'Twilight' the new 'Gone With the Wind?'

David A. Slade, director of "Twilight Saga: Eclipse" is living and breathing the movie. Yesterday, he wrote:

"As I sit here cutting I find out that I am going to miss an exhibit of one of my favourite artists Jeremy Fish."

He had already noted:

"Working Sunday, battle sequences coming together, first half of film feeling very emotional, still early days."

Post-production on a movie can take longer than shooting it. Half a million feet of film were shot on “Gone With the Wind,” edited down to about 20,000. Clearly the “Twilight” films would involve less, and the movies are shorter, but the math gives you an idea of what a director and editor face during post-production.

It’s probably a little too easy to compare the “Twilight” movies to “Gone With the Wind,” but there are real similarities, particularly in terms of the avid interest by the predominantly female fans. And the “Twilight” movies are taking up as much of the principals' lives. After an extensive period of development, script rewrites and pre-production, “Gone With the Wind” was in principal photography for six months, during which time they went through no fewer than four directors. The finished film was roughly twice the length of a standard “A” feature of the time. After approximately nine months of total shooting, Summit Entertainment has released two movies and has a third in post-production. Three directors have already been involved.


Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable Photo: www.imdb.com

The authors of both “Twilight” and “Gone With the Wind” were attractive housewives who came out of nowhere insofar as the literary world was concerned. Margaret Mitchell, author of “Gone With the Wind,” had been a journalist, but had never written a novel. She was only in her thirties when she wrote what would become one of the bestselling books of all time and earn her a Pulitzer Prize. Mitchell was a journalist recuperating from a broken ankle when she wrote her only novel.

Meyer was thirty when she published the first of her “Twilight” novels. She has publicly stated on numerous occasions that the idea for the first novel came to her in a dream, and she wrote “Twilight” in one summer, then rapidly obtained a literary agent who had a book deal within a month.

Readers and filmgoers invested emotionally in the stories and characters in both cases. Twihards often identify themselves as “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob.” “Gone With the Wind” readers and moviegoers debated (often still debate) whether or not Scarlett O’Hara is a strong female protagonist or just a bitch, and whether they like the dashing, macho Rhett over the intellectual, sensitive Ashley.

Margaret Mitchell never wrote a sequel to “Gone With the Wind,” but then the one novel is well over a thousand pages long.

Both “Gone With the Wind” and “Twilight” were produced by “mini-majors.” David O. Selznick, producer of “Gone With the Wind,” formed his own studio after years working first at RKO, where he produced, among others, “King Kong,” and then MGM, the biggest and most prestigious of the studios during Hollywood’s “golden age.” He bought the rights to the novel “Gone With the Wind” for a record-breaking $50 thousand during the Great Depression. Selznick International did not have the resources to make and market the film on its own, and besides, it was clear that the majority of the novel’s fans wanted Clark Gable for the role of Rhett Butler. Gable was under contract to MGM, and so Selznick had to make a deal with his father-in-law and former employer, Louis B. Mayer.
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