Scarlett On The Set
Scarlett O'Hara smoking a cigarette?
Ashley Wilkes hanging out in a pair of shades?
It's not as impossible as it sounds.
About three minutes of rare home-movie footage from the set of Gone With the Wind has surfaced. The 16mm film was shot by a wealthy Iowa industrialist named Howard Hall. He visited the set of GWTW and took pictures of a hoop-skirted Vivien Leigh taking a smoke, Clark Gable relaxing by his trailer, and Leslie Howard in costume as Ashley Wilkes, but wearing sunglasses.
The movie was discovered in the basement of the Brucemore mansion in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Hall lived with his wife, Margaret Douglas Hall. He died in 1971, and the film was bequeathed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Their home is now known as Brucemore Estate, and is a historic site. David Janssen, assistant director, helped find and restore the GWTW footage.
In the home-movie footage, it's a nice sunny day when the GWTW cast and crew are shooting the opening picnic scene of the movie. The film shows the four principal actors (Leigh, Gable, Howard, and Olivia de Havilland) at their trailers, getting ready for the scene.
"When we found the footage, we knew we had 23,000 feet of film. But we didn't know what was on it," says Janssen. "We first saw this footage about a year ago. We just finished cleaning up the film. [Hall] also had home movies of Herbert Hoover from 1928."
The fact that the footage exists illustrates the influence wielded by the Brucemore families, since Hall clearly had access to the set of GWTW. "On a national level, it was pretty much a closed set," Janssen explains.
Hall, the first president of Amana refrigeration, was an important local industrialist in his own right. His wife was an heiress to the Quaker Oats fortune.
What is the Brucemore Estate planning to do with the footage?
"We want to produce a video that we can have for the public," says Janssen. "Currently, it's available to researchers and historians, as are all of our archives. We want to make sure the public gets to see the footage and all of the other footage on Howard's home movie collection."
GWTW, released in 1939, won five Oscars, including best film and best actress for Leigh. It took nearly four years to bring the book to the screen, partly because about 1,400 actresses were screen-tested for the role of Scarlett O'Hara.