So, people say that Gone With the Wind is the greatest motion picture of all time. I can't say specifically which people, but there are a lot of them, and they disappoint me.

Today, I want to check back in about the history of blockbuster movies, which I've been doing sporadically in order to figure out how they work. So far, I've talked about the first blockbuster movie, the 1912 Italian epic Quo Vadis, which set the bar for the kind of large-scale spectacle that audiences could expect from the high-prestige movies. We've also discussed the first American blockbuster, the 1915 Ku Klux Klan recruitment film The Birth of a Nation, which pioneered most of the foundational principles of narrative filmmaking, and also made the case for the continued oppression and second-class status of Black people in the United States.

And today, we're going to look at Gone With the Wind, the flabbergastingly successful 1939 four-hour film epic about the death of the Old South, and... well, the birth of a nation, I suppose.

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