Hollywood Dreaming

• Main Authors: Monteith, Sharon, Gleeson-White, Sarah
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Subjects: American literature
• DOI: 10.1017/CCO9781139568241.011

For Flannery O'Connor's sham general in "A Late Encounter with the Enemy," "only one event in the past ... had any significance": the 1939 Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind. Held over three days and attended by Margaret Mitchell, David O. Selznick, and the film's white stars - Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, and Olivia de Havilland - the premiere included a motorcade, a ball, "various cocktail hours, luncheons, teas [and] tours." For all Selznick's concerns about Gone with the Wind's reception in the South, its Atlanta premiere has lingered in regional memory as the high point of the South's relationship with Hollywood - even with an Englishwoman cast in the role of Scarlett O'Hara - a relationship that has attracted significant scholarly attention in terms of Hollywood redactions of Southern literature and representations of the South. In both contexts, Hollywood comes off rather poorly, typically as an exploitative machine that feeds national and global audiences myths of a magnolia-scented plantation South, or a South that borders on the pornographic, populated by violent, incestuous hillbillies, sex-starved white girls, and lascivious black men. Yet, this is only half the story. As Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith's survey of Southern cinema shows, "sometimes native southerners, like D. W. Griffith, were in the forefront of such representations," as actors, producers, and directors. Southerners have also made significant contributions as writers in and about Hollywood, engaging directly with that most powerful manifestation of the culture industry to control or influence in some way, at least, the South's mediation and its place in the national imaginary.