William Cameron Menzies, Alice in Wonderland, and Gone with the Wind

The pivotal place that William Cameron Menzies today occupies in the history of storyboarding initially derived from common perceptions about the role of storyboarding in the making of Gone with the Wind (1939), and the assumption that the pre-production of the film was significantly influenced by the Disney studio’s innovations in creating Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Menzies, however, had been working on related approaches to film design since the 1920s, and Selznick tested the waters by asking him to work first on a smaller-scale film for SIP, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938). By 29 July 1937 the producer was envisaging that Menzies ‘will be able to do a broken-down sketch script of the entire production’ of Gone with the Wind,1 and as a result, the claim continues to be made that the film was ‘completely storyboarded’.2 Supporting evidence can be drawn from the surviving materials, the most frequently cited being an extensive sequence of images depicting the burning of Atlanta.