would end his long association with M-G-M, confident that he could thrive by offering his services independently to any of the major studios. Gone with the Wind (1939) Wood's parting assignment under M-G-M was to take over the filming of Gone with the Wind when the director Victor Fleming collapsed during shooting and did not return to the studio for a month. The film epic was based on Margaret Mitchell's popular novel set during the American Civil War. Fleming received screen credit for directing the film, though the precise contribution by Wood, as well as that of several other contributors, including George Cukor, Leslie Howard, David O. Selznick, and William Wellman has not been fully documented. A number of uncredited cinematographers also shared in making the picture, among them Joseph Ruttenberg, Wilfred Cline and Lee Garmes, who often worked "at first units located on widely separated locations". Other than overseeing the vast operations at the movie's multiple venues, Wood with certainty filmed the entire sequence where Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) shoots a Yankee bummer (Paul Hurst) who broke into the plantation household. Wood also personally handled some of the scenes that depict wounded Confederate troops at the Atlanta train depot, Whatever way the attributions are allocated, the collective efforts of the cast and crew produced "a remarkable film." Our Town (1940) Now operating as an independent agent, Wood was instantly offered the option by his former associate and producer Irving "Sol" Lesser to adapt Thornton Wilder's play Our Town. Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning play had first been staged on Broadway in 1938, and was "not the kind of vehicle that 1940 Hollywood would have been expected to produce", but Lesser was determined to bring the "unusual" qualities of the work faithfully to the screen. Wilder worked closely with both Wood and Lesser to help preserve the qualities of the stage production by retaining narrator Frank Craven, who on-screen observes the lives of two rural families in New Hampshire near the turn of the 20th century. Lesser and Wood convinced Wilder to permit one major alteration in his allegorical play: Emily Webb, played by Martha Scott, does not die in childbirth, but only in a dream sequence, a re-write that Wilder admitted was preferable in a cinematic treatment of his work. The atmosphere of the picture was enhanced by the simplicity of the scenery conceived by set designer William Cameron Menzies and