When he died this spring, the lights were dimmed on Broadway in his honor. Horton Foote, age 92, was sometimes mentioned in the company of such great 20th century American playwrights as Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. But for many of us, Foote will be remembered for his award-winning screenplays, especially To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies.
In Horton Foote: America’s Storyteller (published by Free Press), New York Times theater critic Wilborn Hampton sympathetically chronicles a life that began among the gentry of a small Texas town in a house where storytelling on the front porch was the preferred entertainment. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was friendly with the town’s black residents and enjoying hearing their stories as well. Childhood provided him with the deep reservoir of ideas he drew from during his long career as a writer. “What sets his stories apart was not the details themselves,” Hampton writes, “but the compassion for human frailty and the struggle for dignity in the face of adversity and failure that runs through them.”
Foote’s Hollywood career grew out of his work in 1950s television, where he adapted a Faulkner story for director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate). His breakthrough was the screenplay based on Harper Lee’s best-selling novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Hollywood executives were leery of offending white Southerners with a story of a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Southern town. The studio scrimped on the budget, tried to gut the story and strip away its authenticity, but the picture’s star, Gregory Peck, used his clout to thwart them. To Kill a Mockingbird became a beloved Hollywood classic, earning Oscars for Best Actor Oscar (Peck) and Best Screenplay (Foote).
Afterward, Foote’s Hollywood career was mostly more confounding than fulfilling, an experience shared by many other writers who worked in the movie capital. Although he won a second Oscar for Tender Mercies, many of his efforts in film were overlooked. It’s a shame. Hollywood could have benefited from his humane sensibility as storytelling gave way to the cinema of sensation.
