The best plays about Hollywood never accept the Dream Factory at its own estimation, but tunnel deep beneath to find hidden energies and secret resonance. Sam Shepard's Angel City, for example, paints Hollywood as a city so noxious that moguls are literally turned into reptiles, magicians and musicians can't help but sell out, and ordinary people can't get over the shame of being in the audience and not on the screen.
David Rabe's Hurlyburly excavates a different part of the city: the enclave of second-rung players who require ever-increasing amounts of sex and cocaine if they're to forget that their lives are meaningless, their relationships shallow, and their code of behavior utterly toothless.
And then there's David Mamet's wonderful Speed-The-Plow, in which one producer's desperate decision to make a movie of importance is literally beaten out of him by his best friend and partner. A Hollywood that disfigures, that narcotizes, that destroys the tender shoot — none of these match the image on Academy Award night, yet all of them manage to strike us with their truth.
Where so much money is at stake — and drink and drugs and physical beauty and sex and celebrity and everything else — it just has to be this way. In the economy of the American psyche, the real Hollywood is a high-voltage danger zone, and it takes wise, thoughtful therapists — in this case, our best playwrights — to show us its true shape.
Ron Hutchinson, author of Moonlight and Magnolias, is a talented, literate writer, but he reduces his effectiveness by believing in the bright Hollywood even more than in its shady underside. Hutchinson's play — currently at Florida Studio Theatre in a superb production — wants us to fall prostrate before the presence of Gone With The Wind, even while recognizing its racism and the bigotry of the milieu in which its Jewish producer, David O. Selznick, had to operate.
In order to astonish us, Hutchinson shows Gone With the Wind being created against all odds; in order to enlighten us, he points out offensive elements of the script and certain telling facts about its characters. Primarily, though, he wants to astonish; and Moonlight and Magnolias, for all its politically correct digressions, is mostly a romp celebrating the creation of a masterpiece.
As for penetrating insights a la Shepard, Rabe or Mamet, don't expect more than a couple. Author Hutchinson, it would seem, loves the movies and movie lore and isn't about to expose anything seamier than a country club exclusion. His play is good, clean, unambitious fun.
The premise of the play is that producer Selznick has just stopped production of Gone With the Wind and is taking on a new director — Victor Fleming — and a new screenwriter, Ben Hecht. Selznick tells Hecht that he needs a totally rewritten script in five days, and will pay him $15,000 for his services. And when Selznick says five days, he doesn't mean five-and-a-half: he locks Hecht and Fleming into his office, offers them unlimited bananas and peanuts — only — and insists that while he and Fleming act out the whole novel, Hecht transform it into dialogue and directions.
There are problems along the way. For example, Hecht and Fleming don't get along very well: Hecht can't help but remind Fleming that the director of Test Pilot was once a chauffeur, and Fleming has to remind Hecht that "Hollywood's Shakespeare" was originally a Chicago newspaperman.
Further, Selznick is besieged by phone calls from his father-in-law, the estimable Louis B. Mayer, who apparently wants Selznick to fail on this most publicized of projects. As Selznick does his best to imitate Vivien Leigh, and Fleming tries manfully to be Melanie having Ashley's baby, Moonlight and Magnolias gives us lots of reasons to laugh, and a couple of reasons to think, especially on the subject of Jewish-run Hollywood (see Neil Gabler's fine book An Empire of Their Own for more details). As history, the play is not very searching, but as farce it's often delightful.
And all the actors are top notch. As Selznick, Gary Marachek is clearly the man in charge, a master manipulator and quick-change artist who knows people and their weaknesses, and will try literally anything in order to get what he wants. As Ben Hecht, Joseph Adams is the conscience of the play, a thinking, feeling presence who objects to racial and religious bigotry, and who can't bring himself to write a passage wherein Scarlett slaps a black slave.
Steven L. Barron plays Victor Fleming as a figure of fun, a proud artiste who's just happy to be off The Wizard of Oz and on to a film that doesn't ask for hundreds of munchkins. And Yetta Levitt, in the small role of Selznick's secretary, is very funny as she attempts to give her boss everything he asks for, however improbable.
Richard Hopkins' direction is fast-paced and ingratiating, and Nayna Ramey's set, of Selznick's plush office, is attractive at the beginning, then more and more a silly mess as the three men lose all sense of order. As always, Marcella Beckwith's costumes are winning.
But the play only entertains, which, in this case, isn't enough. The movies, after all, are our great collective dream, peopled by giants, teaching us morality, broaching embarrassing subjects for two straight hours of discussion, fulfilling our fantasies and addressing our deepest fears.
And behind it all is money: more money than some sovereign nations ever see. It's a dangerous combination — all that cash, all those fantasies — and the people who live on that nexus — the moguls, stars, writers, directors — are, like it or not, of great significance to each of us.
Who put Vivien Leigh/Scarlett O'Hara into your brain, more real to you than certain members of your own family? Selznick did, and Hecht and Fleming. Who made Gable your definitive image of the charming rogue? Selznick did, and Hecht and Fleming. The real significance of these Hollywood types goes far beyond anything in Moonlight and Magnolias. They've crafted us, they've educated us, and stocked our imaginations. The definitive play on this subject calls for more than three guys locked in a room and trying to write a classic. The definitive play calls for a brain surgeon, at least a psychiatrist.
Moonlight and Magnolias is a lot of fun.
But it hardly manages to scratch the surface of its real subject.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2006.