Customer Reviews

On the Road to Tara

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Overall, ON THE ROAD TO TARA gives dozens of wonderful anecdotes about the making of the epic film GONE WITH THE WIND, using Selznick as the focal point. The real life characters seem much larger than life here, and not the one's you'd expect. Issues of that time resonate in our own, including racism, Hollywood's role in shaping national morality, ageism, drug addiction, homophobia and meglomania.

Unfortunately, David Selznick is a very unsympathetic character. He's troubled, undisciplined, unwittingly cruel, irrational-and those are his endearing qualities! Though the author takes pains to show that Selznick was always apologetic after he flew off the handle, there is no soft side to warm this character up a bit. He is reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane but with no love interest but a wife who stays completely out of sight.

Vivien Leigh is just as complex, living a life filled with scandals-she was living out of wedlock with Laurence Olivier, which had to be kept a complete secret from press and public. She was British, and many thought it a crime that a non-Southerner, let alone a non-American play Scarlett. But her determination closely mirrors Scarlett O'Hara's in single-mindedly getting just what she wanted. Over all, a good overview of the making of a classic.

Surprisingly, considering Harmetz's previous books, this volume is, without a doubt, the WORST book ever written on "Gone With the Wind." The text is riddled with mistakes, and many of the illustrations are mislabeled. Thank goodness, the book apparently has been a huge failure in the sales department, so there should be NO trade paperback edition. May it soon be "gone with the wind" ...

Finally, a new and interesting book on the film Gone With The Wind! For years a certain Gone With The Wind "Authority" has published book after book containing the same fuzzy and out-of-focus photographs...many mislabeled !

Furthermore, Aljean Harmetz provides the reader with FRESH & NEW information...and does not, as other's have done, plow the same old field of familiar"facts" regarding this film .

BRAVO to Ms. Harmetz for giving the readers and collectors something FRESH & NEW !

Fabulous! Fantastic set illustrations from a classic. Interesting background info. A treat. I want to frame some of the pages.

Harmetz work is a welcome addition to the literature about the making of "Gone with the Wind". It doesn't pretend to be all-inclusive but what it does, it does well. The author uses broad strokes to set the scene and fills in with generous detail and reproduces illustrations (not found elsewhere) that were used to construct Margaret Mitchel's novel for the screen.

For a wealth of well-researched and highly detailed information about GWTW, Haver's David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind" and "David O. Selznick's Hollywood" are *the* standards works together with Behlmer's "Memo from David O' Selznick".

Harmetz' "On the Road to Tara" is an excellent supplement to these works detailing the making of Selnick's now legendary and timeless epic.

Recommended.

This is an interesting book about the making of "Gone With The Wind." There is a nice description of the peculiarities of David O Selznick, his genius and his incredible eccentricities. He was the son of a movie pioneer who lost control of his studio. He was raised as a "Hollywood Prince," in the fashion of Budd Schulberg who wrote Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince. There is some background on Selznick but there could have been more. He went through multiple writers and directors and there could have been more about them. The book is filled with prints of watercolor illustrations from the art director and costume designer to the point that it begins to feel like padding. I have read a number of other books about the making of classic movies and this one was a bit disappointing. It's worth reading but could have been much better. There was, for another example, very little about Clark Gable although he was a huge star and the public virtually demanded he play Rhett Butler. I would have liked more about the book and the author, Margaret Mitchell. Maybe there are other books that do a better job. If you are particularly interested in set design and costume design, this is your book.

This book is seriously lacking. The pictures are not great and the text is uninteresting. There is nothing here that you haven't seen before.