Selznick's Heroic Techniques In Gone With The Wind

“It’s nothing but a sentimental piece of tripe,” said one of his company’s story editors. His close friend called it “a story of a bitch and a bastard, no one’s going to be interested in that.” The first scenes of the film were shot without casting the lead role, more than half the cast didn’t want to play their respected characters, three directors, several screenwriters, fifty speaking roles, two thousand four hundred extras, several off screen dramas between cast and crew, on the brink of the second World War, and yet despite it all, producer David O. Selznick of Selznick International Pictures pulled it off. He successfully produced the highest grossing film of all time, “Gone With the Wind.” Based on Margaret Mitchell’s critically

He strived for the absolute best, and if it didn’t exist he’d create it. For example, when filming the railroad scene where Scarlett has to search through thousands of wounded soldiers looking for the doctor, in which the frame pans out to see thousands of bodies, there was not a crane large enough to capture the shot, so Selznick found a way to build one. Iin doing so he captured a moment that would change the way we view film. It was not just in the crane that Selznick wanted to go above and beyond. To capture just how many people were wounded in battle Selznick hired 500 S.A.G.(screen actors guild) actors, and upon realizing they alone wouldn’t be enough, he had 1000 dummies mixed in with the real actors. The shot came out so well that the screen actors guild attempted to sue Selznick for the amount of actors used, mistaking the dummies for real people. This demand for perfection caused a lot of stress on the crew members for the film however. His assistant remarked that he was “a nuisance because he was a perfectionist. Selznick had everything tested before filming, costumes, hats, you name it. His reasoning was because technicolor was still very new and understanding it took time; however, when you have to test 500 costume pieces, film and re-film scenes, and burn down an entire backlot of a studio, it can become extremely expensive, which is why Selznick blew through the original budget, and in fact had to receive more funding. Selznick met with the founder of Bank of America, A.P. Giannini and showed him a reel of some of the scenes from the film. Giannini was so impressed he agreed to give him a loan, to finish the film. Gianni wasn’t the only one impressed with early screenings of the