Gone with the Wind is the biggest hit Hollywood ever made once you adjust for inflation, and it has spent more than eight decades on trial. The argument started in its producer’s own memos and is still running in streaming catalogues.

Gone with the Wind opens in Georgia in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, at Tara, the O’Hara family’s cotton plantation. Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), the headstrong eldest daughter, is fixed on Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), who is about to marry his cousin Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland). At the engagement party at the neighbouring estate of Twelve Oaks, Ashley turns Scarlett down, and a guest with a bad reputation, Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), takes notice of her. Then news arrives of the attack on Fort Sumter and the young men of the county rush off to enlist.

From there the story moves through the war and what came after it. Scarlett marries Melanie’s brother Charles to spite Ashley and is widowed within months. She lives through the siege of Atlanta and helps Melanie give birth as the city falls, then makes her way back to a looted Tara where her mother is dead and her father has lost his mind. She vows that her family will never go hungry again. Reconstruction taxes push her into a second marriage, to her sister Suellen’s fiancé, the shopkeeper Frank Kennedy, and later into a third, to Rhett. That marriage, with its daughter Bonnie Blue and Scarlett’s lasting fixation on Ashley, carries the film to Rhett’s exit line, the most famous goodbye in American cinema.

A novel bought for $50,000 and a two-year hunt for Scarlett

Margaret Mitchell’s novel came out in June 1936, and within a month David O. Selznick had bought the film rights for $50,000. He had first passed on it, as had MGM, RKO and Warner Bros. He changed his mind only after his story editor Kay Brown and his business partner John Hay Whitney urged him to buy. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, and turning more than a thousand pages into one film became a problem Selznick never stopped fighting.

Casting the two leads took two years. Selznick wanted Clark Gable from the start, but Gable was under contract to MGM. The deal Selznick struck in August 1938 with his father-in-law, MGM chief Louis B. Mayer, gave him Gable and $1.25 million, half the budget, in exchange for distribution rights and half the profits. The delay that deal imposed turned the search for Scarlett into a national publicity campaign: 1,400 unknowns were interviewed at a cost of $100,000, and Katharine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Joan Bennett and Lana Turner were among the actresses considered or tested. The last two finalists, Paulette Goddard and Vivien Leigh, were tested in Technicolor on 20 December 1938. Leigh, an English actress barely known in the United States, had met Selznick on the night of 10 December, the night the burning of Atlanta was filmed on his backlot. Her casting was announced in January 1939.

Three directors and a script that was never finished

Sidney Howard wrote the screenplay, and his first draft would have run about six hours. George Cukor, who had spent nearly two years preparing the film, was fired less than three weeks into shooting after clashes with Selznick over the script and the pace. Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland went to Selznick’s office in full costume to try to change his mind. Victor Fleming was called away from The Wizard of Oz to take over. Fleming was dissatisfied with the script, so Selznick brought in Ben Hecht, who reworked the first half in seven days of 18-to-20-hour sessions. In May, when Fleming stopped work for two weeks through exhaustion, Sam Wood stepped in. By the end of principal photography Cukor had directed 18 days of filming, Fleming 93 and Wood 24. Only Fleming received screen credit, and only Howard received writing credit. Howard died in a farm-tractor accident in 1939, before the premiere.

The crew was reshuffled just as hard. Cinematographer Lee Garmes shot the first third of the film before Selznick decided his footage was too dark. Ernest Haller replaced him in March 1939, working alongside the Technicolor specialist Ray Rennahan, and Garmes went uncredited. William Cameron Menzies shaped the overall look of the film, Walter Plunkett designed the costumes from 1860s fashion sources, and Tara itself was a plywood and papier-mâché façade on the Selznick lot. For the Atlanta fire, new fronts were built over the backlot’s old abandoned sets and burned, with Selznick himself working the explosives controls. The film cost $3.85 million, a sum surpassed at the time only by the 1925 Ben-Hur.

Max Steiner, borrowed from Warner Bros., spent twelve weeks on the score, longer than he had ever spent on one. It runs two hours and thirty-six minutes across 99 separate pieces of music. It has love themes for Ashley and Melanie and for Scarlett’s longing for Ashley, but none for Scarlett and Rhett, and Tara’s Theme is the melody people still hum. One piece of lore deserves correcting: Selznick was never fined $5,000 for the word «damn». On 1 November 1939 the Production Code was amended to allow it in historical or literary contexts, and the censors dropped their objection to Rhett’s line.

A premiere under Jim Crow and a record Oscar night

About 300,000 people turned out on 15 December 1939 for the Atlanta premiere at Loew’s Grand Theatre, and the governor of Georgia declared the day a state holiday. Hattie McDaniel and the film’s other Black cast members were kept out by the state’s segregation laws. Clark Gable threatened to boycott the event, and McDaniel persuaded him to go. The film then played only as an advance-ticket roadshow at prices more than double those of a regular release, and it did not go into general release until 1941.

At the 12th Academy Awards the film took 13 nominations and won eight competitive Oscars: picture, director, actress for Vivien Leigh, supporting actress for Hattie McDaniel, screenplay, colour cinematography, art direction and editing. Two honorary awards brought the total to ten. It was the first colour film to win Best Picture. Sidney Howard became the first posthumous Oscar winner, and McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award, beating Olivia de Havilland in the same category. She received it after being seated at a separate table at the back of the room.

The commercial numbers have outlasted every rival. Within four years the film had sold around 60 million tickets in the United States, close to half the country’s population, and in London it ran for four years at a single cinema in Leicester Square during the Blitz. Adjusted for inflation it is still the highest-grossing film ever made. Its first network broadcast on NBC in 1976 set a ratings record for a film on television, and Turner later used it to launch both TNT and Turner Classic Movies. In 1989 it was among the first 25 titles chosen for the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute ranked it fourth on its 1998 list of the greatest American films.

The argument the film carries with it

The objections are as old as the film. Black writers and critics attacked it on release for its picture of slavery: contented enslaved characters in the background of a South mourned as a lost civilisation, which is the Lost Cause version of history that Mitchell’s novel tells without apology. Selznick, writing in what he called fascist-ridden times, cut the Ku Klux Klan out of the adaptation entirely, but the plantation nostalgia stayed in. Hattie McDaniel was attacked by the head of the NAACP for playing a maid and answered that she would rather play one than be one. The scene in which Rhett carries a struggling Scarlett up the staircase is now widely discussed as marital rape.

The argument flared up again in this century. In 2017 the Orpheum Theatre in Memphis ended a 34-year tradition of annual screenings. On 9 June 2020, after an op-ed by the screenwriter John Ridley, HBO Max pulled the film from its catalogue. It returned later that month with an introduction by the film scholar Jacqueline Stewart, who argued that the film should remain available precisely so that it can be studied. The withdrawal itself sent the film to the top of online sales charts. It is the same pattern the title has followed for decades: every attempt to retire it ends up putting it back in front of an audience.

Its afterlife reaches well beyond the film itself. The 1988 documentary The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind retold the chaos of the shoot, a 1994 miniseries, Scarlett, adapted Alexandra Ripley’s authorised sequel with Joanne Whalley and Timothy Dalton, and the film’s success made Scarlett a common girls’ name in the United States. Margaret Mitchell refused until her death in 1949 to write what came next. The latest stage is a 4K Ultra HD release scheduled for 4 November 2026, which brings the 1939 Technicolor to a new format again.

Little about Gone with the Wind is simple except its scale. One producer’s will held it together through three directors, a stack of writers and a fired cinematographer. It won more Oscars than any film before it and, adjusted for inflation, has earned more than any film since, and it ran on a view of the South that Black critics rejected from opening week. The film does not settle that argument. It has kept it going for 87 years, and every new format puts the question to a new audience.