Remember this iconic house? Growing up watching this movie we were led to believe there was a big beautiful Plantation named Tara somewhere in Georgia. But with true Hollywood magic this turned out not to be the case. The entire house was a facade and went missing and seemed to be forgotten for 75 years. Miraculously it has been found far from Hollywood and where you may ask? It found its way to where it was meant to be outside of Atlanta yet not under the best of circumstances. According to messynessychic/2014/07/16/saving-scarletts-house-hollywoods-iconic-gone-with-the-wind-movie-set-has-been-hiding-in-a-bar-for-decades/ The centre piece of the greatest movie ever produced has been stashed away here, out of sight inside this rather unsensational pile of concrete all the way on the other side of the country outside Atlanta, Georgia since 1979. Although in pieces and vulnerable to decay, some might find comfort in knowing that the Greek Revival style façade has found its resting place in the southern countryside just a few miles from Margaret Mitchell’s ancestral home where the author originally intended Tara to be set, as written in her 1936 novel. But how did it end up here? Tara’s future didn’t belong in Hollywood. After Gone with the Wind wrapped, the façade was supposedly used to film other Westerns before it was finally dismantled in 1960. For years the set was thought to have existed at a Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer studio in Culver City, CA where a southern mansion set which looked very similar to Tara could be visited by the public on backlot #2. M.G.M. tour guides mislead tourists into thinking that the mansion set was indeed the same iconic Gone with the Wind plantation home of the O’Hara family. Even when the ‘fake’ M.G.M mansion was dismantled years later, the Los Angeles Times covered “the demolition of an iconic film set”– no thanks to the inaccurate information spread by the studio’s tour guides. This of course all led to great confusion over the true whereabouts of the actual Tara set or whether it even still existed. But perhaps you’ll recognize those olive green shutters leaning against the walls of our backyard barn in Georgia… The true Tara first came to Georgia soon after it was dismantled in Hollywood, purchased by a certain Southern Attractions, Inc. in 1959 and shipped to Atlanta with plans to use it as a tourist attraction. But the Margaret Mitchell estate wasn’t having any of it. Mitchell herself was known as an extremely private person. She had originally written Gone with the Wind for her own eyes only, and when a friend persuaded her to a give it to a reputable publisher, she sent a telegram soon after, asking for it back. Her request was refused, the book went on to sell almost 2 million copies in the first year and Mitchell never published another novel during her lifetime. The huge publicity that came from her novel and its subsequent film adaptation was most unwelcome by the solitary author. The Margaret Mitchell estate refused to license anything that sought to capitalize on the novel’s fame, including the movie set (which Mitchell supposedly said did not resemble her novel’s description). Meanwhile, Southern Attractions, Inc. wasn’t about to spend the money restoring Tara unless they could make a buck out of it. And so twenty years after leaving Hollywood, the façade remained hidden. But still, Tara was still not in her final resting place In 1979, the wife of former governor of Georgia, Betty Talmadge bought Tara for $5,000 and moved it to her property. She had the front door restored and lent it for permanent display at the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum in 1989, where it remains today. The rest– windows, shutters, cornice, steps, the breezeway to the kitchen and elements of the kitchen itself, currently rest in an old dairy barn. This is where our local hero comes in to give us some hope for the iconic film set… … Local historian and storyteller, Peter Bonner became a close friend of Betty Talmadge before her death in 2005 and has worked closely ever since with her family in continuing to watch over, preserve and hopefully fully restore Tara’s facade. He is funding the ‘Saving Tara’ project on his own and with the help of volunteers so as not to worry about the disappointment of funding cuts. But Peter and his volunteers certainly have their work cut out for them in bringing this survivor of old Hollywood back to its former glory…. Not only has Tara’s façade been stored in unfavourable conditions for the last 75 years, but if you recall in the film, the O’Hara home was damaged by the ravages of war in the second act. Many of the pieces stored in the barn are in the same state they were in after Hollywood set dressers essentially “damaged the house” for it’s post-Civil War shots… Gone with the Wind’s producer David O. Selznick spoke of Tara after filming, almost predicting her unfortunate fate… “Nothing in Hollywood is permanent. Once photographed, life here is ended. It is almost symbolic of Hollywood. Tara had no rooms inside. It was just a façade. So much of Hollywood is a façade.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 10:33:20 +0000
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