The 1939 film Gone With the Wind was a sweeping epic soap opera about one Georgia woman's life during the Civil War, based on the best-selling novel by Margaret Mitchell. The finished product featured big Hollywood stars and beautiful cinematography, won eight Academy Awards, and was the top movie of all time for 30 years. But putting that story in its historical backdrop was a struggle behind the scenes. Director David O. Selznick went through a dozen script writers, and working scripts were changed constantly.
The script writers were divided into two camps: The "Romantics" who wanted to depict the South as a genteel and honorable place where enslaved people were happy, and the "Realists" who were keen to show an accurate depiction of the brutality and dehumanization of slavery. The Romantics won out, and the movie projected a whitewashed version of the Confederacy that pleased white audiences in Atlanta but gave generations of viewers a distorted idea of the Civil War era South. The movie was shaped by many scenes that were written and some even filmed, but were then discarded. Evidence of the battle between the Romantics and the Realists remain in surviving working copies of the script, with notes from Selznick and others, that the director had ordered destroyed.
Read about the script decisions that shaped Gone With the Wind and the scenes that never made it into the film at The Ankler. Then imagine the same film with the deleted scenes retained. It would have been six hours long, but it would have told a more complete story. -via Mental Floss