Making of classic film is play's backstory

By Mary Martin Niepold
SPECIAL TO THE JOURNAL
Published: September 13, 2009

Afrenzied romp through the era of Southern legend and Hollywood moguls will open the season at Twin City Stage this week.

Moonlight and Magnolias is based on real events in Hollywood's golden era and takes us behind the scenes in 1938 when famed producer David O. Selznick decides that things are not going so great in filming his epic, Gone With the Wind.

He stops production. The film needs resuscitation.

To that end, Selznick grabs famous writer, Ben Hecht, to rework the script alongside the film's new director, Victor Fleming, who had just completed The Wizard of Oz.

Atlanta has already burned and been put to film, but Selznick is adamant. The epic needs a new script, and so he locks himself, Hecht and Fleming in his office for five days to produce one. The three men are literally locked inside his office, and they have only bananas, peanuts and dueling egos to sustain them. Fueling the dramatics and laughs is the fact that Hecht has never even read the book.

"This is straight-up comedy," Anthony Liguori said. Liguori, an associate professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, plays Selznick. "These are real events in a real place and people trying to tell this story that everyone knows except the screenwriter."

Selznick's secretary, Miss Poppengul, played by Cheryl Ann Roberts, supplies the bananas and peanuts.

At the center of the action are Selznick and Fleming taking turns acting out the roles for the rewrite. Since Moonlight and Magnolias is based on true events, playwright Ron Hutchinson simply takes the improbable and works it for all it's worth. Stan Bernstein returns to Twin City Stage as director.

Selznick, one of Hollywood's more infamous couch producers, plays Scarlett and Ashley while Fleming, a successful director, plays Melanie, Prissy and Rhett.

"So you can imagine these two men enacting the birth of Melanie's child," Liguori said.

Meanwhile, Hecht, the no-nonsense journalist, is typing.

Hecht, who wrote the highly successful Broadway play, The Front Page, 10 years before, is hard-boiled and short on sensitivity. He doesn't think that Scarlet O'Hara is so likable, and even though he hasn't read the novel, he suggests that the story is a light-weight, essentially some fluff about "moonlight and magnolias."

Nonetheless, Selznick is losing about $50,000 a day while they squabble over the script; Fleming's reputation is on the line; and Hecht is Hecht, someone who is convinced that he can learn whatever he needs by watching the other men act out the plot.

Selznick, epitomizing the powerful mogul, sums up the stakes: "Big book, big brain, big guy, big shot. Five days, one screenplay."

Thus, the laughs.

Holding all the action together is a set that is a very proper rendition of Selznick's actual office. The space is large -- enough room for a birth and free-wheeling reenactments of the story -- complete with floral draperies and 12-foot ceilings, which designer, Charles Murdock Lucas, has created.

Lucas, who is completing his master's in scenic design from UNC School of the Arts, researched extensively and says that the set, true to the real thing, actually helps the laughs. "The more realistic the environment is in this, it throws the comedy in sharp relief."

In the play, the action is high-pitched, the laughs inevitable, but something obviously did work in those five days: The film went on to win 10 Academy Awards.

■ Twin City Stage (formerly the Little Theatre of Winston-Salem) will present Moonlight and Magnolias at 8 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sept. 24-26; and at 2 p.m. next Sunday and Sept. 27, in the Arts Council Theater, 610 Coliseum Drive. Tickets are $22, $20 for seniors and $18 for students. Call 336-725-4001.