HBO Max removes "Gone With The Wind"

[Bob Jersey]

Temporarily, the streamer told Variety, until a discussion about its historical context and a denouncement of its biased depictions can be offered with it.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/hbo-max-gone-with-the-wind-removed-1234629892/ (link)

B

[Joe Hass]

It never ceases to amaze me how American corporations can be both smart and stupid at the exact same moment.

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[Tom Wolper]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 9:46 AM Joe Hass <hassg...@gmail.com> wrote:

It never ceases to amaze me how American corporations can be both smart and stupid at the exact same moment.

These corporate actions always look like "how do we drop this hot potato" and not "how do we use our power to make the society we want to see." HBO Max wanted to brag about having the most extensive classic movie catalog and that brought them to this. And as it's an almost 4 hour movie it's not like lots of people are going to sit down and watch the whole thing.

I found these tweets from Karina Longworth of the You Must Remember This podcast interesting:

I know I’m going to get asked, so: I believe Hollywood’s history of racism should be openly discussed. As I explained in the

@RememberThisPod season about Song of the South, when the industry tries to hide that history by de-circulating the products, they become fetish objects.

And obviously, that “history” is not over, it lingers. And the fetishism already exists: Trump invoked Gone with the Wind when Parasite won best picture.

[Kevin M.]

I posted over in the Tweety thingy that my late mother used to say that Gone With The Wind wasn’t an especially good movie, but it sold well because it was a long movie, which meant teenage movie-goers had more time to make out in the balcony. 

I remember getting the big special edition box of VHS tapes when they were released in the 80s. We sat down as a family to watch it. My mom fell asleep. None of us had any interest in putting in the second tape, so we all wandered off and when my mom woke up, we just told her we had watched the whole movie. To this day I’ve not seen it all the way through. 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[Bob Jersey]

Moi, this morning (6/10):

Temporarily, the streamer told Variety, until a discussion about its historical context and a denouncement of its biased depictions can be offered with it.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/hbo-max-gone-with-the-wind-removed-1234629892/ (link)

Thank this op-ed in the LAT (possible $) by Oscar®-winning screenwriter John Ridley for WM's decision...

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-08/hbo-max-racism-gone-with-the-wind-movie (link)

B

[PGage]

So, the subject header here is somewhat misleading. They are not removing it, they are taking it down until they can replace it with a version that is not censored or bowdlerized, but includes critical commentary and historical context. See WaPo piece linked below.

I think this is appropriate and long overdue. I grew up watching GWTW and Birth of a Nation. Both films have value, both in terms of the craft of film making and as artifacts of their prior in social history. Neither should be censored, and I have argued against doing that over and over with my liberal friends. But neither should they just be released to free range in the culture, shaping assumptions and attitudes uncritically. Nobody will be forced to view the new material, but everybody will have it available as the default option.

I agree with the comment that many corporations are engaging in shallow performative and ultimately meaningless gestures of support for BLM. I don’t think this is an example of it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/hbo-max-isnt-censoring-gone-with-the-wind-its-reframing-it/2020/06/10/d78544ec-ab3e-11ea-94d2-d7bc43b26bf9_story.html

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[Steve Timko]

"Birth of a Nation" is such a caricature I don't think it needs any explaining or context. 

SPOILER ALERT

The final scene where the father is ready to club his daughter to death with a pistol that has no ammunition rather than let her fall into the hands of the lecherous black aggressors, and then the Ku Klux Klan heroically rides to the rescue, is disturbing. 

"Gone With the Wind" is beautifully shot and epic in scale, even by today's standards. It could be easier to hide the racism in there.

In the 1970s, "Gone With the Wind" topped many best movie lists, ,but has been in decline. The AFI best movie list after 100 years lists it as sixth. It is much lower on many others. And awareness of racism had little to do with it, I think. People just developed more sophisticated tastes. The picture book quality of "Gone With the Wind" is less impressive.

"Birth of a Nation" was fantastically profitable for DW Griffith. It was shown before they had formal movie theaters. Frequently they just set up a tent, put in seats and charged admission. It played for years. It has the distinction to be the first movie screened at The White House, in 1915.

It was based on a novel called "The Klansman," which, as racist literature goes, was not a poorly written book. I'm not calling it a good book. But compared to say "The Turner Diaries," the writer had storytelling skills. "The Turner Diaries" was written like you'd expect an associate professor of physics at a community college to write a novel.

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[PGage]

I think pretty much the opposite. BoaN is exemplary filmmaking. I have watched it many times, including several close critical readings with master filmmakers, and with experts in Pan African Studies. Yes, the racism is gross and obvious, but over the last 100+ years many white viewers come away from it more likely to accept several of the underlying, racist claims (e.g. that black elected officials in the South during reconstruction were clowns, that the KKK was defending innocent women and property owners). 

GwtW on the other hand is sappy melodrama. It is also peak film making on several technical levels, and wildly influential on the popular Mid century imagination. While the book and film do try to make the former slave owners the victims of the Civil War and abolition, I think most white American viewers over the decades have recognized the deep pathology at the root of Scarlet’s saga.

Both films deserve to be seen by students of both serious history and popular culture. Both require pretty extensive contextualization. 

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[Kevin M.]

Something Conan O’Brian has discussed in multiple interviews the last couple of years is the legacy (specifically the lack thereof) of the media and of people in the media. We are already to the point where the films and stars of Hollywood’s golden age are being forgotten. Historians and film buffs will remember them and study them, but with a handful of exceptions, in a decade or two, the majority of films from the whole 20th century will be entirely irrelevant to mainstream culture. Same with TV shows and music. Think of the biggest shows of the golden age... Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, Burns & Allen... will those shows even be pop culture references in 2030? Do they deserve to be? 

Nat King Cole’s variety show had a greater percentage of ratings than almost any series in history but it was cancelled because advertisers refused to sponsor a show with a black host... that’s an especially poignant bit of trivia given our current social circumstances, but what network or streaming service is going to air episodes or even discuss it? 

We in the present don’t dictate what the future will remember about us, just as those in the past didn’t dictate how they would be remembered. I don’t think Gone With The Wind will stand the test of time, in or out of context. But it is not up to me... or HBO. 

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[Pete Ahles]

"Gone With The Wind" has caused more damage than any film in history. It's not the idea that's it's said the N-Word or perpetually stereotypes. It promoted the "Lost Cause" narrative.   

Another example would be Oliver Stone's "JFK". It promoted a false conspiracy theory. People watching it think its history is true.

I'm not promoting censorship of either film. I think there should be more speech instead of less. Maybe there should be disclaimers in front of the films to link to critical examination of the facts.

Pete

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[PGage]

I don’t think HBO is trying to dictate anything to the future. They are just ensuring that the resources under their control are used responsibly, or at least are more likely to be used responsibly.

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[Brad Beam]

From: 'Bob Jersey' via TVorNotTV [mailto:tvor...@googlegroups.com]

>Temporarily, the streamer told Variety, until a discussion about its historical context and a denouncement of its biased depictions can be offered with it.

 

Fun fact: Of the four white leads, only Clark Gable was American – and he was from Ohio. The other three were British by birth, although Olivia de Havilland was born in Tokyo. (And from the FWIW department: Grandma Beam skipped school to see it with her best friend – either the banker’s daughter or the principal’s, I forget – but they were caught leaving the theatre.)

 

_   _

|_>|_>  Brad Beam- Belle WV

|_>|_>  http://www.facebook.com/74bmw

[Tom Wolper]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 10:59 PM Pete Ahles <pete....@gmail.com> wrote:

"Gone With The Wind" has caused more damage than any film in history. It's not the idea that's it's said the N-Word or perpetually stereotypes. It promoted the "Lost Cause" narrative.-

That's a rather tricky claim. In the golden age of Hollywood people were much more likely to read a novel that a movie was based on. One of the factors behind the huge box office for GWTW was that the book was a huge bestseller.

[Dave Sikula]

I've seen it two or three times (nearly getting into a fight the last time I saw it in a theatre) and, its racial politics aside, find it a lousy movie. It's bloated, all of the characters are static, ending up either dead or exactly where they started psychologically, and the two male leads obviously dislike their characters. McDaniel struggles bravely with her role, but there really is little of value in the whole thing.

--Dave Sikula

On Wednesday, June 10, 2020 at 6:46:10 AM UTC-7, Joe Hass wrote:

It never ceases to amaze me how American corporations can be both smart and stupid at the exact same moment.

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 7:53 AM 'Bob Jersey' via TVorNotTV <tvor...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Temporarily, the streamer told Variety, until a discussion about its historical context and a denouncement of its biased depictions can be offered with it.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/hbo-max-gone-with-the-wind-removed-1234629892/ (link)

B

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[Tom Wolper]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 5:40 AM 'Dave Sikula' via TVorNotTV <tvor...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I've seen it two or three times (nearly getting into a fight the last time I saw it in a theatre) and, its racial politics aside, find it a lousy movie. It's bloated, all of the characters are static, ending up either dead or exactly where they started psychologically, and the two male leads obviously dislike their characters. McDaniel struggles bravely with her role, but there really is little of value in the whole thing.

In the days before TV there was just the movie theater. And the movie playing there changed frequently, so if one missed a movie during its run it was conceivable that one would never see it. And over the course of time moviegoers would have seen many movies that they would have forgotten soon after they left the theater and a few that stuck with them for months or years afterward. GWTW is one of those movies that stuck with viewers and got into the lists of best movies over the decades. A lot of that had to do with people who loved the book and were happy to see how it was brought to the screen and a lot were swept away from the romance. Today, with access to the movie, as well as film criticism, only a click away, we can form a different impression of GWTW. When the question of repertory movie theaters booking GWTW came up a couple of years ago I realized that I saw the movie when it was a massive event on network TV back in 1978 or so. Then it was shown on two nights and broken up for commercials. So I got a DVD from a used book store and then watched the movie and a commentary track from a film historian.

I agree with Dave's assessment. The script went through several hands and the movie went through different directors and it shows. They were over budget and rushed for time and a lot of sloppiness remains in the film. One scene that sticks out to me was a scene with Scarlett and Ashley in a barn. Through the whole scene Leslie Howard talks with an English accent. I can't understand why they would print that and not do another take.

I've also seen Birth of a Nation and I realized while watching GWTW that a lot of Griffith's visual language was copied into it. Since there was a 24 year gap between the movies I'm not sure if it was expected that viewers would resonate with those cues or just that was the way the era was going to be depicted.

[Joe Hass]

Disclaimer: I have never seen either Birth Of A Nation nor Gone With The Wind, nor do I have any plan to do so at this time. With that out of the way, and returning briefly to the specific decision:

There was an earlier point made by PGage Wednesday night that the headline was misleading, because WarnerMedia promised "it will return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions."

To which my response is:

1. Given that it would take about a day to create an intertitle that says the first two sentences from the statement spoken to Variety in their item, with a link to hbomax.com/gwtw, which could start with a link to the Analysis section of the existing Wikipedia entry about the film and grow from there, I fail to see how there's a need to pull the film (it ain't like we didn't know this was a problem on June 8);

2. The failure to provide a definitive return date given the reasonably extensive content that a simple Google search returns on the topic leads me to believe that the actual goal is to not return this film to the library and let it go away;

3. If a viewer is really committed to spending three-and-two-thirds hours on an 81-year-old film, I'm guessing they know the metaphorical score already.

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[PGage]

So, responding to each of Joe’s points:

1. My understanding is the HBO is working with recognized experts to develop not just didactic material but informed conversation among them. I applaud this approach, rather than punting to the Wikis. HBO is taking their responsibility to contextualize this seriously.

2. Highly (highly) unlikely. HBO is really not just making a knee jerk response to a Twitter storm, but is informed by some pretty serious scholars, film makers and film critics. Most of these people are decidedly not in favor of taking the film out of circulation. Were HBO to sit on the film and never return it, they would be pissing fb almost everybody who really cares about the issue, on any side. I do agree that it would have been preferable to announce some kind of time frame for bringing it back; I assume the uncertainties introduced by the pandemic and the resistance to police violence (both of which would impact the people involved in making the commentary) are the main reasons for the silence.

3. Strongly (strongly) disagree, based on many decades of talking to people who have watched and either loved or hated the film, with little understanding of the underlying issues. 

It really is hard to communicate the impact of GWTW. While there is that fraction of people under 40 who almost never watch a film made before they were born, even among young adults classic films have a large following. And this particular film/book has the largest following of all. 

I suppose the best analogy would be to LOTR - both a book and film (in this case both trilogies) That have deep and wide fandoms with huge cultural footprint. If at some point in the future there were elements of the story that were seen as offensive (indeed, for some that time is now), there may be seen value in pairing at least the films with some background on, say Catholicism and the British experience in both the Industrial Revolution and the two great wars of the early and mid 20th century.

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[Dave Sikula]

The problem with the didactic material is that they could include a forward by, say, Donald Bogle (who's more or less the go-to guy on this sort of thing), or even an informed panel, and how many people are going to skip through it to get to Scarlett and George Reeves at that damned barbecue?

I think that, at this late date, anyone who's motivated enough to want to watch even an hour or two of the movie is either aware of its implications or background and/or doesn't care and/or supports that mindset.

 

I think it's different with something lesser known like the "Censored 11" Looney Tunes, because most people would A) assume that they're intended for kids and mostly benign and B) don't know about the troublesome ones. I have enough knowledge of film and the period to know that "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarves" of "All This and Rabbit Stew" aren't exactly loaded with positive imagery, but I have enough awareness to put it in the context of "Goin' to Hebben on a Missouri Mule" from "Wonder Bar" or Mickey Rooney's blackface number in "Babes on Broadway" and dismiss it without excusing it.

--Dave Sikula

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[Steve Timko]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 2:38 PM Joe Hass <hassg...@gmail.com> wrote:

Disclaimer: I have never seen either Birth Of A Nation nor Gone With The Wind, nor do I have any plan to do so at this time. 

Took me three tries to watch "Birth of a Nation." I fell asleep the first two times. 

[PGage]

But why is this a problem? People who choose not to view the contextual material don’t have to watch it, those who do can. Perhaps HBO sticks a minute or two of introduction onto the film a la AMC. The only price to be paid is a month, maybe  two or three, of no access to an 80 year led movie. People are more pissed about losing access to Mad Men.

I suspect what will happen is a lot of under age 50 adults will actually be drawn to watch the film for the first time.

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[bermuda999]

On Wednesday, June 10, 2020 at 8:10:46 PM UTC-4, Steve Timko wrote:

"Birth of a Nation" is such a caricature I don't think it needs any explaining or context. 

SPOILER ALERT

The final scene where the father is ready to club his daughter to death with a pistol that has no ammunition rather than let her fall into the hands of the lecherous black aggressors, and then the Ku Klux Klan heroically rides to the rescue, is disturbing. 

"Gone With the Wind" is beautifully shot and epic in scale, even by today's standards. It could be easier to hide the racism in there.

In the 1970s, "Gone With the Wind" topped many best movie lists, ,but has been in decline. The AFI best movie list after 100 years lists it as sixth. It is much lower on many others. And awareness of racism had little to do with it, I think. People just developed more sophisticated tastes. The picture book quality of "Gone With the Wind" is less impressive.

"Birth of a Nation" was fantastically profitable for DW Griffith. It was shown before they had formal movie theaters. Frequently they just set up a tent, put in seats and charged admission. It played for years. It has the distinction to be the first movie screened at The White House, in 1915.

It was based on a novel called "The Klansman," which, as racist literature goes, was not a poorly written book. I'm not calling it a good book. But compared to say "The Turner Diaries," the writer had storytelling skills. "The Turner Diaries" was written like you'd expect an associate professor of physics at a community college to write a novel.

"The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan" was vile yet, as you allude, was written well enough to pass for "normal" literature. It was the second part of author Thomas Dixon's trilogy love letter to the Reconstruction-era Klan.

After he earned a Master’s Degree from Wake Forest, Dixon became a Political Science grad student at Johns Hopkins. There his best friend and virtual roommate was young Woodrow Wilson (also a Southerner). This continuing friendship with eventual President Wilson would come in extremely handy when he wanted to hawk D.W. Griffith;s "Birth of a Nation"and use the White House for the premiere you mentioned.

[Joe Hass]

First, my apologies that I am so late to reply here. I am struggling mightily on both the personal and professional levels with things (nothing severe, but I can’t get my brain to as we used to say about hard drives, spin down).

In an odd order, my response to PGage’s comments from 5:30 PM CT on June 12:

3. You are absolutely right, and I kicked this. I withdraw the comment and apologize.

1. I was not clear enough in my comment and buried the phrase “grow from there” in the middle of that. What I proposed was a fast starting point: something that acknowledges things and will expand further from this point. You’re right that WarnerMedia has the resources to move towards a far, far more robust discussion. But to borrow a cliche I hear too often, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”

2. We just disagree on this. I don’t think it’s too much to ask “How long do you think this is going to take?” I tend to get really nervous on general principle (and especially the last 3.5 years) when people don’t provide a point where we can fairly say “You said you were going to perform this task. What is the status of it?” That was why I recommended the initial idea of starting small with a promise to keep updating and refreshing the content.

When PGage said on June 12 at 9:23 PM CT “I suspect what will happen is a lot of under age 50 adults will actually be drawn to watch the film for the first time.”, I can tell you that, on my Apple TV, Gone With The Wind appeared in the Top Movies section. So yeah: that likely happened.

[Joe Hass]

My words are awfully tasty tonight.

https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/gone-with-the-wind-returns-to-hbo-max-with-intro-on-racism.html

There's a defensive part of me that wants to say "If you would've just said you wanted TCM's Jacqueline Stewart to do something with this, I'd have at least given you a little credit you're going down the right path.".

I have mentioned before in this forum about how for a person who doesn't like movies, I love TCM on several levels. I wonder if WarnerMedia doesn't appreciate what a gem it has in that channel and its followers.

[Bob Jersey]

Moi, June 10th:

Temporarily, the streamer told Variety, until a discussion about its historical context and a denouncement of its biased depictions can be offered with it.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/hbo-max-gone-with-the-wind-removed-1234629892/ (link)

The (optional) extras, per Movieweb.com:  (1) an understandable intro by TCM host Jaqueline Stewart, and (2) the hourlong TCM Film Festival panel about the controversy, back in the day and now, with Donald Bogle.

https://movieweb.com/gone-with-the-wind-hbo-max-return-dsiclaimers/ (link; sic)

B

(GG web has been upgraded, and is a little more readable)

[PGage]

Try them with a little Sriracha...

I think I said AMC originally, but I meant TCM, and I think they were explicit (at least in some discussion ps) that this is what they wanted to do. I did expect some kind of round table discussion after, but perhaps what they will do is produce a kind of documentary about the film and put that up separately later.

While I approve of what HBO has done here, there are still legitimate concerns related to your original objections. I do not approve of going through every film and television show and removing the now offensive bits. I would raise holy hell if they put out a censored version of GWTW, and I do not approve of all of the (mostly self) censorship we are seeing now. OTOH, I reserve the right to approve of pulling some things that may just be too much.

I will post a related example in its own thread.

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[Dave Sikula]

I wouldn't want to see a "censored" version of GWTW, either, but I don't know if it'd be possible to do that. It's not a matter of a particular line or scene; it's the whole mindset of the picture. You'd have to rethink if from the ground up and remake the entire picture.

--Dave Sikula

On Thursday, June 25, 2020 at 7:20:20 PM UTC-7, PGage wrote:

Try them with a little Sriracha...

I think I said AMC originally, but I meant TCM, and I think they were explicit (at least in some discussion ps) that this is what they wanted to do. I did expect some kind of round table discussion after, but perhaps what they will do is produce a kind of documentary about the film and put that up separately later.

While I approve of what HBO has done here, there are still legitimate concerns related to your original objections. I do not approve of going through every film and television show and removing the now offensive bits. I would raise holy hell if they put out a censored version of GWTW, and I do not approve of all of the (mostly self) censorship we are seeing now. OTOH, I reserve the right to approve of pulling some things that may just be too much.

I will post a related example in its own thread.

On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 11:29 PM Joe Hass <hassg...@gmail.com> wrote:

My words are awfully tasty tonight.

https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/gone-with-the-wind-returns-to-hbo-max-with-intro-on-racism.html

There's a defensive part of me that wants to say "If you would've just said you wanted TCM's Jacqueline Stewart to do something with this, I'd have at least given you a little credit you're going down the right path.".

I have mentioned before in this forum about how for a person who doesn't like movies, I love TCM on several levels. I wonder if WarnerMedia doesn't appreciate what a gem it has in that channel and its followers.

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[PGage]

Well, there is no way to make a non racist version of GWTW, as you say the film and book are nostalgic racist poems. But it would be an interesting project, maybe an HBO mini-series, to tell Scarlet’s story from the perspective of her slaves. It would put in more clear and tragic, heartbreaking focus the true meaning of her last line...

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[Ben Combee]

That was the premise of "The Wind Done Gone", the book from 2001 that
set legal precedent for fair use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone

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[Tom Wolper]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 10:20 PM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

While I approve of what HBO has done here, there are still legitimate concerns related to your original objections. I do not approve of going through every film and television show and removing the now offensive bits. I would raise holy hell if they put out a censored version of GWTW, and I do not approve of all of the (mostly self) censorship we are seeing now. OTOH, I reserve the right to approve of pulling some things that may just be too much.

We know that there is content that is unacceptable because it crosses a line. And we know that the line moves over time, usually incrementally. So it's no stretch to look at archival content and say it's unacceptable because it crosses today's lines. In our current situation the lines are making big moves quickly and emotions are strong (or raw, I couldn't figure out the better word). So collectively we're undergoing a culture shock and it interferes with good decision making.

So I think a call to temporarily pull a movie or TV episode from streaming in order to keep from inflaming passions during the shock period is okay. After the shocks stop coming media companies can reassess the problematic content and figure out what goes back out to the public and what gets locked away.

Our current situation reminds me of the premise of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock: technological changes are coming faster than we can adapt to them and we develop permanent stresses as we fail to keep up. In this case it's rapid waves of cultural changes, including but not limited to the mainstreaming of LGBTQ+ people, the opening of gender identity, #metoo and the power imbalance against women, and now antiracism replacing tolerance in the framing of race relations. Keeping up bears its own set of stresses and we don't know what's yet to come and how we'll cope.

In previous generations there wasn't this abundance of instantly available entertainment and so there wasn't a strong call to go into archives and remove all material now found offensive. There's merit in keeping that approach.

[PGage]

This is a reasonable and compassionate approach, in the spirit of pulling episodes of a show that deal with a plane crash in the weeks after a real incident that killed many.

But there are dangers. When they pull the plane crash episode of CSI: Whatever, we aren’t really saying there is anything wrong with s plots about plane crashes, just that it’s not the right time. When they pull blackface episodes of 30 Rock, are they saying they are doing so because timeline is not right, or because they have decided those episodes are really beyond the pale? The latter is fraught with all kinds of danger, many identified here. Next stop: banning Huck Finn.  

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[Doug Eastick]

Re: huck Finn.

I went to primary school where we did not have a coloured classmate until grade 3(? Hi Noel).   Reading about that relationship was completely new and foreign to me .    Yeah... Isolated white kid.

I guess I'm saying that huck Finn is beneficial in education.

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