‘Gone With the Wind’ Back on HBO Max With Intro on Slavery

“Gone With the Wind” was restored to HBO Max on Wednesday after initially being pulled from the brand new streaming platform, and the movie now opens with a video introduction that speaks to the movie’s flawed, romantic view of the Antebellum South.

“The film’s treatment of this world through a lens of nostalgia denies the horrors of slavery, as well as its legacy of racial inequality,” TCM host Jacqueline Stewart says in a virtually five-minute video introduction at first of the movie. “Watching ‘Gone With the Wind’ can be uncomfortable, even painful, still it is important that classic Hollywood films are available to us in their original form.”

The movie can also be accompanied by a sequence of extras, together with a panel dialogue concerning the movie known as “‘Gone With the Wind:’ A Complicated Legacy.” The panel dialogue was filmed on the TCM Film Festival final yr when the movie screened there. Also included is a five-minute brief known as “Hattie McDaniel: What a Character!” that offers a quick profile on the girl who stars within the movie and have become the primary African-American Oscar winner.

Stewart added within the video that McDaniel was famously not allowed to attend the premiere screening of the movie attributable to Georgia Jim Crow legal guidelines on the time of its launch in 1939. The video provides another context about its making and explains that although it’s one of the vital profitable movies of all time, “Gone With the Wind” will not be universally praised and has been broadly protested.

The intro even contains an anecdote about producer David O. Selznick, who assured the NAACP that he was “sensitive” to Black audiences’ considerations about how the movie would deal with slavery.

“Gone With the Wind” was pulled from the platform earlier this month after the author John Ridley wrote a column within the Los Angeles Times calling for the movie to be eliminated within the mild of the protests round George Floyd’s homicide, however he added that the movie shouldn’t be censored or completely eliminated.

In an interview after the movie was pulled, WarnerMedia chairman Bob Greenblatt responded to Ridley’s column and defended the choice of pulling the film, explaining that it ought to’ve at all times had the suitable context earlier than it was added to the service. He defined that the movie has aired on TCM for years and at all times contains an introduction from a bunch that touches on the movie’s difficult legacy, and he regretted not together with the identical context earlier.

“This is a complicated film, undeniably one of the most-watched films of all time, and most award-winning. And it has these issues which are not insignificant. Especially, you know in this moment in the world that we’re in right now. We really do want to put the right context around it,” Greenblatt stated. “We shouldn’t deny that they exist, we should show them to people, but also in the right context. And, hopefully, shed some light on these issues, which you know, affected Hollywood. The last century in Hollywood, there are many darker moments on film that we need to talk about.”

“Gone With the Wind” stars Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh and was an enormous come across launch, changing into the highest-earning movie as much as the purpose, a file it nonetheless holds when figures are adjusted for inflation. It additionally gained 10 Academy Awards, together with Best Supporting Actress for Hattie McDaniel, the first-ever African American to win an Academy Award, and Best Picture.