Adjusted for inflation, the epic film Gone with the Wind retains a healthy lead on Avatar and Star Wars as the most lucrative in history. Pop quiz, hotshot: what was author Margaret Mitchell's follow-up to Gone with the Wind? If your brain refuses to kick out a title, that's because Gone was the only novel Mitchell ever had published. If one's literary debut wins the Pulitzer and sells millions of copies, I suppose early retirement seems a viable option.

Her first edition ran to 1037 pages. That'd be tough to squeeze into a miniseries, let alone a few hours, so how did producer David O. Selznick and the studio he managed convert Mitchell's Southern-fried doorstop into a 220-minute feature plus overture and entr'acte? Chalk that up to screenwriter Ben Hecht, who began writing fiction (first play scripts, then prose, then screenplays) after establishing himself as Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News during World War I. Yet even Hecht, the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood and an Oscar winner to boot, couldn't get onscreen credit for his draft of Gone with the Wind. Such, Gentle Reader, is how justice is done in the movie business.

Moonlight and Magnolias, running now at Tacoma Little Theatre, is playwright Ron Hutchinson's behind-the-typewriters look at how Hecht was able to churn out his adaptation (of Mitchell's novel and Sidney Howard's too-long script) in a mere five days. Hutchinson casts Hecht fairly as a staunch Zionist given to importuning Selznick about his obligations to Jews in Hollywood, but this does tend to bog the otherwise absorbing story down in Act II. It doesn't help that Tedd Saint-James, who plays Hecht for TLT, seems as Jewish as pepperoni pizza, though he does give Hecht a convincing arc of exhaustion.

Jacob Tice, a Lakewood Playhouse standby these last few seasons, displays ferocity and comic chops here as Victor Fleming, one of Gone's three directors. (Among Moonlight's best in-jokes is Fleming's repeated insistence on ‘finishing the picture.') Katelyn Hoffman is lovely as Selznick's assistant, Miss Poppenghul. When all is said and done, though, this production hangs on Blake York as David O. Selznick. Mr. York is TLT's Resident Set Designer, so it's his lovely office design we admire upon entering the theater. York collaborated with director Pavlina Morris on the show's fight choreography, which is as well-executed as any I've seen in years. And it's York's sympathetic Selznick who must badger, bribe, bully, cajole and threaten Hecht and Fleming into remaining on the project. This is a top-notch performance from a gifted, experienced actor, who milks his lead opportunity for everything it's worth.

I laughed often at Moonlight and Magnolias. Will you laugh louder if you're a Gone with the Wind aficionado? That's like asking, "Will tomorrow be another day?"

MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS, 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through June 22, Tacoma Little Theatre, 210 North I Street, Tacoma, $15-$22, 253.272.2281