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Largest GWTW Collection in NC Bill Wooten was already a confirmed movie addict when as a teenager he went with his family to see Gone with the Wind when it came out in 1939. He loved movies. He'd been going to movies alone since he was nine. He remembers having his mother write a note asking that he be excused from school because of pink eye, then spending the whole day in a theater watching King Kong. But no movie before or since touched him like Gone with the Wind. It captivated him, enchanted him. "It seemed to be the complete entertainment," he says. "Everything in it was perfection." Bill is embarrassed to tell how many times he's seen the movie. Begin guessing around a hundred. When he wasn't watching the movie, chances are he was collecting items pertaining to it. His collection of newspaper and magazine clippings about the movie, still photos from it, posters and other advertising materials, books, soundtrack albums, and other items is second only to that owned by fellow collector Herb Bridges, a Georgian. Bill even has an original press book distributed before the movie came out. "So rare," he says, "that even David O. Selznick Studios doesn't have it." Bill, a librarian and former radio announcer who began his collection while working in a Charlotte theater as a student at Davidson College, will show it by appointment.
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