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Posted by Faye Bell on March 28, 2001 at 21:53:06:
Needles to say, this article from the Altanta Constitution-Journal certainly has been the talk of the day ....
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PAGE 1 / A SECTION WEDNESDAY • March 28, 2001
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Fiddle-de-dee! What would Scarlett think of 'TWDG'?
Bill Rankin and Jill Vejnoska - Staff
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
Frankly, they don't give a damn.
Let "Gone With the Wind's" copyright holders file a lawsuit and generally carry on like Scarlett O'Hara during one of her foot-stomping fits. Come June, officials at publishing giant Houghton Mifflin still intend to publish the novel it says "revisits the world of 'Gone With the Wind.' "
Nashville author Alice Randall's "The Wind Done Gone" has been eagerly awaited by literary observers and has already attracted glowing reviews from such disparate sources as award-winning writer John Egerton ("Speak Now Against the Day") and record producer Quincy Jones.
But SunTrust Bank, acting as trustee of an estate controlled by two nephews of author Margaret Mitchell, is asking a federal judge in Atlanta to halt the book's publication. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, SunTrust called "The Wind Done Gone" a "blatant and wholesale theft" of "Gone With the Wind."
U.S. District Judge Charles Panell has scheduled a hearing Thursday morning on SunTrust's request for a temporary restraining order.
News of the lawsuit wasn't particularly surprising to one Atlanta observer.
"The Mitchell estate has been publicly demonstrative about protecting the integrity of 'Gone With the Wind' as a work of literature, as well as its copyright," said Mary Rose Taylor, executive director of the Margaret Mitchell House, where Randall is scheduled to appear in June.
"There's no reason to withdraw the offer to Randall regardless of any lawsuit that might be going on," said Taylor of the invitation by the Mitchell House, which is not connected to the estate.
"We're about freedom of speech. We've invited authors in to talk about the creative process . . . and what in their own life experiences influenced their work."
Randall demonstrated a similar Scarlett-esque unwillingness to back down in the face of adversity Tuesday.
"Once upon a time in America, African-Americans were forbidden by law to read and write," Randall, an African-American, said in a statement issued Tuesday. "It saddens me and breaks my heart there are those who would try to set up obstacles for a black woman to tell her story, and the story of her people, with words in writing."
Illiteracy is a subtext running through "The Wind Done Gone," in which the narrator, Cynara, is proud of her ability to write and is determined to get her own story down on paper.
That her story is fascinating is indisputable. Whetherit is a copyright-busting ripoff of Mitchell's epic saga of the South during and after the Civil War is what the court will have to decide.
Cynara --- or Cinnamon, as she is more commonly known --- is the mulatto offspring of the white master and the black mammy of the antebellum Georgia plantation home "Tata." The book begins in 1873, when the Civil War is over and Cynara is 28. While it is mostly her story of life in the Reconstruction-era South, it is rife with reminiscences and details about her half-sister, "Other," and Other's former husband, "R."
"Other" by any other name would appear to be Scarlett O'Hara, based on Randall's description of her on the book's opening page as "the belle of five counties" moving in a "cloud of commotion and scent."
But just as the words "sequel" or "retelling" don't appear in Houghton Mifflin publicity materials (at one point, Randall's work is described as a "rejoinder"), the names "Rhett," "Scarlett" or "Ashley" don't appear anywhere in the pages of "The Wind Done Gone."
Indeed, a Houghton Mifflin official said Tuesday there are no copyright violations in Randall's book. If anything, she suggested, Randall's rights are the ones in danger of being infringed upon.
"It is unconscionable to deny anyone the right to comment on a book that has taken on such mythic status in American culture," executive vice president Wendy Strothman said in a statement.
Yet one of the estate's lawyers said SunTrust has a duty to aggressively protect the copyrights toMitchell's 1936 novel. Some might mistakenly believe Randall's book to be an authorized sequel, said attorney Maura Wogan of New York.
"The Mitchell Trust has authorized sequels to 'Gone With the Wind,' " Wogan said, referring to Alexandra Ripley's "Scarlett" and another one in the works. "Publication of 'The Wind Done Gone,' of course, will have a huge impact on the trust and is to be published without their permission at all. It's a clear violation of the Copyright Act."
Legal issues aside, Randall said Tuesday her book was "an antidote to a text that has hurt generations of African-Americans." The Detroit native has said she "fell in love" with "Gone With the Wind" the first time she read it. Yet upon later rereading, she recalled in a Q&A included with Houghton Mifflin's publicity materials, she found herself wondering about certain things.
"Where are the mulattos on Tara?" Randall recalled asking herself. "Where is Scarlett's half-sister? Almost immediately I knew I had to tell her story, tell the story that hadn't been told. Tell it because the silence injured me."
Randall's real-life story is interesting in its own right. A 1981 graduate of Harvard, her writing credits range from a CBS movie-of-the-week to a country song, "XXX's and OOO's" that was recorded by Trisha Year- wood.
And she may have shown remarkable prescience in that earlier Q&A when she was asked how she thought Mitchell would react to her book.
"I think Margaret Mitchell would love my novel because it pays careful attention to her novel . . . ," Randall said. "But I think she'd denounce it. 'The Wind Done Gone' tells some truths Mrs. Mitchell didn't want told."
NARRATIVE THEFT OR FICTIONAL LICENSE?
From "Dreamy Gentleman" (Ashley Wilkes) to "Mealy Mouth" (Melanie), the lawsuit claims some characters in Alice Randall's "The Wind Done Gone" are "readily identifiable" as Mitchell's characters. Here's how Randall's "Cynara" remembers them on "the afternoon that Georgia entered the war" in Chapter 24:
"I'm trying to remember about that time and get it straight. R. had gone to the picnic barbecue at Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees, gone to do a little business, he told me. I believe now he went there to see her. Other had gone in the hopes of getting Dreamy Gentleman to ask for her hand in marriage. But that was not to be, and everybody but Other had seen it a long time coming.
"Dreamy Gentleman had made up his mind to marry his cousin Mealy Mouth, a flat-chested slip of a girl who would never ask more from marriage than a family. She didn't have the first idea about passion between a man and a woman but she possessed a fiery loyalty to family, particularly to her brothers, that attracted Dreamy Gentleman profoundly . . ."