I overheard someone self-identifying as a screenwriter last night. Every time I hear someone refer to themselves as a screenwriter, I hear the voice of Tony Shalhoub from Barton Fink--the Cohen Brothers movie about a screenwriter. At one point in the film, the title character is told to seek the counsel of another screenwriter. Barton Fink asks who he should consult. Wordlessly referring to the fact that he’s in Hollywood, Shalhoub’s character says, “Jesus, throw a rock in here, you'll hit one. And do me a favor, Fink: Throw it hard.”
There are A LOT of people who want to write for movies. The world is cluttered with them. It’s not difficult to see why: films may be the last great bastion for large-scale storytelling. What with all the distractions out there, the last Captain America movie still managed to rake in over a billion dollars worldwide. If you want to reach a big audience in a large temple for storytelling you write for the movies. With all the distractions, though, films have faltered a bit in popularity. The last Captain America film won’t be the most successful film of all time. Industry analysts will look to movies like Avatar and Titanic when they talk about the most successfull films of all time. They aren’t. The one movie that sold more tickets than any other worldwide remains Gone With the Wind. Adjusted for inflation, the film brought in $3.4 billion. This was a film that sold a lot of tickets.
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About a dozen years ago, playwright Ron Hutchinson wrote a play about the writing of Gone With the Wind. The comedy focusses on an office where producer David O. Selznick and screenwriter Ben Hecht bash out the script to the most successful film of all time. It’s sharp, it’s clever and it’s very, very funny.
This month, a dinner theater in Port Washington becomes an office in Hollywood as Memories Dinner Theater presents Ron Hutchinson’s screenwriting comedy Moonlight and Magnolias. Relax. Have dinner. Watch a couple of characters lose their minds trying to come up with the right way to bring Gone With the Wind to the big screen. The show runs Jun. 7 - 22 on 1077 Lake Drive in Port Washington. For more information, visit Memories online.
