According to the Commercial Appeal, the Orpheum Theatre Group in Memphis, Tennessee has announced that they will no longer show the epic film “Gone With The Wind” in the Summer Concert Series. The film has been pronounced “racially insensitive”. The decision ends 34 years of this classic and commercially successful film being shown in Memphis.

From the Commercial Appeal article, a description of why the film is considered “racially insensitive”:

Unlike Rhett Butler, many people do give a damn.

And because they do have strong feelings about a film that depicts the slave state of the “Old South” as “a pretty world” where “Gallantry took its last bow,” the 1939 Hollywood epic “Gone With the Wind” will not screen during next year’s “Summer Movie Series” at the Orpheum Theatre in Downtown Memphis, theater officials announced Friday.

If those words look familiar, it’s because they are from the opening roll up titles. They are not from the book itself. These words were written by fantastic writer Ben Hecht. The full roll up title from the film reads:

“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…”

And, after that the music, composed by the genius Max Steiner, swells. If you have ever seen the movie “Gone with the Wind”, you can hear that music in your head right now.

What kind of weaselly, jelly spined, mouth breather would make a decision like that? Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Mr. Brett Batterson and the following is his statement regarding “Gone with the Wind” at the Orpheum Theatre in Memphis, per the Commercial Appeal: