STACK #158 Dec 2017

EXTRAS FEATURE

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T wenty-year-old New York model, Edythe Marrener, was convinced she would win the most coveted female role in motion pictures. The year was 1937. The location, the Selznick International Studios in Culver City, California. As she nervously waited to take her very first screen test, she tried to ignore the fact that the muslin gown she was wearing was still warm from the previous hopeful who had worn it less than ten minutes before. After all, hadn’t the studio invited her to Hollywood following the publication of her photographs in an issue of The Saturday Evening Post ? “Yes”, she told herself, “They want me because they know I’ll be the perfect Scarlett.” The search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara, the fiery heroine of Margaret Mitchell’s best selling novel Gone With The Wind , had gripped the whole nation. Hundreds of aspiring Scarletts – from the brightest female stars in Hollywood to totally unknown American models, secretaries and shop girls – had all applied for an audition. But they and the public at large were completely unaware that the “Search for Scarlett”– as it was dubbed by the US media – was no more than a complete hoax. It had been dreamt up by independent film producer David O Selznick, who had bought the movie rights to the novel in 1936. Following the announcement that a film of Mitchell’s book was to be produced by Selznick, letter from thousands of fans of the novel flooded the producer’s publicity offices. All of them stated that the hero of the story, Rhett Butler, could only be played by one movie actor: “The King of Hollywood”, Clark Gable. Selznick had wanted Gary Cooper for the role, but the amount of mail he received persuaded him to make a deal with MGM for the services of Gable, who was under contract to the studio. As part of the arrangement to use their star actor, MGM demanded exclusive distribution rights to GWTW . But Selznick had a contract with United Artists to release all of his films through to the end of 1938, which meant he could not begin filming his civil war epic until early 1939. How could Selznick hold the public’s interest in his movie for three long years? His solution, although pure hype, was sheer genius: continual publicity by launching a nationwide search to discover an unknown actress to portray, at the time, the most famous female character in fictional literature.  Long before Edythe Marrenner received ...a classic beauty enhanced by flaming red hair

Susan Hayward Part 1 - A Real Gutsy Lady HOLLYWOOD'S GOLDENAGE Forgotten Stars of

The beautiful young New York model Edythe Marrenner

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DECEMBER 2017

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