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137 7 Gone with the Plague Jezebel (1938) in the summer of 1937, Hal Wallis, production head at Warner brothers, decided that he wanted Wyler to direct Jezebel, an antebellum story set in New Orleans. The film would capitalize on the craze generated by David O. Selznick’s national search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Jezebel was bette Davis’s consolation prize for missing out on the plum role of Scarlett. Jack Warner had held the first option on Margaret Mitchell ’s best seller, but he passed on it because of his legal battles with Davis. She had left the studio in a dispute over the inferior roles she had been given after winning her first Oscar for Dangerous in 1935. after sailing for england to avoid being served with legal papers by Warner’s lawyers, Davis signed with an anglo-italian producer to make films in europe. Warner brothers then served her with an injunction prohibiting her from offering her services anywhere, and the two sides prepared for a court battle. Jack Warner came to London with William randolph Hearst, whose newspapers depicted Davis as an ungrateful, spoiled child. eventually, Warner won a three-year injunction, and Davis was forced to return to the studio. in an effort to placate his star, Jack Warner relieved Davis of the obligation to pay the studio’s share of the court costs and gave her a series of prestige pictures, culminating in Jezebel. Originally a broadway play that was both a critical and a commercial failure, Jezebel closed early in 1934 after only thirty-two performances. but Wyler, who had seen the show when he still worked for Universal, recommended it as a potential film project: “i believe that Jezebel contains an excellent foundation for a picture. it’s a very dramatic love story. . . . The weaknesses of the play can be overcome in a picture through the addition of many incidents and sequences only suggested and talked about. a good 138 William Wyler deal of action can be added. The atmosphere and costumes lend themselves to beauty in production.”1 by then, Wyler was developing both a taste for projects about the american social scene and an understanding of how stage properties could be translated effectively to the screen. He had already sublimated his own conflicts about america’s lure for the immigrant in his work on Counsellor-atLaw for Universal. Jezebel, with its melodramatic explorations of racism and the potential effects of industrialism on the american landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century, naturally piqued Wyler’s interest, and he could clearly envision how to strengthen the underdeveloped play. On stage, the role of headstrong, spoiled socialite Julie Kendrick was played by Miriam Hopkins, who had taken over the part when Tallulah bankhead became ill during rehearsals. Despite the play’s failure and the protagonist’s unsympathetic nature, bette Davis thought this property would be an ideal vehicle for her, and she spent more than a year trying to persuade Jack Warner to buy the rights. Walter Macewen, Hal Wallis’s executive assistant, read the play for Warner brothers and expressed his reservations in a 1935 memo. reiterating the critics’ verdict—that the play was “not very good”—he went on to say, “The trouble is that there really is no one in the play to pull for, to offset the bitchiness of the leading part.” Macewen added, “While bette Davis receives acclaim for tasty supporting roles, i doubt if a picture built solely around her in an unsympathetic part would be so well liked.” Like Wyler, however, he felt that the play could be improved by giving the character of Julie a “slant” that would make her more “acceptable to audiences .” Macewen suggested that Julie could start out as “a spoiled little vixen,” which could be justified by her upbringing, and then undergo “regeneration through suffering,” which would make her “a wiser and more palatable person after the final shot.”2 This suggestion would be incorporated into subsequent revisions of the screenplay. Warner bought the rights two years later, although edmund Goulding (Wallis’s original choice as director) echoed Macewen’s concerns. in a lengthy memo to Wallis, he commented that although Davis would likely distinguish herself in the role, audiences would have a difficult time identifying with the character. The studio, however, was determined to cash in on the Gone with the Wind craze and went ahead with the...

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