MAKING MAGIC IN HOLLYWOOD
By Playwright Ron Hutchinson

  This play is about the making of one very great movie 60 years ago in the Golden Age of the Hollywood studio system. That system is long gone but guess what? Movies still get made in much the same way. The physical production (sets, costumes, casting) takes place parallel to the writing of the screenplay. But the thing about parallel lines is that they never meet.

  Consequently, now as back then, in the last weeks, days, hours or seconds before shooting (and often, after principal photography has begun) there's a mad scramble to finally get the script right.

  That's where guys like Ben Hecht came in then and where guys like me come in today. In 25 years as a rewrite man, I've been parachuted into movie locations in places such as Morocco, Mexico, Australia, Hungary, South Africa and really bizarre, exotic places such as Burbank, to work very much as Hecht does in the play. That's to put in 20-hour days to fix what needs fixing —story structure, character, dialogue — with the Director tearing his hair out waiting for the pages and the Producer employing charm, flattery, threat, moral blackmail and every other means of persuasion short of physical violence to keep me punching out the words.

  Often the results are as dire as you'd expect, and the Script Doctor's patient doesn't survive the operation. Sometimes, as with Gone With The Wind (GWTW), this intense, financially rewarding but life threatening process results in movie magic when the skills and craftsmanship of those in the room result in something that's more than the sum of their individual skills.

The ringmaster of this lunatic enterprise is always the Producer. Too often in Hollywood plays he's the butt of the writer's most bitter jokes; written as the vulgarian who stands between the genius of the creative team and its pristine vision. But I've worked there long enough to know that he or she is actually the hero of the town and the pillar that holds the whole thing up.

  In the writing of perhaps the greatest of them all, David O. Selznick, I've tried to redress the balance of received opinion a little. (And besides, they cut the checks and I want to work again.)

  The play is based on the memoirs and written recollections of those who were in that particular room in Hollywood in February 1939, especially Ben Hecht. None of them wanted to dwell too long on the individual horrors of that week, when they had only a few days to rescue the most ballyhooed movie of all time from oblivion, so I've used my own background to fill in the gaps.

  This is how it was done then; I guarantee this is how it's still done, in two movies out of three, today. If you want to keep your illusions intact, make a run for the Exit now. If not, watch and be prepared to be afraid. Be very, very afraid…

GOME WITH THE WIND: The Blockbuster

 - Gone With The Wind, originally released in 1939, and re-issued at least four additional times, is the highest grossing film ever, at $3.8 billion (when adjusted for inflation), which tops Titanic at $1.834 billion.

- The film was rough-cut at six hours, and edited to three and one-half hours running time, with one intermission.

- The movie was challenging in many respects: three years in the making, epic in proportion, hiring 50 speaking actors and 2400 extras. It was shot in Technicolor, with a musical score by Max Steiner, and a record-breaking (at that time) investment of over $4 million

- The nationwide search for an actress to play Scarlet O’Hara, lasting for two years, resulted in the casting of British actress Vivien Leigh.

- Gone With The Wind had heavy competition in a year of outstanding pictures including The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Ninotchka, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Stagecoach. The landmark film received 13 Academy Award nominations, and won 10, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, a posthumous award for Best Screenplay, credited to Sidney Howard (although it was substantially written by numerous others, including Ben Hecht, represented in Moonlight and Magnolias).

CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY

Moonlight features three very real-life characters. Below is a bit of information about these formable people in the film making business.

Victor Fleming
(1889–1949). U.S. motion-picture director Victor Fleming was one of Hollywood's most popular directors during the 1930s. With producer David O. Selznick, he was responsible for completing Gone with the Wind (1939).

Victor Fleming was born on Feb. 23, 1889, in La Canada, Calif. He started in the motion-picture industry as a stunt car driver in 1912 as a driver for the Flying A Studio in Santa Barbara, later becoming the chief cameraman for Douglas Fairbanks. Serving as a military cimematography instructor at Columbia University during World War I, he later filmed President Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, France. Fleming later was associated with Paramount, 20th Century Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, where he made his reputation by guiding actors such as Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy to stardom.

Fleming directed his first feature film, When the Clouds Roll By, in 1919, and he soon became famous for creating highly charged scenes full of dramatic action. His early popular sound films Red Dust (1932) and Treasure Island (1934) were followed by the classic The Wizard of Oz (1939), in which Fleming artfully combined fantasy and realism. It lost money on its initial release, but catapulted Judy Garland to fame. Fleming's later films included Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), Tortilla Flat (1942), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Adventure (1946), and Joan of Arc (1948). He died on Jan. 6, 1949, near Cottonwood, Ariz.

David O. Selznick
One of the icon Hollywood producers of the Golden Age. He is best known for producing the epic blockbuster Gone with the Wind (1939) which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture. The film, one of the most popular and successful in Hollywood history also won seven additional Oscars and two special awards. Selznick also won the Irving G. Thalberg award that same year. He would make film history by winning the Best Picture Oscar a second year in a row for Rebecca (1940).

He was born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of silent movie distributor Lewis J. Selznick and Florence A. (Sachs) Selznick. He studied at Columbia University and worked as an apprentice in his father's company until his father went bankrupt in 1923. In 1926, Selznick moved to Hollywood and with his father's connections, got a job as an assistant story editor at MGM. He left MGM for Paramount Pictures in 1928 and worked there until 1931 when he joined RKO as Head of Production. His years at RKO were fruitful and he guided many notable films there, including A Bill of Divorcement (1932), What Price Hollywood (1932) and King Kong (1933). While at RKO, he also gave George Cukor his big directing break. In 1933 he returned to MGM to establish a second prestige production unit to parallel that of Irving Thalberg who was in poor health. His blockbuster classics included Dinner at Eight (1933), David Copperfield (1935), Anna Karenina (1935) and A Tale of Two Cities (1935).

But Selznick was restless and longed to be an independent producer and establish his own studio. In 1936 he realized that goal by forming Selznick International Pictures and distributing his films through United Artists. His successes continued with classics such as The Garden of Allah (1936), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Made For Each Other (1939), Intermezzo (1939) and of course, his magnum opus, Gone with the Wind (1939). In 1940, he produced his second Best Picture Oscar winner in a row, Rebecca, the first Hollywood production for British director Alfred Hitchcock. Selznick had brought Hitchcock over from England, giving birth to the director's American career. It is interesting to note that Rebecca is Hitchcock's only film to win Best Picture.

After Rebecca, Selznick closed Selznick International Pictures and took some time off. His business activities included loaning out to other studios for large profits the high-powered talent he had under contract including Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Vivien Leigh and Joan Fontaine. He also developed film projects and sold the packages to other producers. In 1944 he returned to producing pictures with the huge success Since You Went Away which he wrote. He followed that with the classic, Spellbound (1945) as well as Portrait of Jennie (1948). In 1949, he co-produced the memorable Carol Reed picture The Third Man.

After Gone with the Wind Selznick spent the rest of his career trying to top that landmark achievement. The closest he came was with Duel in the Sun (1946). With a huge budget, the film is renowned for its stellar cast, its sweeping cinematography and for causing all sorts of moral upheaval because of the then risque script written by Selznick. And though it was a troublesome shoot with a number of directors, the film would turn out to be a major success. The film was the second highest grossing film of 1947 and turned out to be the first movie that Martin Scorcese would see, inspiring the director's brilliant career.Selznick spent most of the 1950s obsessing about nurturing the career of his second wife Jennifer Jones. His last film, the big budget production, A Farewell to Arms (1957) starring Jones and Rock Hudson, was ill received. But in 1954, he ventured successfully into television, producing a two hour extravaganza called Light's Diamond Jubilee, which, in true Selznick fashion, made TV history by being telecast simultaneously on all networks.In addition to his stellar filmography, Selznick had a keen instinct for new talent and will be remembered for introducing American movie audiences to Fred Astaire, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Vivien Leigh and Louis Jourdan as well as director Alfred Hitchcock. Selznick continued to be a larger than life Hollywood presence right up to the end of his life. A fascinating study in contrasts, this passionate, creative, obsessed product of the motion picture business remains an integral part of film making history.For his indelible contribution to the motion picture industry, David O. Selznick has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7000 Hollywood Blvd., in front of the historic Hollywood Roosevelt hotel.

Ben Hecht  
A prolific Hollywood screenwriter, even though he professed disdain for the motion picture industry. He was also a Zionist and human rights activist.

Hecht was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and as a young man moved to Chicago, where he became a reporter and, eventually, a short-story writer and novelist. He eventually landed in New York, where he met movie mogul David O. Selznick. The two were to be lifelong friends and frequent collaborators.

Hecht eventually moved to Hollywood, where he scripted Josef von Sternberg's gangster story Underworld in 1927, and won an Oscar for his work at the first Academy Awards presentation. His most famous work was the stage comedy The Front Page, which he wrote with frequent collaborator Charles MacArthur. It was first translated to film in 1931 and three more times, most notably as Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday in 1940. Much of Hecht's later work was uncredited, as he worked as a "script doctor".

Hecht had an early talk show on television in the New York metropolitan area in the 1950s and 1960s.

Ben Hecht was a great supporter of Zeev Jabotinsky and the right-wing Revisionist Zionism movement of Menachem Begin. He subsequently wrote and published the book Perfidy, dramatizing the failure to rescue Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, and the roles of the Zionist leader Rudolf Kastner and others in high leadership positions in that affair, which was the subject of a famous libel trial when Kastner sued Grunwald, who had accused him of complicity with the Nazis. In that trial, although the court initially held that these accusations were correct, on appeal it was unanimously held that they were largely untrue or unfair and the verdict was reversed. The case remains highly controversial and it is not universally accepted that Hecht's account can be accepted as fair.

Hecht also opposed the social-democratic policies of Israel's first two prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, and of the Jewish Agency for what he regarded as their complicit silence and co-operation with the British during World War II in not doing more to rescue Jews and open the doors of Palestine to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. He spoke out against the lack of interest in saving the Jews trapped in Europe during the Holocaust. He purchased newspaper advertising in New York's newspapers to publicize the fate of Hitler's victims. In one such "advertisement" with the headline: "FOR SALE: 70,000 JEWS AT $50 APIECE GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS" explaining that three and a half million dollars would rescue the then trapped Romanian Jews (quoted in his work Perfidy, pp. 191-192).