Don't Cry for Me Margaret Mitchell

I was in the middle of reading a biography of David Selznick when an ad for a community play "Don't Cry for me Margaret Mitchell" caught my eye.  The play was part of the Ashe County Literary Festival.  


Selznick was a movie producer during the 1930's and his biggest hit was Gone With the Wind.  Selznick had a type A personality and had to be involved in every facet of the film he was producing.  He often  rewrote the screen plays himself, some several times.  Or he would have three or four different writers working on the same screen play without them knowing about the others and he would still rewrite them himself.  Ten different writers contributed to Gone With the Wind, including F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The play takes place in  1939, and Selznick had already begun filming Gone with the Wind, but he needed a new script (again). There was only one writer up to the task, the legendary Ben Hecht. The only problem, Hecht had never read the book, and they had only a week to write a new script. So Selznick locks himself, Hecht and director Victor Flemming in his office with the mission to write a screenplay for Gone With the Wind in one week, the book that took Margaret Mitchell ten years to write. They survive on bananas and peanuts.  

The dialogue was fast and snappy and even hubby enjoyed it.  The actors were hilarious and they captured the egomaniac Selznick perfectly.