The nationwide protests of recent weeks have left all the entertainment companies to carefully reconsider as to what content their channel shows and how that content is viewed by the viewers in the current climate.
HBO Max has decided to remove “Gone with the Wind” from its catalog. The movie Gone with the Wind 1936 is considered a mastery of American Cinema which romanticized the Civil War – era South while glazing over its racial sins.
The movie “Gone with the Wind” is a film set on a plantation and in Atlanta. This film has won many multiple Academy Awards which include the best picture and best supporting actress for Hattie McDaneil, who was also the first African American to win an Oscar. This film remains among the most celebrated movies in cinematic history but also has been long criticized for its blindness to the horrors of slavery. This film is a rose-tinted depiction of the antebellum South.
With the wide – range conversation about race after the death of George Floyed by the brutality of the police, HBO Max decided to remove this film from its catalog by releasing a statement.
“‘Gone with the Wind’ is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society”, the spokesperson of HBO Max said in a statement, “these racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, andwe felt that to keep this telly up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”
Owned by AT&T, HBO Max pulled the film on Tuesday just one day after John Ridley, the “12 Year a Slave” screen writer, wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Time calling for its removal. According to Mr Ridley, he understand that ‘Gone with the Winds’ has snapshots of their moment in history, but the film was still used to “give cover to those who falsely claim that clinging to the iconography of the plantation era is a matter of ‘heritage, not hate’.”
As Mr Ridley said “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. ”
Though the film was one of the most successful in American history, with 8 competitive Academy Awards and the highest grossing film ever when adjusted for inflation, but the world which is viewing it now has changed and knows the difference between right and wrong, and with each decade the discomfort has grown as the people revisit its racial themes and what was omitted its time that is all stopped.
In the year 2017, the Orpheum theatre in Memphis said it would stop showing the film, after receiving complaints from patrons and other commenters. The president of the theatre said that it could not show a film “that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population.”
There are many like HBO Max who has removed shows or films that are depicting racial prejudices. The Paramount Network stated on Tuesday that it will remove a long running show “Cops”, similar move was seen in Britain, where on Monday BBC removed episodes of the comedy series “Little Britain”.
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