Hollywood films are filled with countless places of myth and magic, but few are as universally known as Tara, home of Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind." Perhaps as much as the characters in the film, Tara is a symbol of both Hollywood legend and the Old South.
In "Scarlett," that symbol will have another chapter in its life. Like the other characters in the miniseries, Tara has grown a bit older and has been changed by the Civil War and the passing of slavery. But it still stands, proud as ever, still the beloved home of the O'Hara family and a special place to fans worldwide.There are many stories about the origins of Tara, as well as speculation about what became of it, and many people even think it still exists. Given that Hollywood is an ephemeral place, the truth is that the Tara set of "Gone With the Wind" lives on only on celluloid, and in our memories.
According to studio film historian Marc Wanamaker, although "Gone With the Wind" was distributed by MGM, only a few scenes were filmed on that studio's lot. The majority of filming took place on the Selznick lot, which was part of the RKO-Pathe studios in Culver City, Calif., now called the Culver Studios and owned by Sony.
The Tara in "Gone With the Wind" was not a real mansion, shot on location in the South, nor was it a house in Los Angeles, as some have claimed. The outside of Tara was, in both films, a facade, a constructed set. The original Tara facade was constructed on the part of the Selznick lot then called "The 40 Acres," and the interior was in a soundstage on the main lot.
Tara's design was not based on a specific mansion, but was a carefully researched conglomerate of typical buildings of the pre-Civil War South. In order to create the facade for Tara and the other mansions in "Gone with the Wind," Margaret Mitchell, the author of the book, acted as tour guide in 1937 for Hobe Erwin, a technical adviser, and Wilbur Kurtz, an expert on the architecture of pre-Civil War Georgia.
Mitchell took them to Clayton County, Ga., where they looked at numerous plantations and mansions. They also went to New Orleans to look at the different colors used in buildings of that era. Erwin and Kurtz sketched and painted what they saw and submitted these renderings to William Cameron Menzies, the production designer for the film. Lyle Wheeler was the art director who worked with Menzies on executing the construction of Tara.
Still standing long after the debut of the film, Tara was finally dismantled in 1959 and everything but the bricks was purchased by Coca-Cola executive Julian Foster, who shipped the pieces to Atlanta. After his death, Foster's widow sold these to former Georgia Sen. Herman Talmadge. As far as anyone knows, Talmadge's former wife, Betty, still has them.
For "Scarlett," painstaking effort was taken to copy the original Tara, which was designed in the art department at Twickenham Film Studios outside of London, England, under the supervision of art director Brian Ackland-Snow.