The Stagecrafters Theater of Chestnut Hill is presenting to its audiences “Moonlight and Magnolias”, a comedy about the creating of “Gone with the Wind”, the movie.  It is to a great extent a true story, which is also both a tribute to and a satire of movie making in the the old Hollywood. As there are so few stage pieces that concern themselves with real-life movies, even ones as unique in American culture as “Gone with the Wind”, this play is certainly worth noting.

The phenomenon of “Gone with the Wind” is unique in a number of ways. 

For one, the book forming the basis of the film, though a bestseller at one time, has never been recognized by literary critics as an important literary achievement, and yet it has firmly been considered as a great American classic by its reading public. Even today, when just about everybody admits, without the least embarrassment, to not having read  “An American Tragedy” or “Main Street”,  they feel quite ambivalent about “Gone with the Wind”, promising to “definitely read it” or “re-read it” (a mere 1000+ pages), and starting immediately reliving their fond memories of the movie which they have seen numerous times.

Ah, yes, the movie ... the movie everybody knows, or knows about, remembers, quotes from, admires, and claims as one of their favorites.  Is it really a great film?

Not according to some film connoisseurs. Well, it nabbed a few Oscars at the 1940 festivities, but then how many out of hundreds of Oscar-awarded films over the decades have been as well remembered and as revered? Was it groundbreaking in some major way? Did it stir some deep-rooted psychological layers in its audiences? Was it socially or historically particularly revealing? 

Probably not – on all three counts.  But whatever it has or has not been, it surely remains one of the biggest commercial movie-industry successes of all time, and not just in the United States, but worldwide.  Almost every time and every place where “Gone with the Wind” has been re-released in movie theaters in the last seven decades, its showings are sold out.

The play, “Moonlight and Magnolias”, now at The Stagecrafters, recreates the period when the film was originally made, and it concentrates on the behind-the-scenes event involving the three men who were probably most responsible for what “Gone with the Wind” has become: David O. Selznick, the driven, almost manic producer, head of the project; Ben Hecht, the famed scriptwriter who reluctantly rewrote the original screenplay, claiming that “no Civil War movie ever made a dime”; and acclaimed director Victor Fleming who considered the movie merely as his contractual obligation and apparently said, “I know a turkey when I see one.”

Do come to see this play – you may actually have some fun with it, and learn a little bit of the history of movie-making in the old days.