Belles are Singing: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Failed Gone With the Wind Musical

Abstract

Despite the rich range of scholarship on the film musical, in-depth scholarly attention to the relationship between Hollywood and Broadway as symbolic centers of the U.S. culture industries has been surprisingly sparse. This article makes an intervention into this largely neglected history through an examination of David O. Selznick’s failed efforts in the early 1940s to stage Gone With the Wind as a Broadway musical. Fresh off back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Picture, Selznick made the innovative move to try adapting Gone With the Wind during his four-year hiatus from film production. Using Show Boat as an inspiration and Oklahoma! as a catalyst to accelerate his efforts, Selznick’s attempts ultimately failed during his lifetime, but represent an earlier inroad into cross-industrial franchising. Furthermore, few know that Selznick set up a summer stock theater in Santa Barbara in 1941 not only to hone his contracted talent, but also to prevent them from leaving southern California for the New York stage in the summer. Consequently, this article emphasizes the value of studying industrial failure for scholars of the culture industries as well as the need for greater study of the alternately generative and competitive relationship between Broadway and Hollywood – a relationship put into renewed relief recently as Broadway shows now espouse a high concept aesthetic to tell stories often with roots in film properties and fueled in part by Hollywood money.