Moonlight, Magnolias and Three Dudes Writing A Screeplay at Intiman
When Seattlest sits down at our typewriter to dash off a post things can go one of two ways. We can either fly through clickey clack and have a courier speeding the manuscript to our internets people in no time, or things can get messy. It’s likely to be the latter when the subject is so big that the stress to produce is overwhelming or the subject is such a dog that there’s not a whole lot to work with. Some topics are big and lame and when that happens we pull our hair out , shout, smash our typewriter on the desk, shred papes, throw things and knock over the furniture...
The pressure to produce can really kill us sometimes. Our career is on the line with this one, of course, and our father-in-law is breathing down our necks and the thing has to be done in five days, not to mention the struggles with our heritage that will inevitably and, somewhat inconsequentially, come up. We absolutely cannot fail as our father failed before us, dying penniless and a husk of a blogger, but we all know how it turns out: after a bunch of thrashing about and ruffling of our suit our bandaged fingers finally type the closing line of a post so epic it will forever live as a legend of film making, er, blogging. This is the creative process in action and it may not be pretty, but you can see how it might be mildly entertaining to an impartial observer. It's not going to tear you any new insights into the human condition, though.
It’s all remarkably similar to Intiman’s new production of “Midnight and Magnolias” except instead of Seattlest writing a post they’ve got producer David Selznick, director Victor Fleming and screenwriter Ben Hecht writing Gone With the Wind.
Actor Tom Beckett is a less-than-rotund Selznick, the dreamer, the visionary, the one prone to invite the others to imagine Tara or Scarlett O'Hara with sweeping gestures. Marya Sea Kaminski spends so little time onstage you'd think she had time to direct WET's Museum Play from backstage, but she does make appearances as Selznick's secretary. John Procaccino plays the man's man director Victor Flemming against Peter Van Norden's perfectly rotund, hard-boiled Chicago reporter turned rewrite man Hecht and we're not entirely convinced that these are roles that should be in opposition to each other, but, hey, playwright Ron Hutchinson had to play by the rules established by the source text (in this case, actual historical fact).
At the bginning of the play it’s established that the screenwriter hasn’t read the book. "You haven’t read the book?" "No." "You haven’t read the book?" "No!" The book is Gone With The Wind which means that Seattlest hasn’t read the book either, but in our case “read the book” actually means “seen the movie.” We haven’t been able to entirely escape a scene here or there; we saw “frankly, my dear...” a million and a half times back when VH-1 used to look at the actual past and there’s some recollection of the flaming Atlanta scene, but beyond that we’re drawing a blank. And we have no desire to see it. Three hours? We could watch a play about the making of the movie in that amount of time, but frankly...
