Fifty years ago, a Hollywood epic became a television event so big it needed two nights. Millions settled in for another encounter with cinema’s famously tempestuous couple.

Watching a big film once meant arranging your evening around the television guide. On November 7, 1976, American viewers had a particularly compelling reason to stay home.

That night, NBC began the US network television premiere of Gone with the Wind, showing the 1939 film in two parts across consecutive evenings. The opening instalment attracted a 65 per cent share of the television audience.

With Vivien Leigh as the wilful Scarlett O’Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, the film had already spent decades drawing audiences back to cinemas. Its tangled romances unfolded against the American Civil War and its aftermath, with the burning of Atlanta among its most spectacular sequences.

The anniversary belongs to American broadcasting, but Australian readers will recognise the appeal of a much-anticipated movie night. Before streaming put films within easy reach, a television screening could introduce a younger generation to the stars their parents remembered from the pictures.

A sporting announcement heard worldwide

On November 7, 1991, Earvin “Magic” Johnson announced he was living with HIV and would retire from the Los Angeles Lakers. The basketball star was just 32. At a time of widespread fear and misunderstanding, his public disclosure brought HIV into conversations far beyond sport. His announcement remains a defining moment in the public history of the epidemic, remembered 35 years later.

A woman enters Congress

On November 7, 1916, Montana voters elected Jeannette Rankin as the first woman in the United States Congress. Her victory came four years before the constitutional amendment prohibiting voting discrimination on the basis of sex. A suffrage campaigner and committed pacifist, Rankin later became the only member of Congress to vote against American involvement in both world wars.

Born on this day

Joni Mitchell turns 83. The singer-songwriter gave us Both Sides, Now and Big Yellow Taxi.

Marie Curie would have turned 159. Her research into radioactivity earned Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry.

Do you remember?

Did you first see Gone with the Wind at the cinema, or settle in to watch it on television?