Mayhem, then magic

The Three Stooges have nothing on the trio of men hurling peanut shells and bananas at each other in a bare, windowless rehearsal room across the street from the Old Globe Theatre.

They violently grab each other and grimace. They throw haymakers -- although the blows never quite land as planned. David Manis, failing to find an escape route from the flailing Dan Castellaneta and Tom McGowan, hoists a giant electric fan over his head, threatening to hurl it. But he stops short as McGowan suddenly shouts, “I’ve got it!”

“It” is a brainstorm about how to shoot a problematic scene in “Gone With the Wind.” The rotund McGowan is playing the movie’s director, Victor Fleming. Tall and gawky Manis portrays one of its many screenwriters -- Ben Hecht. Castellaneta, better known as the voice of Homer Simpson, plays the movie’s producer, David O. Selznick. They’re rehearsing a chaotic scene in Ron Hutchinson’s “Moonlight and Magnolias.”

Hutchinson is no stranger to blistering disputes like these: In addition to being an accomplished playwright, he’s a veteran Hollywood screenwriter. “I have been in those rooms for 20-hour days, with people tearing out their hair,” he says.

He was the seventh and then the ninth writer on the recent remake of “Flight of the Phoenix.” He received no screen credit, but the movie’s director, John Moore, confirms that Hutchinson’s contribution to the movie was “truly invaluable.”

For “Phoenix,” Hutchinson was flown from L.A. to Namibia with “two days’ notice and seven shots in my arm,” he recalls. He was assigned to write in a room “with armed guards at the door, a temperature of 115, and sand blowing in.” As a wrecked airplane set waited nearby, his task was to come up with an explanation of how the characters would rebuild it.

That situation was reminiscent of what happened in the shooting of “Gone With the Wind” -- much of the movie was shot before the script was hammered out.

In “Moonlight and Magnolias,” Fleming and Hecht have been summoned to Selznick’s office. The producer insists that the men remain in the room for a week as they grind out a rewrite of the script. Because Hecht hasn’t read the novel, Selznick and Fleming enact scenes for him. Mayhem finally erupts after days of round-the-clock work.

Hecht was the main draw for Hutchinson. “Ben Hecht made it on his own terms,” he says. “I identify with that kind of career.”

As a teenager in Northern Ireland, Hutchinson found Hecht’s memoir “A Child of the Century,” which has a brief account of the incidents that Hutchinson has fictionalized in the play. “I loved his cynical, knockabout attitude toward Hollywood and the absurdist comedy of it.” He also relished such vintage Hecht scripts (with co-writers Charles MacArthur and Charles Lederer) as “The Front Page” and its remake “His Girl Friday.”

Decades later -- probably in 2002, Hutchinson says -- “I was feeling a little angst because some idiocy had prevented a script from realizing its potential. I remember the exact moment when [the idea for the play] crystallized.”

While walking to his car in London, “I put my right foot down, and before I put my left foot down,” it occurred to him that the scene Hecht had described in his memoir “was waiting to be dramatized. Three guys locked in a room -- that’s farce.”

He wrote the play quickly. “I write very fast, and I write a lot of drafts. Quantity before quality has always been my motto.”

His rewrites are usually prompted by his own judgments instead of those of a tyrannical producer. In the theater, as opposed to film and TV, the writer contractually has the last word. “It’s always a treat to work in the theater,” he says. “I can put the final spin on the ball.”

Hutchinson has to come up with the final words of “Moonlight and Magnolias” soon. He’s expecting a check any day for the soon-to-be-published script, which has already been through productions in Chicago and off-Broadway in New York. This means he’ll have to decide which version of the play to preserve for posterity -- an appropriate challenge, he says, because the play itself “is about locking a script.”

On this day, he had just completed discussing script nuances with the Old Globe’s resident artistic director, Jerry Patch.

The next morning, rehearsal begins with director John Rando -- a Tony winner for “Urinetown” -- telling the cast about the overnight script amendments.

Actor McGowan, told that a speech by his character -- the movie director Fleming -- is being cut, jokingly interprets what he has just been told: “We still need you to carry the furniture. But we’ve canceled your fittings, because you’ll be backstage.”

His interpretation might not be far from the mark regarding Hutchinson’s attitude toward the movie director’s role. In an interview, Hutchinson has little to say about Fleming, but he uses the word “hero” for both Hecht and Selznick -- calling the latter “the tent pole who holds it up. He lies awake at night longer than anyone else.”

Serious funny business

Hutchinson grew up in Belfast and in a nearby area called Portmuck that didn’t have electricity. So he saw few movies. He read “Gone With the Wind” as a teenager, long before he saw the movie. “I unabashedly love the book,” he says. “I abashedly love the movie.”

Yet in Hutchinson’s play, Hecht disdains the book. And he questions the politics of the movie -- which leads to a discussion about the roles of Jews, such as Hecht and Selznick, in Hollywood.

Some reviewers of previous productions didn’t feel these more serious elements were successfully integrated. When the play works, wrote Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, “you glean both the insanity and the exhilaration of screenwriting under the gun, under bizarre circumstances and for tremendous piles of cash. When the play works less well, it’s because Hutchinson hasn’t determined how to finesse the more serious issues.”

The farcical scenes are “all well and good,” wrote Gordon Cox of Newsday, “but such ridiculousness doesn’t quite jibe with Hutchinson’s more serious concerns.”

Hutchinson says the Old Globe staging “manages more successfully to solve that problem.” The play’s discussion of Hollywood’s social structure means a lot to him, he adds, because “I’m an Irish exile and my wife is Jewish.”

Director Rando, who saw but didn’t work on the New York production, said these more serious exchanges are “not didactic. They’re part of the fabric of who these characters are” -- and knowing who they are is the play’s key.

Rando touches on the same point in his comments to the actors at the beginning of the rehearsal: “It’s a strange play. It’s comic, but it never feels it has to be rushed. The comedy works better when we get to see the characters’ psychology.”

Hutchinson was hooked by Hollywood in the ‘80s, when actor Brian Dennehy -- then starring in Hutchinson’s IRA-themed play “Rat in the Skull” -- suggested that he write a brief treatment for “Miami Vice.” Hutchinson had never seen the TV series, but his 10 pages netted him more money than he had made for writing an eight-hour BBC miniseries.

His 30 movies include some he regards as terrible (“The Island of Dr. Moreau” remake was “a great bad movie,” but he insists that “not one word of mine” remains in it despite his screen credit) and others that he likes.

Unlike many playwrights turned screenwriters, Hutchinson kept up his stage career -- with productions of “Rat in the Skull” and “Babbitt: A Marriage” at the Mark Taper Forum in the ‘80s and frequent work in London, including the recent “Head/Case” for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

He lives in a Craftsman house in L.A.’s West Adams district with his American wife and their 10-year-old daughter.

The other day, as he drove into sunny Balboa Park for the Old Globe rehearsals in his Lexus with the top down, he recalled a BBC producer who had told him, “You’ll last five years in Hollywood and then they’ll spit you out.”

Hasn’t happened yet. He now thinks of himself as American, he says. But he hasn’t taken the formal step of applying for American citizenship. “The forms are 25 pages long,” he explains. “I’m used to people paying me to write 25 pages.”

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‘Moonlight and Magnolias’

Where: Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego

When: 7 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Ends: Aug. 14

Price: $19 to $55

Contact: (619) 234-5623; www.TheOldGlobe.org