Many Guides on Road to Tara

In his letter regarding my book, “On the Road to Tara: The Making of Gone With the Wind” (Calendar Letters, Jan. 4), Tom Stempel seems to be accusing me of slighting the work of several previous writers on the subject. If Stempel had even glanced at my book, he would have seen that my bibliography lists Rudy Behlmer’s wonderful “Memo From David O. Selznick” and other books he mentions, in addition to a few dozen books he doesn’t catalog, including “Showman,” David Thomson’s authoritative biography of David O. Selznick.

Stempel’s annoyance comes because an interviewer wrote in The Times that I was using “a treasure trove of documents few people knew existed.” Although access to the Selznick Archives at the University of Texas is limited, they are hardly a secret. Thomson used them extensively, and my acknowledgments for “On the Road to Tara” thank Thomson for his generosity in giving me access to interviews he did for “Showman.”

What I was able to bring to light were documents that had not been used by previous authors and a treasure trove of visual material, including storyboards, blueprints and scene renderings, that had not been published before.

As to the one “fact” in Stempel’s letter, that I refer to 11 screenwriters while another book says there were 17, budget figures in the Selznick Archives list 11 writers who were paid for their work on the script as were three story analysts; Selznick, who had an almost fatal inability to make a final decision, roped more than half a dozen other writers into looking over parts of the various scripts without pay.

ALJEAN HARMETZ

Los Angeles