‘Gone with the Wind’ removed from HBO Max due to racist depictions, company says
The 1939 Civil War film “Gone with the Wind” will be temporarily removed from HBO Max due to its “racist depictions,” the company said.
The move comes after John Ridley, who penned the Academy Award-winning “12 Years a Slave,” asked the company, owned by WarnerMedia, to remove the film from its platform in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on Monday.
“As a filmmaker I get that movies are often snapshots of moments in history. They reflect not only the attitudes and opinions of those involved in their creation, but also those of the prevailing culture,” Ridley wrote.
He added that the film is problematic because it “glorifies the antebellum south. It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color.”
“Gone with the Wind” is one of the most popular films of all time and is considered by many to be a classic, but not without controversy. Since its release, the film’s depictions of black people, slavery and the South have drawn a great deal of criticism.
On Tuesday, HBO Max said it would remove the film from its platform, the Times reported.
“‘Gone With the Wind’ is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society,” an HBO Max spokesperson said in a statement, according to the New York Times. “These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”
But the removal is only temporary.
The company added that “Gone with the Wind” will eventually return to the platform unaltered along with “a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions,” The Guardian reported, adding that editing the movie “would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”
Hattie McDaniel, who played Scarlett O’Hara’s slave Mammy in the movie, won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the film, making her the first African American to win an Oscar.
The awards dinner was held at a segregated venue and McDaniel could not sit with her fellow cast members, Smithsonian Magazine reported. Instead, she sat at a small table against a wall.
McDaniel, who played a maid onscreen at least 74 times, drew criticism from the NAACP for playing stereotypes, Smithsonian Magazine reported.
She responded in Hollywood Reporter in 1947.
“Several times I have persuaded the directors to omit dialect from modern pictures,” she wrote. “They readily agreed to the suggestion. I have been told that I have kept alive the stereotype of the (black) servant in the minds of theatre-goers. I believe my critics think the public more naïve than it actually is.”
This story was originally published June 10, 2020 at 8:59 AM with the headline "‘Gone with the Wind’ removed from HBO Max due to racist depictions, company says."