Title credits close. Text rolls up across warm sunny landscape . . . and Tara.
"There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilisation gone with the wind . . . "
But only in some books.
On Friday a federal judge in Atlanta ruled for the estate of Margaret Mitchell that a parody of her 1936 classic Gone With the Wind, this time written from a slave's perspective, is a breach of copyright and must not be published. It is a ruling that has delighted publishers determined to protect authors' valuable right to license sequels, and outraged proponents of free speech.
US District Judge Charles Pannell ruled that Alice Randall's novel The Wind Done Gone is essentially a retelling of Gone With the Wind from a different point of view using the same fictional characters and places.
The author, a mixed race screen-writer and song-writer based in Nashville, whose first book, published by Houghton Mifflin, was due to hit the shops in June, argued that her story, told from the point of view of Scarlett O'Hara's mulatto half sister, was a political parody, and thus specifically exempt under law from copyright restrictions.
Ms Randall's heroine is slaveborn Cynara, daughter of Mammy and her white master, and she's a free and educated woman whose long-time lover, Rhett Butler, of course, has bought her a fine home in Atlanta.
The judge disagreed. Randall's "recitation of so much of the earlier work is overwhelming" and constitutes an unauthorised sequel, he argued in a decision that will certainly be appealed.
"When the reader of Gone With the Wind turns over the last page, he may well wonder what becomes of Ms Mitchell's beloved characters and their romantic, but tragic, world," Judge Pannell wrote. "Ms Randall has offered her vision of how to answer those unanswered questions . . . The right to answer those questions and to write a sequel or other derivative work, however, legally belongs to Ms Mitchell's heirs, not Ms Randall."
The lawyers from the Mitchell estate list some 34 characters and scenes which they say are stolen largely intact from the original.
Those lucrative rights to license a sequel have been exploited several times by the Mitchell estate, each time, however, insisting on strict plot conditions: no miscegination, and no gay sex. Ms Randall's version has both.
"It's not about the money," the intellectual-property lawyer representing Houghton Mifflin, Mr Joseph Beck says. The estate's trust committee members "want to censor this book. I think they fear criticism. I think they fear the ridicule that is brought to life. They know the misdepiction of African Americans is a weakness in Gone With the Wind".
In recent years the extent of borrowing allowed in parody has rarely been tested by the courts, although a 1994 bawdy reinterpretation of Roy Orbison's song Pretty Woman was sanctioned by the Supreme Court.
An attempt by Valdimir Nabokov's son to prevent the US publication of an Italian writer, Pia Rea's Lo's Diary, a reworking of Lolita from the girl's perspective, was settled out of court.
