Gone With the Wind
Ernest Haller, ASC and Ray Rennahan, ASCIn a way, it's unfortunate that Gone With the Wind, the best-loved picture of its time, was released in 1939. Film historians generally agree that more outstanding movies were made that year than in any other, but GWTW (as it was called) shunted most of the others aside. Based on an enormously successful novel of the Old South by Margaret Mitchell, it was produced by David O. Selznick, who drove the production with an iron will. The first director, George Cukor, and director of photography, Lee Garmes, ASC, were fired a few weeks into production. The credited director, Victor Fleming, a notoriously tough ex-cinematographer, suffered a nervous breakdown before production wrapped.
The credited cinematographers were Ernest Haller, who replaced Garmes, and Technicolor's great Ray Rennahan, who was with the show from beginning to end. Several other cinematographers were also involved, including Jack Cosgrove, ASC, who served as director of photographic effects, Wilfred M. Kline, ASC, and Karl Struss, ASC. The convincing 1860s look of the film resulted primarily from the work of Haller and Rennahan, production designer William Cameron Menzies, art director Lyle Wheeler and costume designer Walter Plunkett. Remarkably, the entire picture, save for a few second-unit scenes, was made at the RKO Pathé studio in Culver City, then occupied by Selznick International Pictures. All of the soundstages were utilized for the interior sets, and much of the 40-acre backlot, a treasury of sets from great motion pictures of the past, was bulldozed to make way for new exteriors. The scrapped sets provided flaming backgrounds for the "burning of Atlanta" sequence.
The public followed newspaper accounts of the production avidly, especially the search for suitable actors. Although the cinematography was not publicized, patrons commented on it in glowing terms, and increased their demands for more color films.
Three-strip Technicolor was not an easy process. Although the picture was made in the new "high-speed" Technicolor that had been used for The Wizard of Oz, the film was so "slow" that filming required an almost intolerable amount of candlepower, especially in the many large-scale scenes. The camera in its blimp weighed about 700 pounds, and the three-strip process required the use of correction filters and weirdly colored makeups to achieve realistic hues.
GWTW was nominated by the Academy in 13 categories. It won eight Oscars, plus three special awards. Among the winners were Haller and Rennahan, whose triumph was hard-won and richly deserved.
—G.T.
© 1999 ASC