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  Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to win an Oscar for her role in ‘Gone with the Wind’, was requested to sit at a segregated table during the award ceremony Jan 29, 2017 Stefan A. Hattie McDaniel was the youngest of 13 children in a family of former slaves. Born in Kansas, she moved with her family to Colorado in 1900, where she finished high school. During her early days, Hattie took on many different jobs.When she worked on minstrel shows, side by side with one of her brothers, she honed her songwriting skills. During the 1920’s, she toured...

Asked how she could debase herself to the level of playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind, Hattie McDaniel replied, “I’d rather play the maid and make $700 a week than be a maid and make $7.” Now McDaniel’s iconic performance, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first and only black winner in that category until 1990, stands under threat of being erased from the cultural memory. A Memphis theater that screens Gone with the Wind annually announced that it is withdrawing it from future showings. At this moment that decision may look like...

“If there is no God, everything is permitted”, wrote Dostoyevsky. Yet he underestimated the despotic potential of godless modernity. It imposes its own taboos, and they may well be more numerous than those imposed by Christendom. They certainly are different because their purpose is. Judaeo-Christianity saw man as sinful but capable of becoming better. Both its prescriptions and proscriptions were issued to signpost the road to self-improvement in this world and salvation in the next. The original commandments were chiselled in stone literally, the later ones figuratively, but there was no room left for misinterpretation in either case. Modernity sees...

RUSH: I was making a joke after the protests in Charlottesville. I said, “Why don’t we just go ahead and ban Gone With the Wind? Let’s ban the movie. Let’s ban the book.” They’ve banned the movie. “Gone With the Wind is a landmark film, one which has been beloved since its record-breaking 1939 release. … Now, the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Memphis has decided to stop showing the film, as, in the words of one citizen, it has somehow been placed in the ‘tributes to white supremacy’ category. … “Memphis based Orpheum Theatre, whose stated mission is to ‘entertain,...

A Tennessee theater has canceled a long-running screening of “Gone With the Wind” because of racially insensitive content in the classic 1939 film. Officials at Memphis’ Orpheum Theatre have announced that the film will not be shown during its summer movie series in 2018. Theater president Brett Batterson says in a statement that “the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population.” […] Batterson tells the Memphis Commercial Appeal a “social media storm” played a role in the decision. …

 “Gone With the Wind” will be gone from The Orpheum’s summer movie series, the theater’s board said Friday. The Orpheum Theatre Group decided not to include the 1939 movie about a plantation in the Civil War-era South in its 2018 Summer Movie Series after feedback from patrons following the last screening Aug. 11. “As an organization whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves’, the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population,” the theater’s operators said in a statement. Memphis’ population is about 64 percent African-American.

One would like to think that Olivia de Havilland, the last remaining cast member from “Gone With the Wind” and, indeed, the last remaining female star from Hollywood’s Golden Age, had a vibrant lunch among friends at her Paris residence to celebrate her 100th birthday on Friday, July 1. “She’s gone through life collecting friends,” film critic and author Donald Spoto, a good friend who often lunches with de Havilland, said during a visit to San Francisco in 2013. “She’ll talk about her films if you ask her, but she never turns the spotlight on herself. She’s much more interested...

When Americans think about the Confederacy, they often think about Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 classic, Gone With the Wind. Inspired by recent debates over the Confederate flag, I decided to give the book a try. I confess that I did not have high hopes. I expected to be appalled by its politics and racism, and to be bored by the melodrama. (Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, and Ashley Wilkes? Really?) About twenty pages, I thought, would be enough. I could not have been more wrong. The book is enthralling, and it casts a spell. Does it make a plausible argument for continuing...

RUSH: Did you see the movie critic for the New York Post? The New York Post is supposed to be a conservative paper, if it's anything, and the movie critic there is a guy named Lou Lumenick, I'm not sure how he pronounces it. Anyway, he said in a piece that ran last night -- actually I think it's in today's paper -- that the movie Gone With the Wind is a national embarrassment and needs to be banned from television and movie theoretical release and available to be seen only in museums. Now, there's some black actors that won...

First, the Confederate flag was banned, now, how about films that show images of it? It’s been a busy week for political correctness, where anyone with a complaint against anything is taking advantage of shifting winds and pushing for an outright ban. This afternoon, New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick added his target to the list, Gone with the Wind, labeling it “insidious”. He believes it should be relegated to museums as opposed to continued regular showings elsewhere.

<p>Gone With the Wind is Birth of a Nation with less horses. The movie, and its position among the American cinematic pantheon, has done more to further the ahistoric Lost Cause bullshit than any other single production. Because that's the fundamental problem with the Lost Cause narrative: it's not true.</p>

Remembering the War Between the States Sesquicentennial This summer marks the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Atlanta. Please share with parents, teachers, students, historians and all who cherish the Heritage of America’s past that includes those days when women kept the home fires burning while the men of Yankee Blue and Confederate Gray met with cold-hard steel on a battlefield of honor. Fifty years have passed since the War Between the States Centennial. Today, the South joins the nation in celebrating our Sesquicentennial-150th Anniversary of the war of “1861-1865” that some call the 2nd American Revolution.

Mary Anderson, who played Maybelle Merriwether in Gone With the Wind and was one of the nine survivors cast adrift from a torpedoed ship in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, has died. She was 96.

AUSTIN (AP) — It turns out there will be another day for Scarlett O'Hara's green curtain dress. Many of them. The iconic dress and Scarlett's burgundy ball gown from the 1939 film "Gone With the Wind" have been saved from deterioration by a $30,000 conservation effort by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. The dresses worn by actress Vivien Leigh are now on display for the first time in nearly 30 years at London's Victoria and Albert Museum as part of a Hollywood costume exhibit. Ransom Center officials announced the project in 2010, noting the dresses were...

“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.”

Gone with the Wind premiered during the Christmas Season of 1939.

No one denies that "Gone With the Wind" holds an honored—even sacred—place in the pantheon of beloved American movies. Adjusted for inflation, its domestic box-office gross is variously estimated at $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion—vastly more than the sum earned by "Titanic." Still more impressive are its initial ticket sales, which totaled more than 200 million at a time when the U.S. population was just 130 million. And then there are those eight Oscars, including best picture, in a year widely acknowledged as Hollywood's greatest. But affection and respect are different things, and it is perhaps only now—70 years after...

Confined to her bed in Atlanta by a broken ankle and arthritis, she was given a stack of blank paper by her husband, who said, "Write a book." Did she ever. The novel's first title became its last words, "Tomorrow is another day," and at first she named the protagonist Pansy. But Pansy became Scarlett, and the title of the book published 70 years ago this week became "Gone With the Wind." You might think that John Steinbeck, not Margaret Mitchell, was the emblematic novelist of the 1930s, and that the publishing event in American fiction in that difficult decade...

GONE WITH THE WIND(miss hillary's 'plantation' blunder) by Mia T, 01.18.06           "When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talkin' about. [Note the gratuitous gerundial g-dropping.] ... We have a culture of corruption. We have cronyism. We have incompetence. I predict to you that this administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country." (Miss hillary also apologized to a group of Hurricane Katrina evacuees in the audience "on...