Racial content sweeps away ‘Gone With the Wind’ screening - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

AP, sfgate.com; thanks for the lead, AF.

image from article

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee theater has canceled a long-running screening of "Gone With the Wind" because of racially insensitive content in the classic 1939 film.

Officials at Memphis' Orpheum Theatre have announced that the film will not be shown during its summer movie series in 2018. Theater president Brett Batterson says in a statement that "the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population."

The film was shown at the Orpheum on Aug. 11. This is the 34th straight year it has screened at the theater.

"Gone With the Wind" tells the story of the daughter of a Georgia plantation owner during and after the Civil War.

Batterson tells the Memphis Commercial Appeal a "social media storm" played a role in the decision.

***

Seth Abramovitch, "Oscar's First Black Winner Accepted Her Honor in a Segregated 'No Blacks' Hotel in L.A.," hollywoodreporter.com (February 19, 2015)

It's been 75 years since Hattie McDaniel won for 'Gone With the Wind,' accepting her award at the Ambassador's Cocoanut Grove nightclub. Four husbands, a friendship with Clark Gable and 74 maid roles later, she died, her body refused by a segregated cemetery, her statuette now missing, but with her descendants devoted to her memory. 

This story first appeared in the Feb. 27 issue  [sic] of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

On a February afternoon in 1940, Hattie McDaniel — then one of the biggest African-American movie stars in the world — marched into the Culver City offices of producer David O. Selznick and placed a stack of Gone With the Wind reviews on his desk. The Civil War epic, released two months earlier, had become an instant cultural sensation, and McDaniel's portrayal of Mammy — the head slave at Tara, the film's fictional Southern plantation — was being singled out by both white and African-American critics as extraordinary. The Los Angeles Times even praised her work as "worthy of Academy supporting awards." Selznick took the hint and submitted the 44-year-old for a nomination in the best supporting actress category, along with her co-star, Olivia de Havilland, contributing to the film's record-setting 13 noms.

The 12th Academy Awards were held at the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub in The Ambassador Hotel. McDaniel arrived in a rhinestone-studded turquoise gown with white gardenias in her hair. (Seventy years later in 2010, a blue-gown– and white-gardenia–clad Mo'Nique, one of 11 black actors to win Academy Awards since, was the only one to pay homage to McDaniel while accepting her best supporting actress Oscar for Lee Daniels' Precious.) McDaniel then was escorted, not to the Gone With the Wind table — where Selznick sat with de Havilland and his two Oscar-nominated leads, Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable — but to a small table set against a far wall, where she took a seat with her escort, F.P. Yober, and her white agent, William Meiklejohn. With the hotel's strict no-blacks policy, Selznick had to call in a special favor just to have McDaniel allowed into the building (it was officially integrated by 1959, when the Unruh Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in California).

“Every picture and every line, it belonged to Hattie. She knew she was supposed to be subservient, but she never delivered a subservient line,” says MaBel Collins (center), 77, partner of Edgar Goff, McDaniel’s grandnephew. McDaniel’s descendants were photographed Feb. 13 at The Culver Studios in Culver City, a few yards from Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick’s former offices and where most of the movie was filmed.

A list of winners had leaked before the show, so McDaniel's win came as no shock. Even so, when she was presented with the embossed plaque given to supporting winners at the time, the room was rife with emotion, wrote syndicated gossip columnist Louella Parsons: "You would have had the choke in your voice that all of us had." The daughter of two former slaves gave a gracious speech about her win: "I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope that I shall always be a credit to my race and the motion picture industry."

But Hollywood's highest honor couldn't stave off the indignities that greeted McDaniel at every turn. White Hollywood pigeonholed her as the sassy Mammy archetype, with 74 confirmable domestic roles out of the IMDb list of 94 ("I'd rather play a maid than be a maid," was her go-to response). [JB emphasis]The NAACP disowned her for perpetuating negative stereotypes. Even after death, her Oscar, which she left to Howard University, was deemed valueless by appraisers and later went missing from the school — and has remained so for more than 40 years. Her final wish — to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery — was denied because of the color of her skin.

McDaniel's career was defined by contradictions, from performing in "whiteface" early on to accounts that her refusal to utter the N-word meant it never made it onscreen in Gone With the Wind. "We all grew up with this image of her, the Mammy character, kind of cringing," says Jill Watts, author of Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. "But she saw herself in the old-fashioned sense as a 'race woman' — someone advancing the race." Adds Mo'Nique: "That woman had to endure questions from the white community and the black community. But she said, 'I'm an actress — and when you say, "Cut," I'm no longer that.' If anybody knew who this woman really was, they would say, 'Let me shut my mouth.'"

A staging for a 1939 Oscars newsreel had McDaniel standing by a table laden with awards; her best supporting actress plaque is up front.

•••

Said McDaniel in 1944 about her disappointing prospects following her Oscar win, "It was as if I had done something wrong." Selznick's first move had been to dispatch her on a live, movie-palace tour as Mammy, which played to half-filled houses. But he saw less and less use for his typecast star, and Warner Bros. eventually bought out her contract.

Even after World War II, she continued to play underwritten maid parts in such films as 1946's Song of the South, Walt Disney's adaptation of the Uncle Remus stories, now considered a rare racist blot on the studio's legacy. In her final years, McDaniel found success on the radio, taking over in 1947 from Bob Corley — a white voice actor who mimicked an African-American woman — as the title character in Beulah, a hit comedy series about a live-in maid. It was the first time an African-American woman starred in a radio show, earning McDaniel $1,000 a week. She was cast in the TV version of Beulah in 1951 but shot only six episodes before falling ill. She died Oct. 26, 1952, of breast cancer. She was 57.

McDaniel with Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in a scene from the 1939 film, which won best picture.

Though she had been married four times — losing her first husband to pneumonia, the others to divorce — McDaniel never had children of her own. The McDaniel bloodline lives on through her sister, Etta. Etta's grandson Edgar Goff, who devoted much of his life to keeping Hattie's memory alive, died in 2012. "He was an urban engineer by profession, but his passion was black Hollywood, and the Hattie McDaniel story in particular," says Edgar's daughter Kimberly Goff-Crews, secretary and vice president for student life at Yale University. Edgar would regale his kids with stories of their great-great-aunt Hattie, who had hoped her descendants might choose a different path. "My father said that Hattie was pretty clear that she didn't want the family to be in Hollywood," says Goff-Crews. "She wanted them to have 'good, normal' jobs, so to speak — doctors and lawyers. She was no stage mom."

In her last days, McDaniel threw a deathbed party, coincidentally attended by her grandnephew's future life partner MaBel Collins, then 15, who recalls "people milling around, drinking, laughing. Guests would go in one or two at a time and visit with her. I had no idea who that dying movie star was until a couple years later, I saw Gone With the Wind — and realized that was Hattie in the bed."

In her last will and testament, McDaniel left detailed instructions for her funeral. "I desire a white casket and a white shroud; white gardenias in my hair and in my hands, together with a white gard­enia blanket and a pillow of red roses," she wrote. "I also wish to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery," today known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery. But the resting place of numerous showbiz types — including GWTW director Victor Fleming — had a whites-only policy. Hattie was buried at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, the first L.A. cemetery open to all races. In 1999, Edgar successfully lobbied to get a marble memorial to McDaniel placed at Hollywood Forever.

McDaniel also specified what was to become of her Oscar, which an appraiser dismissed as having "no value" in an accounting of her estate. Despite working steadily until her death, McDaniel left the world in debt: Her belongings were valued at $10,336.47 (about $95,000 today), $1,000 less than what she was deemed to owe the IRS. The Oscar, she wrote, was to be left to Howard University, but the award went missing from the Washington, D.C., school during the early 1970s.