specks of light struck to a strip of celluloid ... a series of moments frozen in time by the only time machine ever invented
-- David O. Selznick, producer of Gone With The Wind, in Moonlight and Magnolias
I admit it -- except for a few minutes, I never watched Gone With The Wind, but like ace screenwriter Ben Hecht noted, it is about a woman with no morals that owns slaves, smacks a young child, and "plugs" a Union soldier. Well, I do not know if he actually said that, but that was the description noted in Moonlight and Magnolias, an enjoyable play running in Manhattan Theatre* that provides a behind the scenes look at the furious re-write of the screenplay with the help of new director Victor Fleming (played by David Rasche, who in another life played the goofball police officer Sledgehammer).
Furious indeed, since Selznick (having a five day commitment from Hecht) trapping them in his office, while Selznick and Fleming acted out scenes from the book ... which Hecht admitted not reading. Meanwhile, Selznick's loyal secretary (Miss Poppenguhl, suggesting the farce slant of the story, though it has many serious themes) was on guard outside, and only providing bananas and peanuts as subsistence.
It was striking, if fitting, that screen tests from the movie were played before showtime. In a day and age where commercials are invading movie theaters (luckily not in the middle of the films ... yet), it seems a bit off to have any film shown at a play! It also was used to set the scenes at the beginning ... "Three Days Later," etc. The screen tests were interesting though. As a fan of Jean Arthur (You Can't Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Talk of The Town, etc.), the idea that she was tested for the movie is rather amusing -- Arthur usually played a fast talking sort with some small town Midwestern flavor (sort of a big city girl with an Iowan sensibility deep down, waiting to be found by true believers like Mr. Smith). She is just not what I think of a Southern lady.
Selznick was the ultimate star of the four-person play, equal parts maniac, desperate, and eloquent. He defended the movie against Hecht's complaints (both were Jews, Hecht's newspaper muckraking background influencing his concerns) by reminding him just how much the public loved the book. And, why Selznick himself was drawn to risk spending so much time and effort on the material -- the central character just drew you in, so much that you forgive her for her flaws.
And, this struck me too, since I'm not really too gung ho about a movie that (let's be honest) glorified something that left a lot to be desired (the same thing comes to mind with mafia movies, and darn if a high school classmate that I sometimes differed with liked them both). Not saying I will now watch the thing, but the play did help me respect it somewhat more.
Mike Royko of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Mary Pickford, the one-time screen darling of America, has managed to offend people. She did it by growing old."
Talking about old time film, PBS had an interesting documentary the other day about Mary Pickford, the (mostly) silent film screen star. She led an interesting life, starting with her start as a child silent screen actress back at the first decade (or so) of cinema. The amazing thing about Mary Pickford was not only her skill and fame, but also her business sense. For instance, along with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Doug Fairbanks (her lover and later husband), she founded United Artists (fitting name) ... the doc explained how she was an excellent businesswoman and was quite a hard bargainer.
The end of silent film along with various personal traumas led to her downfall as perhaps did her getting older (thirty-five or so), which was not quite what her audience wanted to accept (her telltale curls and ability to play girlish parts was her bread and butter). Though she received an Oscar for her first talkie (deemed even then as a questionable piece of cinema), in the mid-1970s, Pickford was given an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement.
In a dubious act, cameras came to her home (where she lived in seclusion for years) because she was too fragile to accept it in person. Quite made up and clearly fragile, her appearance upset many people, including those who retained an idealized view of the one time screen legend. PBS included the above quotation in its resource page on the documentary, one that I recall reading a long time ago. The amusing thing about it is that Mike Royko -- associated quite closely to Chicago (sort of its patron saint) -- is labeled "of the Los Angeles Times." [No, it's not some other Mike Royko.]
The quote also reminds me of a favorite passage that Justice Brennan often cited, down to perhaps his final public appearance when he was too frail to completely cite the reference. As Nat Hentoff tells it:
Then William Brennan quoted from a scene in Yeats's play "Cathleen ni Houlihan": " 'Did you see an old woman going down the path?' asks Bridget. 'I did not,' replies Patrick, who came into the house just after the old woman left it. 'But I saw a young girl and she had the walk of a queen.' "
Through the power of that time machine we heard about, Mary Pickford is also still a young girl, the queen of motion pictures.
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* Not too surprisingly, a theater in mid-town Manhattan. Around the corner, is a good bakery, in which you might purchase overpriced tasty pastries and such.