A popular myth claims that if typewriters were supplied to a room full of monkeys, they eventually would create much of the world’s great literature.

Fact or fiction, this is somewhat the premise of the South Bend Civic Theatre season opener, “Moonlight and Magnolias,” in which playwright Ron Hutchinson credits the film version of “Gone with the Wind” to  producer David O. Selznick  locking himself, playwright/reporter Ben Hecht and director Victor Fleming in his office for five days and emerging with the screenplay  for Margaret Mitchell’s masterpiece.

Behind the scenes at "Gone with the Wind" are (from left) Mark Allen Carter as Ben Hecht, Mark Moriarty as Victor Fleming and Scot Shepley as David O. Selznick in the South Bend Civic Theatre production of "Moonlight and Magnolias."

There are several historical facts to support such a premise.

Fact: Three weeks into production, Selznick fired original director George Cukor (for a reported incident with
Clark Gable in the MGM men’s room) and pulled Fleming off “The Wizard of Oz” to take over the Civil War epic.

Fact: Hecht was the last of several dozen writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald to try their hand at turning the book into a film.

Not a fact: That the trio spent five days sequestered on a diet of peanuts and bananas (Selznick’s idea of  “brain food”) or that Hecht tried to introduce dialogue supporting the emancipation of  the slaves, not really a stretch as the setting is 1939 and Hecht, a Jew, equates Southern slavery with Hitler.

Add to this the idea that Hecht  had never read “Gone with the Wind” and therefore must have all the scenes enacted for him by Selznick and Fleming in order to create the screenplay, and you have the Three Stooges meet the Marx Brothers in a rowdy scenario that gets louder and more outrageous as the mini incarceration wears on.

A good script can make the requisite mayhem a lot more palatable.  Unfortunately, this script goes in a very short while from shout to scream to how-long-does-this-have-to-go-on?  To imagine three of the film world’s giants hitting each other in rhythm to depict Scarlett’s slap of  Prissy or Fleming writhing on the floor to depict Melanie’s labor or his mincing falsetto as Prissy is, for this reviewer, a bit too much to take.

After the frequent dire predictions including “You’ll never get a movie out of it (the book),” “I know a turkey when I see it” and “No Civil War movie ever made a dime” and Hecht’s insistence that  viewers would want to know that happened to Scarlett and Rhett so “the ending doesn’t work” (luckily Selznick held fast to the book), the two-hour rampage (plus intermission) seems almost as long as the movie itself.

Played against David Chudzynski’s elegantly art deco set, the increasingly frantic protagonists are Scot Shepley as Selznick, Mark Allen Carter as Hecht, Mark Moriarty as Fleming and Lorri Wright as Miss Poppenghul, Selznick’s long-suffering secretary. All ramp up the tempo vocally and physically as the deadline approaches (Hecht’s contract is up in five days), Fleming struggles to peel the last banana and the floor fills with more and more discarded script pages.

The director is Jim Geisel, whose last SBCT effort was the elegant and excellent “Rashomon.”

In all fairness, the majority of the opening night audience found the slapstick proceedings funny. But to paraphrase Rhett Butler, “Frankly, my dear, I didn’t give a damn.”

“MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS” plays Wednesday through Sunday in the Wilson Mainstage Auditorium. For performance times and reservations, call (574) 234-1112 from noon to 6 p.m. weekdays or online at www.sbct.org.