America in 1937 was swept up in the “Gone With the Wind” phenomenon. The year before, Margaret Mitchell’s epic novel about the death of the Old South and the birth of the New had scored an unprecedented hit, and soon afterward it had been snapped up by Hollywood. All over the nation the popular guessing game became what star would play which character.
Producer David O. Selznick planned to make the movie on the sets of Hollywood, a locale far in time and place from the 1860s Georgia setting of the story. To keep the movie accurate, however, he wooed the novelist—in vain—to come out to the Coast. But in her place she urged him to use a fellow Georgia newspaper woman named Susan Myrik. “If you really wanted a Georgian for the job there wouldn’t be anyone better than Sue,” she wrote about the Macon journalist.
So Myrick became a technical advisor on speech and customs, on manners and costumes. And having been reared among Georgia’s fabled white columned mansions, she had a thing or two to say about the set designers’ recreations of Tara and Twelve Oaks.
Other columns concerned her also—her own, the ones she sent back to the Macon Telegraph and Atlanta Gazette to keep the home folks up-to-date on how “their” epic was being transferred to the screen. These are those lively reports, and they remain as compelling an insider’s account of the filming of Hollywood’s greatest movie as when they were written over forty years ago.
Richard Harwell is one of the South’s best know men of letters and greatest GWTW collectors. Among his many books is the collection of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” Letters, 1936–1949.