Hollywood at War: Now and Then

ROMANTICIZED SOUTH 1939’s Gone With the Wind, starring Vivien Leigh and Hattie McDaniel, glosses over the horrors of slavery that were depicted in deleted scenes of a rediscovered script. (FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images)

For decades, the prevailing narrative around Gone With the Wind has been that it romanticized slavery and the antebellum south. But, as David Vincent Kimel learned when he discovered one of the film's few remaining shooting scripts, it almost did the exact opposite. The Yale grad student joins the podcast to talk about his groundbreaking story, which exposes the film's warring screenwriters and deleted scenes depicting the horrors of slavery (23:48). “It really is shocking how gritty and uncompromising that early material was,” he says. Also: Richard Rushfield's dire takeaways from talking with 20+ writers against the backdrop of a looming WGA strike (13:18), and the NBA agent joining our IRL Oscar week streaming summit (0:43).