How They Made a Movie Out of “Our Town”

In my day, every high school student knew Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play, Our Town. It was a simple, wholesome depiction of life in a small New England town called Grover’s Corners, spanning the years between 1901 and 1913. Within the play’s cast are all manner of ordinary local folk: a milkman, a constable, two newsboys, a lady who cries at weddings, the local church organist who’s prone to melancholy and drink, and dies a suicide. But the play’s main action involves two local clans. The Gibbs family is headed by the town doctor. The Webb family patriarch is editor of town newspaper. The Webb and Gibbs houses are side by side, and in the course of the play young George Gibbs and Emily Webb fall in love and ultimately marry.

Nothing too unique there, but it was Wilder’s ideas about stagecraft that lifted Our Town beyond the conventional. Today’s literary commentators call Our Town a “metatheatrical” play. This newfangled term points to Wilder’s determination to comment on the nature of theatre by way of the play’s unusual staging. Wilder’s script calls for no realistic sets, just a few chairs and tables on an otherwise bare stage. When George and Emily communicate back and forth from their second-story bedroom windows, the effect is achieved by having them perch on the top of stepladders. The point, of course, is to require audience members to use their imaginations, filling in the details that the set design does not provide.

Helping the viewers along is a character known as the Stage Manager. In theatre parlance, he “breaks the fourth wall,” speaking directly to those who occupy theatre seats. (Traditionally this Stage Manager has been a folksy man smoking a pipe, but I saw a magnificent production in which Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt took the role.) It’s the Stage Manager’s job to fill us in on the life of the town: its history, its customs, its idiosyncrasies. He introduces characters, and guides us when the story jumps in time, from George and Emily’s high school years to the day of their wedding to the sad day, nine years later, when Emily is buried after failing to survive the birth of her second child. Yes, this is a play that is much concerned with the whole life-cycle, and also with the concept of eternity. A climactic section in the third act takes place in the town cemetery, where the newly-dead Emily is welcomed by the locals who have pre-deceased her. Against their advice, she revisits scenes from her past, then retreats from their everyday wonder, rapturously exclaiming, “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. . . . Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”

I became interested in the film version of Our Town while reading James Curtis’s biography of production designer William Cameron Menzies. Menzies began making his mark in Hollywood with spectacularly atmospheric sets for films like the original Thief of Bagdad. Our Town posed a very different challenge. Moving far beyond the job of a set designer, he helped the production team decide on a visual approach that would preserve Thornton Wilder’s stylized vision of small-town life. It was he who conceptualized how to handle the Stage Manager, who (instead of leaning against a stage proscenium) would speak to the viewer while casually lounging against a rural fence high above the town. Menzies chose  a cluster of stark black umbrellas to set the cemetery scene, and advocated for gauzy filters and unusual angles to show the dead returning to their past haunts. Bravo!

William Cameron Menzies: A Production Designer Who Has Gone with the Wind

When we think about the landmark film production of Gone With the Wind, most of us conjure up images of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland and Hattie McDaniels. If we’re up on film history, we remember the film’s imperious producer, David O. Selznick, as well as a revolving cast of directors that included George Cukor and Victor Fleming. But the name William Cameron Menzies doesn’t readily spring to mind. My colleague Jim Curtis’s exhaustively researched 2015 book, William Cameron Menzies: The Shape of Films to Come, aims to change all that.

Menzies began his career as an art director at the tail-end of the silent era. On such early sound films as 1933’s all-star Alice in Wonderland and the futuristic 1936 Things to Come, he used his artistic talents not only to plan appropriate settings but also to lay out camera moves and action sequences. Through volumes of elaborate sketches that are the forerunners of today’s storyboards, he conceptualized the visual aspects of many productions. He himself described his mandate: “As a production designer, it is my job to dramatize the mood of a picture and to keep it ‘in character.’ This is done simply by coordinating every phase of the production not covered by dialogue and action of the players.” 

That, of course, was a huge responsibility, and Menzies’ family life inevitably suffered. Still, those in the know fully recognized his genius. Selznick insisted he be part of the Gone With the Wind team, and later granted him the brand-new “production designed by” credit to reflect the broad scope of his services. Ironically, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not recognize the title of production designer when it came to handing out Oscars. That’s why the art direction Oscar for Gone With the Wind (one of eight won by the film) went solely to Lyle R. Wheeler. Happily, at the Oscar ceremony Menzies was awarded a special plaque recognizing his “outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood” in the film. (He had earlier nabbed a competitive Oscar for the 1928 silent, Tempest, but won no awards in his later career, which ended with an associate producer credit on 1956’s Around the World in Eighty Days.)

The Academy’s recognition of Menzies’ work on Gone With the Wind focused on his pioneering use of color. For instance, he deliberately chose “severe red skies & indigo backings” to punch up somber scenes like the burning of Atlanta. When it came to filming the moment in which Melanie gives birth, the challenge was to suggest the anguish of the experience while not running afoul of the MPAA’s Breen office, which frowned on depicting outright pain and suffering. Menzies’ solution was to choose angles “of stark black and sharp, knifelike patterns of yellow, no light falling on the shutters or the human figures in the foreground, simply a white backing reflecting the colored glare of flood lamps through the slits.” He intuited that orange was a hot color, while black could suggest violence. The combination of the two colors suggested both a steamy afternoon and the violence of childbirth.

Menzies’ contributions to Gone With the Wind also included the iconic use of a (fake) tree in the foreground to add drama to the shot of Gerald O’Hara showing his daughter the land that is her birthright. When he needed towering shadows of Leigh and de Havilland, he got the effect by using doubles who were required to move in unison with the two actresses in the foreground of the shot. Who knew?  

Speaking of Atlanta, I encourage all working writers and journalists to be aware of the American Society of Journalists and Authors’ regional conference in that fair city on Saturday, November 5. There’ll be loads of practical info on how to further your career. Early bird sign-up rates end soon. Here’s the link.