Posted on 12/20/2009 4:58:35 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
“Another chick flick.”
Uh, no.
bump
She sat on her daddy's shoulders so that she could see Leigh and Gable walk into the theater. It was a Big Deal for a little town, as Atlanta was then.
Did you see this newsreel segment I posted on Dec. 16 after the Atlanta premiere?
My father's family and, in fact, the whole town showed up for the premiere of GWTW at the town's movie house - in 1953, 14 years after the release!
This was in rural Arkansas.... How times have changed!
Thanks, I was just defending GWTW from being characterized as a “chick flick”.
The model dressed as Scarlett tossed aside her cigarette and took her station.
A Cigarette! That's as bad as showing your bosom before three o'clock.
Nice column. Thanks. Stanley Crouch has a good feel for popular culture.
The review and accompanying articles are fascinating.
BUMP!
Of interest to locals is the fact that two of the three radio stations on the mike setup are still around - WSB "The Voice of the South" and WGST (home of Rush Limbaugh).
I can't read the third one in the middle, the last two letters of the call sign are "GA" - but WCGA isn't that old.
Clearly not a chick flick. Scarlett is very unsympathetic. On the other hand, I wanted to take Melanie Wilkes by the shoulders and SHAKE some sense into her head.
People with sense start their wedding before six, so the guests don't have to wear evening gowns and tuxedos.
Have you read the Margaret Mitchell’s biography “Southern Daughter”? It’s well known by we GWTW fans that she spent many hours on her grandfathers lap listening to stories about the antebellum period, the war and it’s aftermath. But the biography goes into much more detail about her life from childhood until her death. It’s a very good bio. Highly recommended by yours truly.
Sorry Oztrich Boy, but GWTW is NOT just "another" chick flick. It's an amazing film with depth of meaning and metaphor.
Some entrepreneur sold the bricks from the Grand. I used to see them all boxed up with certificates of authenticity at a flea market in Chamblee.
At best that supports AnAmericanMother's post about it portraying a created Southern Myth about the GoodOldDays
At worst 
There’s nothing chicks like more than hatin’ on other chicks.
Man, I’m glad I missed that then! I was so interested in horses (and books) in school that all that girl stuff just passed me right by.
I had two sides of the family though. One side were small urban (Charleston, Augusta) tradesmen during and after the War and were determinedly upwardly mobile and urban. They tended to sugar-coat and romanticize the War.
The other side were Alabama plantation owners, but real hardworking farmers, not the effete aristocrats of GWTW legend. Anybody who looked over the plantation account books and property tax returns (as I did . . . to the point of weariness) realized immediately that farming is a business proposition and takes a good deal of talent and skill.
In fact, the topic of my thesis was exploring the difference between the myth and the reality of the experiences of post-War Southern families.
The Margaret Mitchell theory was that the soft, aristocratic Southern planter class was destroyed by the War and supplanted by white trash dirt farmers (the Slatterys) who brought in greedy pursuit of filthy lucre and changed the South forever.
But I found in my research that the families that were wealthy before the War found ways, by hook or crook, to restore their fortunes relatively quickly afterwards. Even if they were completely beggared by the War and Reconstruction. One gg grandfather was left penniless with a wife and three children - he was a lawyer and banker before the War, his money was worthless and he was attaindered because he was a Confederate officer and forbidden to practice law. He used two of his old artillery horses to run a carting and delivery service until he could get the family back on its feet. Eventually, of course, he was back banking and practicing law and prospered until his death in 1917. The other gg grandfather on that side went right back to farming - and persuaded his emancipated slaves to stay on and take a wage to help him make a crop. (All of this can be demonstrated, by the way, from contemporaneous records, not golden-hued reminiscence long after the fact.) He too died very wealthy, although everything was taken from him but his land.
It's the old saw that if you divided all the money in the world up equally, after the passage of a certain amount of time the same people who had most of the money to begin with will wind up with it again. Talent, hard work, resilience, strong moral fiber . . . those people persist and are not wiped out, or not for long.
So really, the true story of the post-War Southern experience is less romantic but much more encouraging than the legend.
It doesn't matter what you've got, SOMEbody at SOME flea market eventually will want it!
How would you know that it was an honest to goodness real brick from the Grand? lol It could be from any old building and he was getting 10-15 dollars a brick.
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