Scarlett O'Hara Costumes in Need of Repairs Ahead of 'Gone With the Wind' Exhibit
Published August 10, 2010
Two of the famous 'Gone With the Wind' costumes are in need of repair.
It's time to find out if fans of "Gone With the Wind" frankly give a damn about the fabulous dresses worn by Vivien Leigh in the multiple Oscar-winning Civil War drama.
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin is trying to raise $30,000 to restore five of Scarlett O'Hara's now tattered gowns from the 1939 film.
The Ransom Center is planning an exhibit to mark the movie's 75th anniversary in 2014, but at the moment most of them are too fragile to go on display, according to Jill Morena, the center's collection assistant for costumes and personal effects.
"There are areas where the fabric has been worn through, fragile seams and other problems," Morena said. "These dresses have been under a lot of stress."
The Ransom Center acquired the costumes -- including O'Hara's green curtain dress, green velvet gown, burgundy ball gown, blue velvet night gown and her wedding dress -- in the mid-1980s as part of the collection of "Gone With the Wind" producer David O. Selznick. By then, they had already been through decades of traveling displays in theaters and had been on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
"Film costumes weren't meant to last," Morena said. "They are only meant to last through the duration of filming. You won't find them to be as finished as if you bought something off the rack."
The costumes are among the most famous in Hollywood history and they played a key role in one of the most popular films ever. "Gone With the Wind" won eight Acadamy Awards.
Yet the green curtain dress -- symbolic of O'Hara's determination to survive -- has loose seams and needs structural reinforcement. Others have suffered abrasion and areas where the fabric is nearly worn through.
Leigh wore the curtain dress in three scenes: the jail scene in which Scarlett asks Rhett Butler, played by Clark Gable, for financial help; as she walks through the streets of Atlanta with Mammy; and when she meets Frank Kennedy.
Talking about his costume designs for the film in William Pratt's 1977 book "Scarlett Fever," designer Walter Plunkett was modest.
"I don't think it was my best work or even the biggest thing I did," Plunkett said. "But that picture, of course, will go on forever, and that green dress, because it makes a story point, is probably the most famous costume in the history of motion pictures."
Donations will be used to restore the dresses and buy protective housing and custom mannequins for the 2014 exhibit, Morena said. The Ransom Center also hopes to send the dresses out on loan.
Donations can be made on the Ransom Center website
Dispute over marker goes on Confederate soldiers' memorial feud bound for trial
Date published: 8/10/2010
By CLINT SCHEMMER
Fredericksburg's legal battle over the location of a memorial to Confederate dead can go to trial, a judge decided yesterday.
Circuit Judge Gordon F. Willis rejected the city's motion for summary judgment to dismiss a lawsuit by the Sons of Confederate Veterans' local camp, saying the court must decide some of the facts disputed by both sides.
The City Council wants the SCV's Matthew Fontaine Maury Camp No. 1722 to remove a granite-and-bronze memorial it erected in early 2009 to honor 51 Confederate soldiers who were buried nearby on what is now the Maury Commons condominiums.
The small monument sits on one corner of the grassy triangle at Barton and George streets that's better known as site of the much-larger Fredericksburg Area War Memorial.
Last fall, the City Council said the SCV monument must move. It enacted an ordinance declaring the triangle the exclusive site of the War Memorial, donated by the Fredericksburg Area Veterans Council, that honors local military personnel killed in World War I and later conflicts.
The Maury camp contends that state law bars the city from moving its monument, and that the SCV had city building and zoning officials' permission to put it there on municipal property. It claims that elsewhere on city land, markers and monuments to the Union's Irish Brigade and the 7th Michigan Infantry were recently permitted by the same process.
But City Attorney Kathleen Dooley argued in court yesterday that staff weren't authorized to allow the SCV memorial. Permission must come expressly from the City Council, she said.
The SCV camp obtained a building permit for the monument's base from the city zoning administrator.
Since it has that document and the memorial is built, the council cannot retroactively move or alter the monument, the group's Richmond attorney, Patrick McSweeney, told the court.
"After the fact, the city can't change the rules," McSweeney argued.
Judge Willis said he wants to hear testimony on why Roy B. Perry Jr., the SCV camp's first lieutenant commander--who obtained the building permit--believed he had the city's approval for the monument.
And as he did last spring when the case arrived in his courtroom, Willis urged the two sides to settle the issue out of court, through mediation overseen by a retired judge. In interviews afterward, Dooley and McSweeney said their clients are open to such an agreement, if they can find common ground. "If there's a will, it could be worked out," McSweeney said. "The monument could be located where everybody would be satisfied."
But the legal dispute may grow, not go away.
William E. Glover, the local attorney for the Veterans Council, said the group will file a brief asking the court to let it be a party to the case, on the city's side.
The City Council has retained Fredericksburg trial lawyer Jennifer Lee Parrish to assist Dooley in the case.
And while McSweeney and Dooley declined to describe their clients' bargaining positions for a potential deal, it's not clear that the city and the SCV camp are even on the same page.
Ironically, it was the City Council which--in 1861--approved burial of Confederate troops from seven states at what later became the home of Maury School.
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. ? A decade after the raising of the Confederate submarine Hunley off the South Carolina coast, the cause of the sinking of the first sub in history to sink an enemy warship remains a mystery. But scientists are edging closer. On Friday, scientists announced one of the final steps that should help explain what happened after the hand-cranked sub and its eight-man crew rammed a spar with a powder charge into the Union blockade ship Housatonic off Charleston in February, 1864.
Early next year the 23-ton sub will be delicately rotated to an upright position, exposing sections of hull not examined in almost 150 years. When the Hunley sank, it was buried in sand listing 45 degrees to starboard. It was kept that way as slings were put beneath it and it was raised and brought to a conservation lab in North Charleston a decade ago.
Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the raising of the Hunley, discovered five years earlier by shipwreck hunter Clive Cussler.
As thousands watched from boats and the shoreline, the Hunley was brought from the depths and back to the lab by barge. Thousands turned out again in April 2004 when the crew was buried in what has been called the last Confederate funeral. During the past 15 years, about $22 million has been spent excavating and conserving the Hunley, according to Friends of Hunley, the nonprofit group that raises money for the project.
About $10.8 million came from the state and federal government, with the rest raised through donations and tour ticket and merchandise sales. About a half million people have seen the sub that sits in a tank of water at the conservation lab. An economic analysis earlier this year estimated the project has returned its investment many times over.
The study found that publicity from hundreds of news stories, a half dozen documentaries and a made-for-TV movie has generated at least $30 million in a state where tourism is an $18 billion industry.
"I have absolutely no misgivings," said state Sen. Glenn McConnell, the chairman of the South Carolina Hunley Commission. "The state is spending millions of dollars to get its message out to get people to visit here and the Hunley, in just one new historic revelation, makes history and makes news all over the world." U-Haul also has the picture of the Hunley on the side of 1,200 of its rental trucks that travel throughout the country, essentially free advertising that the company says would otherwise be worth $117 million.
Rotating the sub will allow scientists to, for the first time, completely examine the Hunley's hull.
It's a delicate operation, involving replacing the existing slings before the sub is turned upright. The pressure on the straps will be monitored electronically and a laser will monitor to make sure the surface doesn't get warped. The Hunley is "a ghost of an iron object," said senior conservator Paul Mardikian, adding it has "hundreds of different parts and everything has to move together." Putting it upright should provide clues to the sinking. Was it damaged by fire from the Houstonic or perhaps struck by a second Union ship coming to the aid of the blockade vessel? Were the Hunley sailors knocked out by the concussion of the explosion that sank the Housatonic?
The clues indicate the crew died of anoxia, a lack of oxygen which can overtake a person very quickly, and didn't drown. The remains showed they were at their crank stations and there was no rush for an escape hatch.McConnell concedes he didn't expect the project to take so long and thought it would have been in a museum by now. "The Hunley is a very complex artifact and we decided we had only one chance to do it and that was to do it right," he said.
He estimates the Hunley could now be displayed in a museum by 2015. Conservation of such artifacts often takes years, underwater archeologists say. It was almost 30 years before the Swedish royal warship Vasa, which sank in 1628 in Stockholm Harbor and was raised in 1961, went on display in a permanent museum. Scientific reports on the Vasa are just coming out, said Lawrence Babits, director of the Program in Maritime Studies at East Carolina University. "The Hunley is iron and the iron isn't very thick and iron that has been in salt water is in a very nebulous state," he said. Putting it in shape where it can be displayed "does take time."
Frederick Hanselmann, a field archaeologist at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M said the most painstaking part of conserving iron objects is removing the salts from years in sea water.
Conserving a ship cannon alone can take three to four years, he said. "For conservation it's not an unusually long time, especially considering they are conserving an entire submarine," said Mark Gordon, the president and chief executive officer of Odyssey Marine Exploration.
The company salvaged more than 50,000 coins and other artifacts from the wreck of the SS Republic off Savannah, Ga., in 2003 and while many of those coins are being displayed, some of the artifacts are still being conserved seven years later, Gordon said.
Hunley archaeologist Maria Jacobsen isn't surprised the cause of the sinking hasn't been found and expects a new series of questions and answers when the Hunley is rotated. "I do think with persistence and patience and a good deal of luck we will get there," she said. ____ Online: Friends of the Hunley: http://www.hunley.org/ http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100806/ap_on_re_us/us_confederate_submarine
