2006-09-04-moonlight-magnolias

By Cynthia Citron

LOS ANGELES —Here’s one I can heartily recommend. It’s Moonlight and Magnolias, currently having its Los Angeles premiere at the Odyssey Theatre. Hell, if a play’s three principals are David O. Selznick, Victor Fleming, and Ben Hecht, what’s not to love?

It’s 1939, that memorable year for movies, and three weeks into the filming of Gone With The Wind Selznick has fired director George Cukor and closed down the shoot. He has also pulled Victor Fleming off the final scenes of Wizard of Oz to direct GWTW, and cajoled (coerced?) go-to screenplay fixer-upper Ben Hecht to rewrite the script—in five days!

Hecht appears to be the only person in America who has not read Margaret Mitchell’s thousand-page melodrama, so Selznick and Fleming act it out, scene by scene, while Hecht rewrites. And since everyone in the world knows the plot, there’s not much need to explain the hilarious reenactment.

Throughout, Hecht is cynical, skeptical, and chronically just minutes from upchucking the diet of “brain food”—peanuts and bananas—that Selznick has limited him to. Did I mention that Selznick has locked them all in to his office for the duration? Hecht, frenetically played by the always excellent Kip Gilman (one of my favorites since his terrific performance in the marvelous 2 Across), is the central figure in this tortured triad. Alternately rebelling against his “imprisonment”, needling Fleming about his less-than-auspicious former career as a chauffeur, and expressing horror at the “moonlight and magnolias” setting of this Civil War saga, Hecht attempts to inject his own liberal sentiments into the racial issues inherent in the plot.

Meanwhile, Selznick has his own problems: trying to run a studio still traumatized by the memory of the glorious, god-like Irving Thalberg, and trying to get out from under the heavy thumb of his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, who remains on the phone, on “Hold”, throughout the play. Rob Nagle gives this role a kind of flaky gravitas, behaving by turns as the in-charge studio head and the insecure failure he fears becoming. He alone believes in GWTW and insists that Hecht keep to Mitchell’s story rather than adding one of his own.

Rounding out this motley crew is Greg Mullavey as Fleming. Mullavey looks like the late Red Buttons and plays Fleming as Buttons might have: all waving arms and comic innocence. He is a hilarious counterpoint to the other two, and terrific in his own right.

Additional comic relief is provided by the fourth member of this trio: Lynda Lenet as Miss Poppenghul, Selznick’s harried secretary (“Yes, Mr. Selznick,” “Yes, Mr. Selznick,” “Yes, Mr. Selznick”), who keeps the three supplied with peanuts and bananas and Louis B. on hold.

Despite its farcical construction, however, there is more to this light buffoonery than meets the eye. Award-winning playwright Ron Hutchinson has incorporated some pithy dissertations on Hollywood, where, as Hecht notes, “Every day is 2:30 on Thursday”; on film studios, the “stockyards for the human soul”; and on monomania and the quest for power. There is also a powerful confrontation between Selznick and Hecht on their Jewish backgrounds and their relationship to anti-Semitism (this is 1939, don’t forget}.

Director Scott Cummins, who has won awards for acting as well as directing, has guided his crew well. They make an implausible story believable and, thanks to Designer Laura Fine’s impressive office set, five days in captivity a bearable adventure.

And here’s the kicker. Finished at last and packing up to leave, Selznick asks Fleming if he would prefer a check now or a percentage of the movie. Fleming, who, like Hecht, is convinced that GWTW is headed for flophood, takes the check.

As an aside, the Gone With The Wind screenplay is credited to Sidney Howard, who won an Oscar for it, with Ben Hecht, David O. Selznick, Jo Swerling, and John Van Druten as uncredited co-authors. When it came out it was the highest-grossing film of all time. It still is, with a total gross (adjusted for inflation) of $3,800,000,000. Wouldn’t you love to know what Victor Fleming’s check was worth?

Moonlight and Magnolias will continue at The Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., in Los Angeles, Wednesday through Sunday until November 5th.