betting against the kiss

"Democracy only works when people take part in it."

~  John Kerry

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     There's a short video on You Tube where director Martin Scorsese discusses the film version of Gone With The Wind.  He says the movie "unlocks that fantasy part of your brain, when you see those images..."

The movie has the power to do this, he states, because of "the production design, the matte work, and his vision" -- i.e., the vision of producer David O. Selznick.

     Since the 1970s, a film's director has been considered as the "author" of the work, or -- the "auteur" (original French term).  

However, when Gone With The Wind was made, 1938, Hollywood's studio system ruled the movie-making process, and directors were hirelings, not authors.  

Selznick as producer was the "auteur."  During the project, he had two different directors work on it at different times -- first George Cukor; later Victor Fleming.  



Directors were interchangeable; it was the producer's vision which would be realized.

     One facet of Selznick's philosophy was, if he was making a movie based on a book, the movie version had to follow the novel as written.  This strongly-held belief clashed with Alfred Hitchcock's method, which was to just shoot it to make the best movie that he could.

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Hitchcock:  make a great movie

Selznick:  bring the book to life on the screen

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     When Alfred Hitchcock and his wife and young daughter left England and moved to Hollywood, Hitchcock worked for Selznick, making the movie Rebecca, based on the best-selling novel by English author Dame Daphne du Maurier.

     What Hitchcock ended up doing was shooting minimum camera footage, so there were not a whole bunch of choices for how the story could be edited together -- editors had only limited amount of walk-and-talks, zoom-ins, etc. -- there was really only one way it would all fit together into a movie -- Hitchcock's way.


     (In the editing room, Selznick was all:  "Damn!!")

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----------------------- Two thoughts about movies and the novels they are based on...

1.  On You Tube there are videos showing a variety of different actresses reading for the role of Scarlett O'Hara.  None of the others even come close to Vivien Leigh.  People in the Comments keep saying, "She was born to play that role!  No other actress would do!"

     Vivien Leigh read Gone With The Wind, the book, while she was still over in England.  She was very excited by the story, and determined to play the part of Scarlett.  Listening to other actresses' readings on You Tube, I thought -- I wonder if any of these ladies read the book, or if they were just reading from the script.  I think that could make some of the difference between them and Leigh. 

 Reading the "billion"-page novel by Margaret Mitchell, one would have a deeper, richer, more visceral understanding for the Scarlett character than you would just reading aloud from a script.


And then, 2.
I wonder whether Alfred Hitchcock read du Maurier's novel, or if he just read the screenplay and went to work making the movie.

     The latter, I bet.

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