling nearly 1 million copies. The William Morris Agency, representing Ripley and the Margaret Mitchell estate, sold the foreign rights for $5 million more. William Morris' Robert Gottlieb believes film rights could sell in the "high seven figures." Scarlett is the first published sequel to Gone With...
...book conceived, produced and marketed like a theatrical property. The deal came first, the writer came second, and then the publicity machine passed them all. The project was draped in a gauze of secrecy that, now removed, reveals no great surprise. The book is a tease. Rhett and Scarlett remain rascals and opportunists. He continues to profit from the defeat of the Confederacy; she shrewdly expands her Atlanta business interests and plots her slippery husband's recapture. For those who were on Mars last week, the most famous bickerers in literature since Petruchio and Katharina get back together again. Although...
Once again publicity foreplay is more exciting than what goes on between the covers. The managed anticipation that preceded Scarlett's publication was enlivened by the intricacies of copyright law and the persistent, though unconfirmed, rumor that Sidney Sheldon had been a candidate before the Mitchell estate settled on Ripley, 57, a native of Charleston, S.C., and author of three solid historical romances. There was also the confirmed rumor that Ripley threatened to quit when told by her editor that the first draft of Scarlett was not commercial enough. Finally, there was the author's disarming candor. "Margaret Mitchell...