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Showing Original Post only (View all)"Gone With the Wind" pulled from HBO Max library for now [View all]
Source: CBS News
"Gone With the Wind" is generating controversy once again. The once-acclaimed 1939 Civil War drama has been temporarily pulled by HBO Max from its slate of streaming options amid outcries over the film's dated depictions of slavery and racism, according to multiple reports.
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The film -- which has long been revered by film critics and is the highest grossing movie of all time when adjusting box office totals for inflation -- was recently decried in a high-profile op-ed in the Los Angeles Times penned by "12 Years a Slave" screenwriter John Ridley.
Ridley called on HBO Max to pull the film -- which tells the story of a tumultuous love affair between two wealthy Southern aristocrats and is set against the backdrop of the end of the Civil War and the destruction of the Confederacy. Ridley argued that the movie "doesn't just 'fall short' with regard to representation. It is a film that glorifies the antebellum South."
"It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color," Ridley wrote. "It is a film that, as part of the narrative of the 'Lost Cause,' romanticizes the Confederacy in a way that continues to give legitimacy to the notion that the secessionist movement was something more, or better, or more noble than what it was -- a bloody insurrection to maintain the 'right' to own, sell and buy human beings."
Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gone-with-the-wind-pulled-from-hbo-max-library-for-now/