Once More, the Old South in All Its Glory
By MAX ALEXANDER; Max Alexander writes on art restoration.
Published: January 29, 1989 on New York Times

IN 1939, IT WAS THE MOST TECHNICALLY sophisticated color film ever made, but by 1987 ''Gone With the Wind'' looked more like ''Confederates From Mars.'' Scarlett and Rhett had grown green and blue, a result of unstable film stocks and generations of badly duplicated prints. Hair styles and costumes, once marvels of spectral subtlety, looked as though captured in Crayola, not Technicolor.

Not anymore. Turner Broadcasting System, owner of the film, spent two years and $250,000 restoring David O. Selznick's four-hour classic, in time for the film's 50th anniversary this year.

The new color-corrected print, struck from the original negatives, has its premiere tomorrow and Tuesday on the 34-foot-high screen at Radio City Music Hall. When the house lights dim and the theater's 4,500-watt projectors whirr into action, Scarlett O'Hara will again raise her fist against a sky the color of her name and exhort, ''As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!''

The refurbished film is booked into 41 American cities - often at prestige revival houses like the Castro in San Francisco - and the home video release of the restored version of the print is slated for August.

But the music hall show, co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, is the kickoff. Monday's screening will be introduced live by one of the few surviving cast members - Butterfly McQueen, who played Prissy, the sobbing maid.

For the restoration of ''Gone With the Wind,'' Richard May, director of film services at Turner, returned to the original - and highly flammable - nitrate negatives, stored specially at Eastman House in Rochester. While many film historians cringe at Turner's practice of ''colorizing'' black-and-white films for television, the archival work on ''Gone With the Wind'' was entirely different, according to Mary Lea Bandy, director of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art.

In colorization, she says, tints are applied to one-inch video masters. By contrast, the goal with ''Gone With the Wind'' was to create a new negative on modern safety film from the fragile original -a complicated job because the original negative of ''Gone With the Wind'' was actually three. Modern color photography combines the yellow, cyan and magenta dyes necessary for color reproduction on a single negative, but the massive Technicolor cameras of 1939 ran three 35-millimeter negatives at once; a prism behind the lens refracted the image onto the separate strips, whose colors were later combined in a laboratory dye-transfer process to make a full-color print.

The result, according to Ms. Bandy, was ''perfection - the most beautiful color in the world.'' But the Technicolor laboratory closed in 1974, and subsequent prints were inferior and unstable.

The nationwide cable-TV network TBS initially planned only to restore the original title sequence, in which the words ''Gone With the Wind'' sweep across the screen. (Later prints used a simpler block title.) Seeing the quality of the restored title ''made us hungry for the rest of it,'' says Mr. May. ''We decided to go with the whole picture.''

''If the novel has a theme, the theme is that of survival,'' said the late Margaret Mitchell about ''Gone With the Wind,'' her 1,000-page best seller of 1936.

But the making of the 1939 movie was itself a story of survival, as epic and ironic as Miss Mitchell's detail of the Civil-War South and its heroine phoenix, Scarlett O'Hara. The picture took three years, three directors, half a million feet of film and $4.25 million to produce, nearly bankrupting the Selznick studio. The difficulties ranged from the grand - lack of a workable screenplay - to the embarrassing: Clark Gable couldn't dance.

Nonetheless, ''Selznick's Folly,'' as the film was quickly dubbed in Hollywood, won eight Academy Awards, and Mr. Selznick took the Irving Thalberg Award as 1939's outstanding producer. It has grossed more than $2 billion in today's money, according to ''The Making of a Legend,'' a recent documentary about the film on the new Turner cable movie channel, TNT.

Turner acquired the picture in 1986 when it bought the M-G-M film library; it secured broadcast rights from CBS the following year and plans to televise the film only on cable.

Butterfly McQueen, speaking from her home in Augusta, Ga., remembers her own troubles on the set, primarily her reluctance to portray a racial stereotype: ''I didn't want to eat the watermelon and I didn't want her [ Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara ] to actually slap me. I told them that if she did slap me I would not scream, but if she did not slap me I would scream as loud as I could.'' Even for Miss McQueen, now 78, the film is obviously larger than life. She often refers to her fellow cast members by their characters' names. ''Always Mammy [ Hattie McDaniel ] said to me, 'You'll never come back to Hollywood because you complain too much.' But Mr. Selznick put me in two more movies and he only put her in one more,'' she laughs.

She remembers the 36-year-old Mr. Selznick as ''a hard worker and an excellent person; that's why the movie is so excellent.'' As for Victor Fleming, who replaced George Cukor as director early in the filming, ''The only time he scolded me was when I was sitting in the back of the wagon and we had to pretend that we were going through the fire - which we never saw - and he said to me, 'Ham it up, Prissy! Ham it up! You're not hammy enough!' ''

Using as a guide a 1954 Technicolor print approved by the late Mr. Selznick, work began on rephotographing the negatives in early 1987 at YCM Laboratories in Burbank, Calif.

According to Mr. May, ''It had long been thought that the original negatives had shrunk at different rates; in fact the problem was not shrinkage but maladjustment of the prism in the Technicolor camera when it was photographed.''

The worst problem came during the Twelve Oaks smoking-room scene early in the film, where the men discuss the impending Civil War. ''Rhett has on a tie that's supposed to be a black-and-white check, but it appears as a yellow-cyan and magenta check,'' says Mr. May, cringing slightly at the thought.

In another scene, he says, ''Ashley [ Leslie Howard ] and Scarlett were silhouetted in front of a window, and he had three noses - different colors.''

Correcting the problems was ''largely trial and error,'' sighs Mr. May: ''Re-photographing the original at a slightly different relationship to the sprocket holes, hoping that it comes out the same as the other two strips. You're dealing with ten-thousandths of an inch.''

But how close is the color to the original production, as designed by the late William Cameron Menzies?

''That is the unanswerable question,'' says Ms. Bandy at the Museum of Modern Art. ''What we all hope today from the archival standpoint is that studios want their films to be re-released as closely as possible to the original release, and that's what you're seeing with 'Gone With the Wind.' ''

But at a recent press screening, a ''control'' sample of an early Technicolor print appeared considerably more orange than the cooler tones of the new release. In fact, in setting color values for the new print, Turner took into account contemporary taste. To a generation raised on color television, ''Technicolor seems a much warmer tone,'' says Mr. May. ''Ah, but that's the beautiful part of the old Technicolor,'' says the director Martin Scorsese, long a proponent of film preservaton. ''That's what gave the original 'Gone With the Wind' a very vivid, hot, saturated feeling to it. And I personally prefer that.''

''There is a little subjectivity in it,'' admits Roger Mayer, president of Turner Entertainment, the West Coast subsidiary of the Atlanta-based TBS. ''It's unavoidable, but we don't think we've destroyed the character of it, and I assume that Menzies would probably like it.''

''The Technicolor process is so very different that there are things you can never duplicate,'' says Mr. May, ''especially in low-key blacks and dark things.''

Mr. Scorsese, who says he attempted to duplicate the three-strip Technicolor of the 1940's in his 1977 film ''New York, New York,'' agrees. ''It is difficult to do, but I feel if you go warmer you get the impression of it. You have control over the color.''

For Ted Turner, the plain-speaking president and chairman of TBS, the issue is, well, black and white. Alluding to critics of colorization, he asks, ''How would 'Gone With the Wind' be in black and white?''

Mr. May, who remembers projecting ''Gone With the Wind'' as a high school student in 1949, when he worked at his local Oklahoma City movie theater, adds, ''Somebody made a decision 50 years ago that this should look a certain way, and that somebody isn't here anymore; we have to now take the best example of what they did and make our own decisions.''