TEMPE, AZ — An original shooting script for Gone with the Wind is among the many stars of stage and screen that come under the hammer without reserve on Sunday, April 28. The script, one of the few that escaped destruction during the rewrites, is estimated at $15,000-$25,000 in the Piece of the Past auction now open on LiveAuctioneers.

Bringing Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War epic to the big screen proved a famously herculean task, replete with countless changes and revisions. Gone with the Wind is a Holy Grail of film-script collecting because most of them were gathered up by producer David O. Selznick and burned. Only a handful of the January 24, 1939 shooting scripts are known to have survived, with this example (numbered 00111) having been professionally bound and given as a gift by Selznick himself. The inscription in ink reads For Yvette Curran, The Champion fan of GWTW David O. Selznick Twenty-five years later! It was last sold by Profiles in History in the 1990s.

Also offered in this no-reserve sale is an umbrella signed by Singing in the Rain star Gene Kelly (1912-1996) in the year before he died. The catalog entry records that Kelly was signing 100 photos for charity when Piece of the Past specialist Kevin Martin said, “I bet people ask you to sign their umbrellas all the time.” When Kelly said he could not recall ever signing one, he boldly signed his own umbrella and gave it to Martin as a souvenir. In his personal collection for more than 25 years, it will be offered with an estimate of $1,750-$3,500.

Expected to lead the line at the ‘1 of a Kind’ auction is a Babe Ruth-signed league ball that features ‘the best darkest signature to come to market in some time’, together with faded ink notes detailing how it was acquired. Offered with full credentials, it is estimated at $50,000-$100,000.