Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (62 page)

He closed by noting, “There are perhaps a group of wealthy vestal virgins willing to spend their lives and fortunes protecting
Gone With the Wind
. If there are, and were, I have never met them.”
³⁰

Just months after the sequel deal announcement, Congress extended the copyright of works then in their renewal period—including
Gone With
the Wind
—an additional nineteen years. Under the new law, the copyright on Mitchell's book enjoyed protection until 2011. The extension gave the estate some breathing room from aspiring sequel writers, but Stephens Mitchell expressed no regrets over having signed the sequel deal. When asked how the copyright extension might have affected his decision-making process, he refused to speculate. “I do not know what my decision would have been had I known that the Act amending the copyright law would pass. There is no way to tell how an ‘if ' would have turned out,” he noted in a letter to a fan.
³¹

The movie sequel deal was not
Gone With the Wind
's only turn in the spotlight in 1976. MGM took in another five million dollars when NBC acquired the rights to broadcast
Gone With the Wind
for the first time on network television in the United States. The estate's share was five hundred thousand dollars. The movie aired over two nights that fall. The first part, which ran on November 7, 1976, drew a record 33,890,000 viewers, the largest audience ever to watch a single television broadcast. The final segment, shown the following night, attracted 33,750,000 viewers, the secondlargest audience in television history. As had happened when MGM rereleased the movie in theaters, interest in the novel picked up. Avon Books went to press with its paperback edition three times in the wake of the showing.
³²

That same year, another novel about life in the Old South took the nation by storm. Alex Haley's
Roots
, which purported to trace the author's family tree back to Africa, became a bestseller, and several commentators termed Haley's book a counterpoint to
Gone With the Wind
. An intriguing mystery arose when a handful of readers in Connecticut and Wisconsin purchased copies of
Roots
from a book club and were startled to find the text of
Gone With the Wind
bound inside the cover of Haley's book. Press reports referred to the incident as “
Roots
Traduced” or “The Revenge of the Confederacy,” but the
New York Times
investigated and determined there had been no nefarious plot. According to the publisher, it had been an accident—albeit an ironic one—that occurred at a bindery where both Haley's and Mitchell's books were being produced. Only about two dozen copies of the mismatched volume made it into circulation.

During Mitchell's lifetime, the racial themes in her book had been discussed but rarely came to the forefront. Forty years later, standards of tolerance had changed, and many commentators questioned the ongoing relevance of Mitchell's version of life in the Old South. Yet, despite the increased sensitivity to racial considerations,
Gone With the Wind
remained commercially popular. The racial issue would escalate in years to come but had not yet dampened enthusiasm for Mitchell's story. It certainly did not unduly concern executives at CBS, who in April 1978, paid thirty-five million dollars for the exclusive privilege of broadcasting
Gone With the Wind
on television for the next twenty years. The deal earned the estate another $3.5 million.

In late 1976, after considering a long list of potential writers, David Brown and Zanuck chose Vivien Leigh biographer Anne Edwards to develop the story on which their movie would be based. After two years of research and writing, Edwards produced a manuscript titled “Tara: The Continuation of
Gone With the Wind
.” In the 650-page story, which opens after Melanie's death, Scarlett convinces Rhett to reconcile. However, when he becomes suspicious of her continuing interest in Ashley, he finds comfort in the arms of Belle Watling, who later dies of yellow fever. Rhett returns to Scarlett but is killed in a Ku Klux Klan raid while fighting to protect Tara. Screenwriter James Goldman was hired to turn Edwards's story into a screenplay, and his treatment follows some of her plot line, but adds a new husband for Scarlett and spares Rhett's life in the end. After reviewing the draft treatment, Universal and MGM came to loggerheads over how the script should be finalized. They could not settle their differences during the three-year option period, and so, in 1979, Zanuck and Brown paid the estate one hundred thousand dollars to extend the option for another year. Even with the extra time, Universal and MGM could not agree on a story line, and the project foundered. In 1980, the movie deal was off.

Although the copyright extension alleviated any sense of urgency on issuing a sequel, Stephens Mitchell maintained an interest in authorizing a continuation of
Gone With the Wind
as a way of protecting the content and, of course, sharing in the profits. However, an incident occurred that caused him to reconsider MGM's involvement. In 1980, MGM attorney Herbert S. Nusbaum alerted the estate to an unauthorized sequel that was being shopped around to Hollywood studios. Anderson, who now handled much of the
GWTW
work, contacted the sequel's author and warned him that the project violated the estate's rights. Nusbaum also wrote to the man, advising him that MGM owned the
Gone With the Wind
motion picture rights, including sequels.
³³
Anderson, who had been copied on the letter, quickly responded to Nusbaum, taking exception to his claim about MGM's rights. “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer owns only such motion picture rights in connection with
Gone With the Wind
as it has acquired by contract, and it owns no sequel rights whatsoever,” he said.
³⁴
Those few words would serve as the launching pad for a multiyear court battle.

The estate hired an attorney specializing in copyright issues to review the series of contracts between Margaret Mitchell, Selznick, the estate, and MGM to determine what, if any, rights the studio had in a
GWTW
sequel. The lawyer concurred with the estate's view that MGM had no sequel rights in the United States. If the estate wanted to establish that point definitively, he recommended, it would have to file for a declaratory judgment in court nullifying MGM's claims. Although the case would be an expensive undertaking, Kay Brown urged the estate to push ahead, noting that MGM's claim reduced the value of the sequel rights. Zanuck and David Brown, who remained interested in tackling a movie sequel, were supportive as well. They offered one hundred thousand dollars for a new option on a movie sequel if the estate negated MGM's claim.
³⁵
In June 1981, the estate filed suit against MGM in federal court, asserting that Margaret Mitchell, and later her estate, controlled the right to continue her story and that such rights had never been granted to Selznick, or his successor in interest, MGM. In response, MGM maintained there was ambiguity over who controlled the sequel rights and that, by allowing MGM into the 1976 agreement with Universal, Stephens Mitchell implicitly recognized MGM's rights.

While that case wended its way through the judicial system, the estate prepared for trial on another copyright matter—this one related to the
GWTW
dramatic rights. In 1979, an Atlanta theater group called Plump Bess Productions had attempted to stage a dinner theater production called
Scarlett Fever: The Comic Retelling of a Southern Legend
. When the estate claimed copyright infringement, the theater group maintained its show was a parody and, therefore, permissible under fair use laws, which authorize limited public use of copyrighted material for purposes such as critique or commentary. The distinction between what constitutes infringement versus fair use is not clearly defined, but the estate felt confident that the theater company was making excessive use of Margaret Mitchell's copyrighted material and filed a lawsuit. The estate obtained a temporary restraining order, preventing Plump Bess Productions from staging the play, and the case finally went to trial in the summer of 1981. On September 3, the court ruled in favor of the estate, permanently barring the production and awarding five hundred dollars in damages.
³⁶

Stephens Mitchell won that round but would not live to see the results of his struggle with MGM over the sequel rights. That case remained unresolved when he died on May 12, 1983, at the age of eighty-seven.* Of all the people integrally involved in the life of
Gone With the Wind
, he had dedicated the most time and energy to its care. And he, more so even than his sister, had ensured its lasting value. According to his will, the rights to
Gone With the Wind
now passed to two new trusts, which he referred to jointly as the Stephens Mitchell Trusts, that he had set up for the benefit of his sons. Responsibility for managing those rights transferred to a committee consisting of Anderson, Clarke, and Atlanta tax lawyer Herbert R. Elsas, in conjunction with the Trust Company of Georgia as executor of the estate. Some of the most highly publicized events related to the business of
Gone
With the Wind
lay ahead, including, at long last, an answer to the question readers had been asking for half a century: what happened to Scarlett and Rhett?

* Over the years, the estate has added to the collection, as have third parties. Today, the university's Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses more than sixty thousand Mitchell-related items.

* Stephens Mitchell was not, however, the last survivor of the core group involved with the book's original publication. That distinction goes to George Brett, who died the following year at the age of ninety-one. Cole had died in 1979 at age seventy-six.

18
Tomorrow Is Another Book

F
or the first time in almost half a century, the Mitchell family was not managing the business of
Gone With the Wind
. Though the author's two nephews inherited the income earned from the book and other deals and served as the final arbiters of how the rights would be handled, they were not involved with the day-to-day decisions related to the protection and exploitation of the
GWTW
copyright. Their father had entrusted that responsibility to the trio of attorneys in Atlanta who served as committee members of the Stephens Mitchell Trusts.

Like Stephens Mitchell before them, none of the three lawyers was trained in copyright or publishing law, and none had aspirations for careers in the literary rights world. But they shared a loyalty to their friend Stephens Mitchell and a willingness to carry out his wishes regarding the estate. While the author's brother did not leave specific instructions as to how he expected the trustees to handle matters, the lawyers were well aware of his intentions. “We knew pretty much what he would have wanted,” Paul Anderson said. He and Thomas Hal Clarke had helped with the Universal sequel deal, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) litigation, and the lawsuit over the stage version of
Scarlett Fever
, so they were familiar with how Mitchell thought and operated. Most decisions came down to “what made sense and what was the right answer to the problem.”
¹