Dramaturgical Notes
By Mike Dorrell
MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS is a different kind of play for Ron Hutchinson who first broke through with the coruscatingly realistic work, RAT IN THE SKULL, at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1984. SKULL features a series of famous verbal duels between an Irish Detective Inspector and an IRA bomber. This play, on the other hand, demonstrates a different kind of verbal dexterity: a kind of breakneck statement and response that is both funny and achingly accurate in its portrayal of life behind the scenes in 1930sHollywood.
Initially something of a Hollywood outsider himself, (Hutchinson came to the film industry in the '90s, and now has a significant track record), the playwright creates an extremely funny and probable account of the rewriting of the script of Gone With The Wind. His version probes beneath the obvious surface to reveal the deeper motivations and machinations of the principal characters: screenwriter Ben Hecht, director Victor Fleming and producer David O. Selznick. Hutchinson's Selznick, for example, is not only driven by a compulsive desire to succeed with this particular production, but he also has a more perceptive insight into the nature of his own profession; "The movies are the biggest gamble there is and Hollywood's rigged the game- but it's the only game in town."
Some seventy years later, knowing that Gone With The Wind became the biggest blockbuster of all time, it might be easy enough to dismiss the anxiety and insecurities of those behind its manufacture in the 1930s. But those anxieties were real; Hollywood itself had gone through a major act of self censorship with the introduction of the Production Code in 1934, and was in the process of reaffirming traditional values. The Depression was biting deep, and while fortunes were being made in motion pictures, the grim reality of a largely out of work Americawas never far away.
Meanwhile, these three men engaged in daily grind of the fiction factory are all acutely aware of the limitations of their art, and of their own attempted contribution to it. Victor Fleming, recently released from finishing The Wizard of Oz, is caught between his admiration for Ben Hecht's script doctoring skills, and his impatience with writers in general. Selznick himself can buy writers by the pound, but wants a version of Gone With The Wind that transcends the tear jerking elements, and if he wants this, he not only needs Hecht, but a director with ability to realize his new script. In contrast, Ben Hecht is doing a week's work for fifteen thousand dollars and doesn't care who knows it.
Ron Hutchinson's take on these three characters and their embroiled situation is fiction, but it is fiction based on a sliver of truth- a truncated account in Ben Hecht's autobiography. And the quicksilver humor, well, that's all his own.