Another Day Arrives for ‘Gone With the Wind’

It was the sort of audience every producer dreams about: Applause that begins with the film’s opening credits and swells when the film’s title appears. But then, it was “Gone With the Wind.”

Pretty good box office, too, for a 50-year-old movie. Virtually all of Radio City Music Hall’s 5,874 seats were filled Monday night, with Ted Turner, the Atlanta cable-TV maestro, among the patrons.

But the showing--Tuesday’s final Music Hall run also was sold out, according to officials of the grand old Art Deco emporium--was no ordinary revival. Yes, the film was elderly. Not so the print of it.

The “GWTW” gala re-premiere here, co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, was due to Turner, who has been denounced by the likes of Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra for “colorizing” versions of black-and-white film classics for TV.

His Turner Broadcasting System, which owns the lush, romantic, Oscar-winning Civil War classic produced by David O. Selznick, spent two years and $250,000 restoring the 3-hour, 40-minute film for its 50th anniversary this year.

That it packed the Music Hall with cineastes and civilians alike, lured them away from the 19-inch TV screen on which they’ve often seen it, was heartening to Selznick’s son, Daniel, a film and TV producer.

“Even when a picture is out on home video”--which “GWTW” is--”there are certain pictures I don’t want to see on my television set,” he said. “There are certain movies that are an extraordinary experience to see with an audience, and it’s not the same thing as seeing them in the privacy of your living room.”

The new, color-corrected print of the movie, slated for home video release in August at $89.95, will be shown later this year in regulation-screen sites in 41 other cities.

That includes a Feb. 11 screening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said Selznick who, with his brother, Jeffrey, made a documentary about his father’s movie, “The Making of a Legend.”

The documentary, bankrolled by Turner, aired last October and again in January on Turner’s new TNT cable channel. According to the documentary, the movie cost $4.25 million to make, a monstrous sum in 1939, and has grossed more than $2 billion.

Monday’s Music Hall showing of the restored “Gone With the Wind” marked the kickoff of its national tour, a kickoff preceded by a lavish cocktail-and-canape reception in the hall’s Grand Lounge beneath the lobby.

There, the free-wheeling Turner popped up to face reporters and pose for TV and news photographers with Selznick and Butterfly McQueen, one of the film’s few surviving cast members.

Turner’s company got the picture in 1986 when it bought the MGM film library, and secured broadcast rights for it from CBS the following year. It plans to televise the film only on cable, starting in December on Turner’s WTBS “superstation” in Atlanta, a spokesman for him says.

Turner shrugged when asked why he authorized the restoration of the movie rather than staying with previous print versions, some of which are said to be of dubious color quality that, say, make the famous burning of Atlanta an uneven blaze.

Referring to the president of his Culver City-based Turner Entertainment Co., he simply said that “when Roger Mayer told me it needed refurbishing, we refurbished it, didn’t even question it. . . .

“I said, ‘Do it.’ I didn’t even ask what it cost.”

Selznick ventured that Turner “took a look at the quality of the prints that had been done in Eastman color and they were just not good . . . He really wanted to take care of it, much like a loved child.”

McQueen played Prissy, the sobbing, fussy slave-maid, a role since criticized as a racial stereotype. Monday night, she arrived at the reception as it began and sat at one of several tables behind a velvet rope, chatting with reporters. Later, she met singer Johnny Mathis, who happens to be opening tonight at the Music Hall and said he had always wanted to meet her.

A tiny, cheerful, musical-voiced woman, she just turned 78 and lives here in the summer and in Augusta, Ga., in the winter. She said she’s making a new movie called “The Stiff” next month.

“It’s a political spoof,” she explained.

She said she thought it wonderful that Turner had backed the restoration of “Gone With the Wind,” likewise that he was paying her for her appearance at Monday’s re-premiere.

Her theory on why all the fuss about the born-again film: “I think students are curious about history, especially since ‘Roots.’ They really want to see how things started.”

(A somewhat different but all-inclusive explanation was offered by one patron, Lisa Ellers, 24, of suburban East Meadows, N.Y. “It’s my all-time favorite movie,” she said.)

“Mr. Selznick did such a terrific job on that movie--he made it so beautiful,” sighed McQueen, who later donned her Prissy costume, took to the huge Music Hall stage and sang a cheerful welcome to the multitudes.

Ironically, she never has seen “Gone With the Wind” on television, she said. She may never see the home-video version, past or future, either, unless she gets a short course in the vicissitudes of the VCR.

“I have a video machine,” she said with a smile, “but I don’t know how to operate it.”