Sunday, June 21, 1998
`Gone With The Wind': Back To Big-Screen Glory

By John Hartl

Seattle Times Movie Reviewer

Honored last week in an American Film Institute television special as one of the great American movies, David O. Selznick's "Gone With the Wind" will be celebrating its 60th anniversary soon.

Its new theatrical distributor, New Line Cinema, is treating it with the respect due a movie that has sold more tickets than any other single event in entertainment history.

The company has spent more than $1 million to restore the Civil War epic to something like its original big-screen, three-strip Technicolor glory. It opens in more than 200 theaters on Friday.

New Line is promising "an extensive and elaborate" restoration that is "not subtle, but clearly audible to the ear and visible to the naked eye . . . the focus is clearer, almost three-dimensional, and the resolution is sharper. With the three-strip process, audiences can gauge variances in everything from the warm hues of a skyline to skin tones to the texture of fabric in a costume."

The original camera negatives have suffered damage over the years, so EDS Digital Studios has removed the imperfections by copying the film into its computers and electronically removing the scratches before restoring it to 35mm film.

The soundtrack was reworked by Chace Sound, which was founded by Rick Chace, a former technician at KVOS-TV in Bellingham, whose "Chace Surround" system creates stereo effects for video releases of mono movies.

"Gone With the Wind" went through its first major

reconstruction in 1967. At the time, a composite negative was made for a 70-millimeter reissue that grossed $30 million during the Vietnam War years.

It's been almost a decade since the last major restoration of "Gone With the Wind," which set box-office records in 1989 at Radio City Music Hall in New York and the Castro Theater in San Francisco.

Right from the beginning, "Gone With the Wind" has been a blockbuster. Margaret Mitchell's book had already been a massive best-seller when the movie, starring the then-unknown Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable (the people's choice to play Rhett Butler), arrived in theaters during the early days of World War II.

"A capacity audience at 10 o'clock in the morning paid the picture the homage of breathless attention for almost four mortal hours without a letup," reported J. Willis Sayre when the film was reviewed in The Seattle Times on Jan. 26, 1940.

"And the only complaint heard from the vast throng was that the picture isn't long enough. It cast such a spell that nobody wanted to go home."

For the past six months, "Titanic" has challenged "Gone With the Wind's" status as the No. 1 box-office attraction. In terms of dollars, "Titanic," which will be released to video Sept. 1, has grossed more. In terms of tickets sold, it lands in the No. 8 position on the top 10.

According to Variety, "Gone With the Wind" has sold more than twice as many tickets as "Titanic."

Of course, it had a 58-year head start, but the average ticket price in the 1930s was 25 cents. In the late 1990s, it's about $5. Here's Variety's all-time top 10 for the U.S. and Canada, adjusted for inflation:

1. "Gone With the Wind," $1.3 billion.

2. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," $1 billion.

3. "Star Wars," $812 million.

4. "E.T. - The Extraterrestrial," $725 million.

5. "101 Dalmatians" (1961 version), $657 million.

6. "Bambi," $646 million.

7. "Jaws," $590 million.

8. "Titanic," $585 million.

9. "The Sound of Music," $565 million.

10. "The Ten Commandments" (1956 version), $548 million.