The Reality of a Pseudo-Event: Gone With the Wind Premiere, 1939

Lexie Little (Ph.D. student). “The Reality of a Pseudo-Event: Gone With the Wind Premiere, 1939,” paper accepted for presentation at the 2024 American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA) Convention, Oct. 3-5 in Pittsburgh, PA.

Abstract: Answering a call for historical research inclusive of perspectives beyond journalism alone, this study explores press coverage and film studio public relations of the 1939 Gone With the Wind premiere in Atlanta, Georgia, to challenge Daniel Boorstin’s conceptualization of a pseudo-event. Textual analysis illuminates how Atlantans publicized their present and past through an entirely mediated event, one lucrative for outsiders and vitally important to the Southern city in its self-promotion and social, economic, and cultural relations. These real relations, amplified through the visibility of a highly anticipated Hollywood premiere as captured in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer publicity, reflected extant tensions of race and definitions of the South during and after the Civil War, conditions that permeated pre-World War II Atlanta as the city sought its place on the national stage. The premiere illuminated the capacity for material negotiation of social conditions with tangible implications for life in the Jim Crow South, not unreality.