An admission

This month's TCM Spotlight is on Wednesdays, so I think we can finally put to rest the idea of the "Friday Night Spotlight" theme that TCM ran for a good two years. That also means tonight is the first night of the new spotlight, on southern writers. It'll be presented by John Grisham, who is probably a good choice considering that he's a southern writer himself, hailing from Mississippi, and has had a lot of his books turned into movies. (I haven't seen him on TV enough to know whether he'll be a good TV presenter, but I have no reason to believe he wouldn't be.)

Anyhow, one of tonight's movies is Gone With the Wind, airing at 9:45 PM. TCM's schedule, for some bizarre reason, likes to break this movie into two parts, with the schedule claiming Part 2 is airing first, followed by Part 1. It never happens that way, of course. The schedule makes mistakes, of which this is one. The other big mistake that's currently going on is that a whole bunch of the movies are listing people a good ways down the cast list as being the stars. My printed copy of the monthly schedule, for example, lists the stars of Gone With the Wind as being... Fred Crane, J.M. Kerrigan, and Wallis Clark. I have no idea what characters they even played!

But now for the admission. I don't think I've ever actually sat through the entire four hours of Gone With the Wind in one sitting. Oh, I've sat down for the start on several occasions, and have come into the middle of the movie on quite a few others. And just as importantly, I read the book 30 years ago. But spend a full four hours with the movie? I don't think I've ever blocked out that much time.

That having been said, I think the 1939 version of Gone With the Wind is just as much a phenomenon in and of itself as it is a movie. And I'm also not the biggest fan of Vivien Leigh. But I'm sure a lot of you will enjoy it, and there are probably people who like the idea of sitting down and spending four hours with Gone With the Wind for the umpteenth time.