"Moonlight and Magnolias" in Hickory, NC, at the Fireman's Kitchen, HCT

Bill Boyd on the left as Victor Fleming and Anthony Liguori playing David Selznick, take a truer than life run at the wickedly-wild world of Hollywood. Fiction always does get a lot more truth out than the most sober and consciousness meticulation can ever produce and this play is a great example of how that takes place.

I won’t go through the plot because that would strip the impact of the actors from the play, let’s just say that they they took a clearly implausible story, breathed life into it and created an enjoyable work of art.

Bob Smith as Ben Hecht and Connie Bools as MIss Poppenghul rounded out the cast. Hechct was the key character in the play as he wove a mixture of Jewish-Southern-New York innuendic folklore into the story of a book he had never read. Fortunately he had a LOT of help in understanding the screen play he wound up writing.

I was attracted to the Fleming character. He reminded me of some people I had known in the upper echelons of state government when I worked in Tallahassee. The Selznick and Heckt guys were sometimes pretty good, and the Poppenghul character was faithful to her role. The bananas and peanuts were weirdy-weird though, and the Jew-boy thing got off message and wandered badly - I kept thinking it would be woven into the story somehow and would provide an ultimate meaning, bringing some new light of understanding on the Civil War. Instead, it got forgotten - and that's not good writing. AND the pop-corn popper hanging on the wall WAS NEVER USED!!! - That is awesomely bad theatre!

Boyd and Liguori showed how life can be lived, way out there at the end of the world of reason, when the only hope you have left is that desperate promise of the greatest glory on earth. They also showed how ordinary these people can be who aspire to that perch - and how awful those wonderful jobs might really have been.

Clearly the most memorable part of the movie “Gone With the Wind” was Rhett Butler telling Scarlett O’Hara that he frankly didn’t “give a damn”. I remember back some sixty-two years ago hearing those lines in a movie theater in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and that genteel audience gasped "UHHHHHH!" in shock at those awful words. Well! Ron Hutchinson, who wrote this screen play, crowned that great quote by going even better than that. What was it? Heh-heh. You will be amazed!