'Gone With the Wind' film celebrates 70 years

"There's a great tradition of reverence for and connoisseurship of the arts here that sometimes is not appreciated," said Gabe Wardell, executive director of Atlanta Film Festival 365, which is partnering with the Fox Theatre to showcase the movie during its 10-day festival beginning April 16. "Hopefully, having 'Gone With the Wind' linked with the film festival and these other institutions can emphasize that in some way."

With a serious-minded Saturday evening author panel at the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, featuring esteemed film critic Molly Haskell, the weekend underscores how both the book and film versions of "Wind" are being re-evaluated as something weightier than mere pop culture pleasers. But the multievent extravaganza also serves as a reminder that ambition and commercialism have always gone hand in hand with Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War-era saga.

" 'Gone With the Wind' is the gift that just keeps on giving," quipped Florida International University history professor Darden Pyron, author of "Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell." "[Mitchell] would probably respond to it the way she did all the other stuff. By rolling her eyes heavenward and wondering why all of this is happening."

The short answer, Ms. Mitchell: Anniversaries. Lots of 'em.

Convergence of interests

The Academy Award-winning film celebrates its 70th this year. The Fox Theatre — which sits directly across Peachtree Street from the Georgian Terrace, which hosted the 1939 premiere night party and housed stars Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland — is turning 80. And Atlanta-based classic movie channel TCM officially launched by showing founder Ted Turner's favorite movie, "Gone With the Wind," on April 14, 1994 — 15 years ago.

"We were planning on making it an event here," said Kristin Delaney, director of marketing for the Fox, which decided late last spring it wanted to show the movie on its big screen.

"We realized maybe there's a little more here to celebrate."

The Fox reached out to TCM and the Atlanta History Center, which oversees the Margaret Mitchell House. TCM, which will again air "Gone With the Wind" on its April 14 anniversary, agreed to sponsor the author event and to provide Robert Osborne, its popular on-air host, as a guest. Then, Michael Sragow, author of an acclaimed new biography of "Wind" director Victor Fleming, was brought into the picture.

Up in New York, meanwhile, film critic Haskell — whose provocative new book claims that Melanie Wilkes, not Scarlett O'Hara, was actually Mitchell's intended heroine — decided, "Hey, I want to be involved with that," and contacted Osborne.

Something for everyone

The Atlanta History Center in Buckhead can accommodate a bigger crowd than the Mitchell House's Literary Center, but there never was any thought of holding the evening event there.

Mitchell's one-time home at the corner of 10th and Peachtree "is where she physically wrote the book," said Hillary Hardwick, the History Center's vice president of marketing communications. "How many books have had that much of a lasting impact on literary history?"

And what better way to get the word out that it's business as usual at the Mitchell House & Museum? After much of the staff was laid off in January, many assumed that tours and literary events had been similarly pruned back.

Not true, said Hardwick, who calls that misconception "our major frustration." The author event, she said, is a high-profile way to emphasize that its programming continues.

Atlanta Film Festival 365 won't share in the Fox's box-office receipts when "Gone With the Wind" plays on April 19 — twice, it turns out, since the first showing at the 4,674-seat theater quickly sold out.

Fiddle-dee-dee, as Scarlett O'Hara might dismiss any concerns. While the Fox holds a "Scarlett and Rhett Reception" in its Egyptian Ballroom, a film festival board member will host a "Southern Breakfast" fund-raiser at his home (minimum donation: $500), featuring sweet tea, mint juleps, gift bags and shuttle service to the Fox to take in the show.

Haskell and Sragow will be at the breakfast, in addition to serving on the film festival jury and participating in a panel discussion. Atlanta Film Festival 365 also has created a promotional trailer that the Fox will run before both "Wind" screenings and during its popular summer film series.

"Our mission is to lead the community in the discovery of moving images," Wardell said. "If a single one of those people who sees 'Gone With the Wind' goes to see one more festival movie, that's a plus. If not, they've still participated in the festival, and we've driven that much more interest in filmgoing."

Timeless and timely

To some extent, the weekend smacks of Scarlett O'Hara's characteristic drive and ingenuity, her "When life hands you curtains, make a ball gown" attitude. But to Haskell, it's evidence of Mitchell's timeless creation suddenly feeling more timely than ever.

"She wrote it in the late Jazz Age, and everyone saw it as a Depression fable," Haskell said of the book Mitchell began writing three years before the 1929 stock market crash. "The South after the Civil War, that was the first great Depression, and here we are again. We have had this period of excess and indulgence as in the antebellum South and during the Jazz Age, and we're trying to figure out a way to put it together again."

For years, TCM's Osborne said, "cineastes" looked down on the movie because it was so popular. But now even they are starting to see what so many others have for so long.

"Its survival message strikes people," said Osborne, a message that seems even more relevant right now. "It always seems like we're going through some sort of crisis, so it's very meaningful to realize you have to learn how to survive."