This is an article about a play about a movie of a book. The book is Gone with the Wind, still one of the biggest bestsellers ever. The movie is “Gone with the Wind,” arguably the most successful of all time, both critically and popularly, and the stuff of legend – urban, Hollywood, larger-than-life personalities, and otherwise.
One of those legends is that GWTW producer David O. Selznick, desperate after some twenty drafts, locked Academy Award-winning screenwriter and script doctor (and playwright) Ben Hecht, film director Victor Fleming, and himself in his office, subsisting on bananas and peanuts for five days, until they worked out a usable screenplay of the epic film.
If that wasn’t one of the legends, it is now, as that is the plot of Ron Hutchinson’s “Moonlight and Magnolias,” a legendary comedy now playing at the Hermosa Beach Playhouse. As with most legends, and as with its Hollywood subject matter, veracity is upstaged by good storytelling. After all, it took place behind locked doors; who’s to say what actually happened?
Because the purist Hecht is the only one in America who hasn’t read Margaret Mitchell’s magnum melodrama, Fleming and Selznick must act it out while Hecht turns it into a screenplay, all the while complaining about its glorifying Scarlett, who, true to her name, is just this side of a prostitute, at least in Hecht’s eyes.
An interesting bit of “deconstructed Reconstruction” goes on throughout, as three 1939 views of both the book and the film-in-progress hash it out, and we’re made to rethink not only GWTW, but the creative process, film and society – and it’s a comedy. Hecht is appalled at the idea of making a slave-owning murderous harlot into a heroine, and he is positive the film will fail. Fleming, meanwhile, is just relieved to be rid of the Munchkins on his previous opus, “Wizard of Oz,” and pretends not to care, but just wants to get the angle right. Selznick just knows that he has the rights to a very popular book and that (rather like “Harry Potter”) deviating from it is a recipe for disaster.
For what it’s worth, the “truth” is that only Selznick had faith in the project. Both Hecht and Fleming took a fee in lieu of a percentage of the profits. But, as previously noted, “veritas” is not one of the Latin words on MGM’s logo. What matters is what works, and in the hands of director Stephanie Coltrin, artistic director of the Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities, this play works.
So, if Joel Bryant’s Hecht is a bit nebbish at times, and his ornery political correctness, whining about Scarlett’s slap of Prissy being tantamount to child abuse, is either not what we’d like to hear from the author of “The Front Page,” an icon of Chicago-style macho writing; or, if it seems a bit naive coming from a guy who had won the world’s first Academy Award for a screenplay… so what? It works. It’s legend. It’s funny. (And even funnier remembering that Hecht’s version of “Wuthering Heights” actually lost to GWTW in the Academy Awards.)
Likewise, Cylan Brown’s portrayal of Victor Fleming as something of a crybaby is hilarious, even though Fleming was a Hollywood man’s man and pal of Clark Gable. As Brown acts out many of the more memorable scenes of the Civil War epic, with Patrick Vest as Selznick – Melanie giving birth, Prissy dawdling, Melanie dying, Rhett saying good-bye – they become the play’s more memorable scenes as well.
Vest’s Selznick seems to be the character closest to whatever we may think is the “real” David O., but again, who knows? Whether Selznick was driven by equal parts visionary bravado, and Freudian fear and loathing of his “Rich Dad,” L.B. Mayer, and his actual poor dad, who cares? Vest moves the play along by rising to whichever version of a Hollywood producer the beat requires, or whoever is on the other end of his many telephones. Meanwhile, secretary Miss Poppenghuhll, Nicole Wessel, deserves applause for the multitude of different ways one can actually say, “Yes, Mr. Selznick.”
“Moonlight and Magnolias” has its faults, primarily in the script, whose pace can be clunky, its dialogue sometimes too much of an in-joke and sometimes didactic, and its tone relying on over-the-top bits and a strange lack of character evolution. But, like the book and the movie, it just works.
Moonlight and Magnolias plays through Sunday at the Hermosa Beach Playhouse, 710 Pier Ave., Hermosa Beach. Tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets, $35 in advance and $40 at the door. (310) 372-4477 or go to hermosabeachplayhouse.com. ER
