Author Spotlight Week - Linda Swift shares her favorite movie

My all-time favorite movie is Gone With The Wind. I love the Civil War period of history and sweeping sagas with many subplots, deep-South settings, and elaborate costumes. I get so caught up in them that I feel a part of them. I can achieve almost this same sense of participation in a good thick book. (or ebook) But the visuals and sound do enrich the story for me. I loved the excitement of the battles, the drama of their struggles, and of course, the passion between Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara. There will never be another Clark Gable.

I am fascinated by the fact that Margaret Mitchell wrote only this book and one other which was destroyed. (I doubt that it would have been another Gone With The Wind.) And what a lasting imprint she made with this one story. I had to write one Civil War book in my lifetime and I did. It is being released this July, in the first year of the Sesquicentennial four-year celebration. But wait, I'm getting off track here talking about books and authors instead of movies made from those books. I have to confess that I have seen few movies do justice to the books they came from. But perhaps that is because I am an author, not an actress and prefer books to movies overall.

Many of today's movies bore me with their shallow plots and loud, jarring music and fast action. Spoken like a person not in tune with the times, right? I'm sure my mother said the same thing about my taste in movies. To each his own.