MOONLIGHT & MAGNOLIAS

 

Reviewed by Jeff Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle.

 

Now through October 12th, The Ross Valley Players are staging Ron Hutchinson's MOONLIGHT & MAGNOLIAS.

 

Robert Wilson directs this hilarious, frantically paced historical piece about the Herculean task of transitioning Margaret Mitchell's tome: GONE WITH THE WIND, from the printed page to the silver screen.

The play is faithful both to the character of David O. Selznick and certainly to the spirit with which the final draft of the screenplay was written.

Hollywood director George Cukor, a perfectionist and an artist in his own eyes, was a dawdler in the budgetary eyes of David O. Selznick.

Cukor had the first crack at making the movie using a script prepared by Sidney Howard.

The honor did not last long: Selznick quickly grew restless and lost confidence in Cukor.

To justify supplanting Cukor with Victor Fleming, Selznick argued, "I think the biggest black mark against our management to date is the Cukor situation and we can no longer be sentimental about it.... We are a business concern and not patrons of the arts."

Selznick's justification for cashiering Cukor is ironic: MGM studios, for whom Selznick made the film, to date, opens every movie with its logo and the motto: "Ars Gratia Artis" which was bungled Latin for "ars artis gratia" meaning "art for art sake."

Sidney Howard had agreed to write one of many proposed screenplays.

When David O. Selznick, traveled to Bermuda in September 1938 in a futile effort to finalize the script, he carried along four suitcases full of drafts.

Many other writers contributed to the final script, with the final sum paid to every one of them being $126,000.

The task was considered so daunting that even F. Scott Fitzgerald was invited to participate in the writing, and at one point in the film's juddering evolution, Alfred Hitchcock was invited to direct.

When Victor Fleming was assigned to the movie February 1939, he rejected Howard's script.

Shooting was suspended for 17 days while the script was rewritten: principally by Ben Hecht.

Hecht acknowledged that Howard's screenplay was "superb," thus the final draft so closely adhered to Howard's script that the film's closing credits name Sidney Howard, exclusively, as the screenwriter.

MOONLIGHT & MAGNOLIAS nostalgically revisits this frantic period when production had stopped while the cast and crew were languishing on the payroll clock.

Perhaps to compress the plot and to escalate of the sense of pressure, playwright Ron Hutchinson whittles the 17-day hiatus down to 5-day one.

Stephen Dietz plays Ben Hecht for the Ross Valley Players.

Dietz credibly comes across as a capable genius; who could forsake showers, shaving, bed rest, conjugal visits and real food for five days while he hunkered over a manual Smith-Corona, locked and loaded with flimsies and carbon paper, to tap out the greatest screenplay ever.

Russell E. Lessig is cast as Victor Fleming.

Being the only gentile, Lessig's Fleming, is reminiscent of Camus' OUTSIDER, sequestered in Selznick's office with Selznick and Hecht.

David Kester is David O. Selznick: talking faster than most people can read; perhaps even listen.

Kester is a marvel on stage: his bearing, movements, posturing and delivery capture the Titanic ambition of Selznick.

The subtext of the play revisits the nagging anti-Semitism that has prevailed within the United States and elsewhere since the fall of Judea.

The basis for such a bias was ostensibly because of religious inanities; more likely it is due to coveting the financial successes of the more cosmopolitan culture.

Today this same anti-Semitism, because of the secularization of the U.S. culture and the absurdity of any religious arguments against the Jewish people, has transmogrified or reinvented itself, under a weak political ruse, as anti-Zionism or an anti-Israeli bend.

The play is funny and complex and it has a capable cast to make it all work.

No one said that serious drama cannot be funny: this is.

For tickets surf on over to www.rossvalleyplayers.com or unfold the cell and call—when the CHP are not a factor—the box office at 415-456-9555.

 

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