Saturday, December 10,1938, 8:05 P.M.

Atlanta was burning on the back lot of Selznick International.

Cameras were grinding while walls and fake storefronts of old sets from King of Kings, King Kong, Garden of Allah, which had been doctored to look like Atlanta, at least from a distance, went up in crackling fire.

"Looks like what Hitler's doing in Czechoslovakia," Wally Hospodar, second-in-command, Selznick International security, said to me.

I shrugged and watched the darkness beyond the half acre of burning set.

Wally had hired a dozen backup private detectives, and security guards with studio experience like me had been hired for one night of work and the promise of more on Gone With the Wind.

Atlanta was burning with seven technicolor cameras grinding all over the place till they got it right. The studio had its own fire department, but more than two hundred studio employees had been given a crash fire-fighting course and were standing by while the Culver City fire chief, Ernest Grey, tried to control them and all of his own men and trucks.

It was a security nightmare. A stray fan in a U.S.C. sweater, a guy with a grudge against Selznick or old man Mayer, could get in the middle of the shot and force Selznick to rebuild Atlanta and burn it all over again. As k was, the fire had been started seven times and stopped seven times and started again where the second-unit director, Bill Menzies, wanted some extra coverage.

The air was hot, sticky, and smelled of smoke. Reporters who had heard, from carefully planted phone calls from Selznick's press people, particularly Russell Birdwell, that the back lot in Culver City was on fire were trying to talk their way past a detail of security guards. A mile away on Washington Street, Louis B. Mayer and his office staff were probably watching the smoking skies and worrying about the investment they had made in what Selznick had promised would be the biggest movie ever made.