A Mogul Of the Best And Worst Kind
By DAVID THOMSON
Published: May 26, 2002 on New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO— YES, it's not just hype that somewhere or another, ''Gone With the Wind'' is still and always playing, and has been for more than 60 years, with some young woman watching, and knowing, that she is, or could have been, Scarlett!

Where, exactly? My favorite example occurs in Steven Spielberg's ''Empire of the Sun.'' As Shanghai begins to break apart in 1941, with the English schoolboy lost in the streets, there is a fabulous poster for David O. Selznick's immense enterprise. I think of it as a modern mogul saluting one of the great figures from the past.

You may say that ''Gone With the Wind'' is too long, too old-fashioned, that it meanders, that its view of blacks is nothing to be proud of. Well, sure, but don't forget that the whole film is seriously hampered by the conventions of melodrama. Still, it's the movie of movies, and still one of the most successful motion pictures ever made. And whenever that music starts to play, people all over the world think, ''Hollywood.''

Selznick -- DOS as he signed all his memos -- did not just make that film. He believed in it before he had read Margaret Mitchell's novel; he backed it as the one brilliant bet of his life; he held to it as it lengthened, became more expensive, more unlikely and more impossible. He trusted his hunch that a Scarlett O'Hara would turn up; then he bullied, coaxed, wooed and dragged the film into being as directors fell by the wayside in exhaustion.

And on one hot September night in 1939, with his wife, Irene, and his partner, Jock Whitney, he drove from Beverly Hills to Riverside, found a theater and pushed his four-hour work in progress into the middle of a double bill as a sneak preview. The last test of the auteur theory is this: Who is left alive and still dictating memos? That person made the film. And DOS made ''Gone With the Wind.''

He was born, near enough, 100 years ago. Well, yes, you're right: we're late: May 10, 1902 was the day, in Pittsburgh. But Selznick, who died at 63, was late most of his life, and he might forgive us, just as we owe him something like thanks and respect.

He was not perfect. His older brother, Myron -- the man who invented Hollywood agents and who actually introduced Vivien Leigh on the set when the first scene, the burning of Atlanta, was shot -- always called him a chump. One of the last bits of advice Myron offered in 1944, before he died, was don't sell off your share of ''Wind.'' But Selznick needed money quickly in 1946, and he reckoned he'd made so much on the film already. And films pass away, don't they? So he sold his share for a few hundred thousand dollars, and the picture went on and on, keeping Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer alive for decades, while Selznick had hard times in his last years and sometimes had to borrow money so that he could spend it flamboyantly as a way of demonstrating that he was still there, and still DOS.

And worse than a chump; he was sometimes dictatorial and domineering, hectoring associates in 10,000-word memos, reckoning that ''The Third Man'' would have been better off as ''Night in Vienna,'' firing the director George Cukor from ''Gone With the Wind,'' treating King Vidor so badly on ''Duel in The Sun'' that that veteran director stormed away, and so irritating Alfred Hitchcock over the years that Hitch made the killer in ''Rear Window'' (the Raymond Burr character) look like Selznick.

Yes, a pain in the neck, a chronic, losing gambler, a helpless womanizer, an interferer, a producer who thought he could write scripts better than writers, a guy who might be six hours late to a meeting and then call you at three in the morning. Not reasonable, but obsessed.

Have you spent time in Hollywood? Name me three reasonable people. And then consider that it was Selznick who brought Hitchcock over from England and gave him ''Rebecca'' and ''Spellbound'' to make, and who was then so caught up in ''Duel in the Sun'' that Hitch was able to do ''Notorious'' while his back was turned. And it was Selznick who had Vidor capture the delirious bloodstained Technicolor of ''Duel in the Sun.'' The same David O. Selznick also produced (take a deep breath): ''A Bill of Divorcement'' (the debut of Katharine Hepburn), ''What Price Hollywood?'' ''King Kong,'' ''Dinner at Eight,'' ''Viva Villa!,'' ''David Copperfield'' (the one with W.C. Fields as Micawber and Freddie Bartholomew as David), ''Anna Karenina'' (with Garbo), ''A Tale of Two Cities,'' ''Nothing Sacred,'' ''A Star is Born'' (the first, with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March), not to mention ''Since You Went Away,'' ''Portrait of Jennie,'' ''Gone to Earth'' and ''A Farewell to Arms,'' all of which starred his second wife, Jennifer Jones.

I am prejudiced. For several years in the 80's and early 90's, I became a kind of adjunct to the family, trusted to examine the 57 tons of paper he left behind (all now at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Tex.). I became a friend to his two sons, Jeffrey and Daniel (especially while they produced a TNT documentary on the making of ''Gone With the Wind'') and the witness to many hours-long rants and reveries from Selznick's first wife, Irene Mayer.

I was writing the life of David Selznick, so I understand every story about Selznick being the worst kind of tyrant and mogul. Yet I know, from reading his daily thoughts, and from talking to so many people who suffered under him but were inspired by him, that no one ever cared more about pictures or did more to make them work.

He was the son of a movie mogul, Lewis J. Selznick, who went bust in 1923. He was raised to look at screen tests of young actresses, to read treatments and scripts, to advise on the re-cutting of a picture. He was of that generation in which the men who controlled the business had showmanship, celluloid and the smell of tungsten lights in their blood, along with cigarette ash on their clothes. (Selznick smoked four packs a day.)

Hollywood today has too few leaders with that passionate training. He cared. On ''Gone With the Wind,'' he told the young Ann Rutherford, who played Careen O'Hara, that even in the heat of June and the furnace of the Technicolor lights she was to wear authentic underwear beneath her dress. But David, she said, no one will see it, or know. And he told her: Ann, you will feel it, and I will know. And that will affect the film!

Still playing.