The set for Moonlight and Magnolias is beautifully understated and, complete with a big oak desk, gives off that golden Hollywood era glow.
I was excited to be the Prop mistress for this show. I had just gotten back from my job in Charlotte, NC at CPCC as one of their prop mistresses and I guess just doing it professionally made me want to do it for the school and show them how much I had learned over the summer – plus I was getting paid to do so, so why not? The show wasn’t too demanding, a lot of movie posters, (a lot of printing actually), period office supplies, and some massive shelves to fill. Which my director said, “I hate shelves sometimes because of the pressure to fill them with all the accurate materials.” But tons of books and a few fake award trophies pretty much took care of it.
Moon&Mags is about famous Hollywood producer, David Selznick producing Margaret Mitchell’s famous novel, Gone with the Wind. So, we needed a very important prop; well, several important props. The novel with its original cover from 1936. Since we weren’t going to be getting actual books that meant I had to find the cover and be able to re-produce it and make fake covers. I perused e-bay for pictures of the original first edition. I got really lucky when one seller put a picture of the real book cover slip folded all the way out. I put it in photoshop worked on it for a while, and then printed it out on 11x17 paper and covered Britannica Encyclopedias with the fake covers. I had a few trial and error pages, but eventually I found the size I needed. The book looked like the real deal from the audience - which is all I wanted.
This was the show of a million bananas. The main character locks himself and two others in his office to work and wants nothing else to eat except bananas and peanuts - "brain food". Well, that is what we had; bags of peanuts and bundles of bananas. I bought every single fake banana at Hobby Lobby, Michaels, and two different Wal-Marts. We had a lot of real ones too that were browning and then frozen to be preserved. Throughout the show the peels would end up everywhere on the set sparing no area – even the blinds had peels hanging off them. Peanut shells were crunched into the carpet and real bananas were smashed into the couch cushions and actors clothes. Let me just say I’m glad I wasn’t the stage manager cleaning up for that one… Except it would have been fun because the show is hilarious.
There were tons of blanks pages for the actors to work with as script pages or trash or whatever they needed. There was a hilarious gag when Selznick is trying to get the attention of Fleming and Hecht and he fires a gun in the air scaring the other two men who were fighting over a script – the jolt scares them and they throw the loose pages in the air and they fly everywhere and rain down back on them. They’re silence is classic and the whole audience is laughing watching the papers fall down all around them. Sometimes the pages got as high as the proscenium - it was a great moment.
The set for Moonlight and Magnolias is beautifully understated and, complete with a big oak desk, gives off that golden Hollywood era glow.
