The following interview transcript with Horton
Foote has been carefully broken down into
segments involving a variety of topics. Below
each segment is a link to the corresponding
video clip. Please attribute research sources to
Mike Wood, Interviewer and the William
Inge Center for the Arts.
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Wharton: The Landscape |
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Well, it really is different than other parts of
Texas in many ways. It is on the Gulf Coast,
and our native tree is the pecan and the oak.
We have giant pecan trees here. It’s
subtropical most of the time, although today
would not let you think that. It’s gotten a
little cold all of a sudden. But yesterday it
was 82, and Christmas Day we had the air
conditioning on all day. When I was growing up,
this was part of a flood plain. A little town
out in the country was called Egypt, and which
was named that because the land was as rich as
the Nile Delta. And we had floods at least two
times…oh maybe every five years—we’d have two
floods. And the water would come up here to our
front porch, which enormously enriched the
ground and the earth a great deal, so that we
never had to fertilize when I was a boy. It was
unheard of. The topsoil was—I forget—some kind
of fabulous number of feet; I don’t remember
exactly. We could also grow crops three times a
year, which we still can, but they found out
that it was exhausting the land to grow money
crops that often. This particular area is
interesting to me because it has two or three
kinds of terrains: it has the prairie, then it
has what they call the bottomlands, which is
heavily, heavily wooded—it was almost like a
jungle at times when I was a boy. Then there is
a coastal plain soil. I understand, not in my
day, but as I write a great deal about times
when I wasn’t here so that I…as you know, most
Southerners and most Kansans too are great oral
historians, and so the past always had a great
meaning for me, and sometimes people that I
never knew are sometimes as real to me as people
that I did know, and I often write about them,
or at least what I perceived about them from
what I was told. And one story they told me was
that…they didn’t know until a certain kind of
plow was invented that you could farm the
prairies. You know they just thought that was
wasted land, so that other plantations were in
the river bottoms. There were some great
plantations here.
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Wharton: Cotton and Sugar Cane Plantations |
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My great, great grandfather came from Alabama
and had a plantation just on the outskirts
of town. I think he had…oh I’m
not sure, four or five thousand acres, and I
often wonder how in this wilderness he
ever—because it was…plantations in those days,
as you know, were run by slaves—so how he got
these slaves in and out of this wilderness, I
don’t know, but he did. And I think at one time
he had 120 people on the plantation working for
him, with him. But on the coastal plains,
evidently, a very popular name around here is
Caney, and we have a creek called Caney Creek.
And I think all these came because these
enormous cane fields would grow up on the
prairies and the plains… on the plains, not the
prairies, but the plains. And they would be,
oh, ten and twelve feet high. And I understand
that all kinds of wild fowl and things that have
just totally disappeared that lived there. Then
a cold spell like this would come along and they
would all die down, but it would come back next
year. And evidently it was a fantastic sight to
see this wild growth, which has of course now
disappeared entirely. And the prairies—after
a certain kind of plow was invented, they
realized they could plant cotton and it became—I
sometimes wonder, to the detriment of them. It
cultivated them. I’ve seen…when I was a boy
there was an enormous sugar cane crop grown
here. But cheap labor in Louisiana or cheaper
labor in Cuba have made it financially
impossible, so that’s gone. From here to town
there were all cotton fields belonging to my
grandfather and my great uncle, and you can see
what’s happened to that. Now this cotton is
still grown in some measure, but the big cash
crop now is rice, and that’s done through
irrigation a great deal. And again, the
prairies are very good for that, and the
plains. They irrigate it.
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Wharton: Face to Face with Slavery |
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I was on—I think they called it a seven mile
hike, and I don’t believe on those hikes you are
supposed to stop off and get a drink, but I got
thirsty. And I was passing by this old store,
and I went
in for a Coca-Cola, I
wanted it I
guess, and I came out to drink it, and there was
this old black man sittin’ there. And we
talked, and he asked me my name, and I told him,
and he told me that he’d been born and had been
raised on my great-great-grandfather’s
plantation. He was a slave, and slavery had
always seemed very abstract to me until I looked
in this man’s face, and it suddenly became a
very real thing to me. And it impressed me
deeply, and of course from then on I had a much
more realistic idea of the whole horror of the
whole system—that you could really own another
human being. It was scary, but it did…it was
very
enlightening for me, and I
never
was able to have any romantic illusions about
slavery ever again, because there was a living
presence, and he was a human being, and you know
I suddenly realized there were human beings that
were enslaved, not just some kind of abstract
entity.
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Wharton: Black and White |
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And my father was semi-orphaned, and when he was
11 he went out to work in a plantation store out
in the country. His uncle took him out there,
and his uncle was a gambler, and he didn’t like
to stay on the plantation, so he left him out
there, and he lived all year long for a year
with a black couple—a black man and a black
woman, and he slept in the house with them.
Often, he said, on cold nights, when he got
frightened, he’d go right in and sleep not in
the bed, but in the same room with them. He was
so happy there that at Christmas time, when his
family wanted him to come in for Christmas, he
wouldn’t leave them. He had a store, a men’s
store, and I would say that nine-tenths of his
customers were black. I assume one would call
it
a paternalistic
attitude, but
in any case, he was
the unofficial lawyer for them and banker. Many
of them couldn’t read or write, and they trusted
him totally, and he absolutely adored them. I
can’t tell you in those days that if they came
to the front door—I don’t know what he would
have done. He would’ve been embarrassed and at
a loss what to do. Can you believe when I was a
boy that a black wouldn’t come to this front
door? They would’ve gone back to the back
door. There would’ve been no question about
it. It’s very difficult to think of how far
we’ve gone. I mean it’s almost impossible to
think that you grew up in a society like that
and had so little questions about it. But in
any case I was always raised by blacks and had a
strong emotional attachment to them and never
felt any sense of superiority or inferiority.
That never occurred to me. I knew that there was
a law in Texas that you couldn’t marry. That I
understood. I also knew that miscegenation was
practiced openly, and I knew the families that
did and didn’t. I knew the black children that
looked like their white fathers that walked down
the street. One of them had a Jewish father, a
Jewish merchant in town, which was a very
strange combination.
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Wharton: Saturday Nights |
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Yeah, for instance I just can’t get used to the
fact that you go down there are on Saturday
nights and it’s just like the graveyard now.
And when I was growing up of course, that was
the day of the year. I mean everybody, blacks
and whites; the streets were so crowded you
simply couldn’t walk down the sidewalks. I mean
all the people would come in from the country,
and of course in those days all the farms had a
lot of tenants. In other words there’d be on a
farm, a given farm, maybe four or five tenants
working the farm. Well all that’s gone because
of the cotton machine and all the things we’ve
improved our lives with, or think we have, and
also, I don’t know why, just suddenly, I guess
with the availability of cars to everybody and
shopping centers and Houston being so close…but
this is all over the South. I don’t know about
the rest of the world, but all over the South,
the Saturday night is gone. I worked for father
in the store, and we’d go down there at seven in
the morning on a Saturday and work until 11:30
at night until the last wagon – in those days
they had a lot of wagons too – and cars left
town. And then we’d go and eat oysters at the
restaurant until one o’clock in the morning. It
was a phenomena because there again, most of the
blacks came in the store wouldn’t let anyone
wait on them but my father. So there’d be
fifteen or twenty people standing in line
patiently and I would be wrapping packages for
him and taking change, but I couldn’t wait on
them because they wouldn’t let me. They always
spoke of my father in plural: always Mister
Footes. I’ve never known why that is, but every
black here always calls me plural. I’m still
Mister Footes to most of them.
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Called to be an Actor |
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Well, there was this guy, this man, this
gentleman, this dignified man in here, in
Wharton named Mr. Armstrong—and a very, very
distinguished looking man. I knew he was a
pillar of the Baptist Church. I hadn’t known
that he had been a preacher at one time. In any
case, we used to pass him and
say, “How do you do?” The minute
we’d go past, my father and mother would always
let me know, “This is Mr. Armstrong. This is
Mr. Armstrong.” And he was in the cotton fields
in Mississippi, and he got a call to come to
Texas and to preach. Well this “call” business
worried me to death. I didn’t know what that
meant. And so I figured he was a Baptist, and
my father was an Episcopalian, and my mother was
a Methodist, so I figured maybe a call only came
to a
Baptist,
but my mother said no, she knew Methodists had
had calls and Episcopalians. And we had a few
Presbyterians, but that’s all we had in those
days. And I was really dying to ask Mr.
Armstrong about it, but I didn’t. Anyway, one
day—I was about nine or ten—I just woke up, and
I knew I wanted to be an actor. So I figured
that was the same kind of call as Mr. Armstrong
had. And it was just as clear that I had a
whole new perception about myself and what I
wanted to do. I’ve never known any actors, no
actors in my family. We used to have what they
call tent shows come here, maybe twice a year.
When the cotton fields were not planted, they’d
pitch the tent down there, and I’d go every
night if I could, and my father would let me and
my mother. And we’d have a medicine show, you
know, which had a little entertainment come in.
But except for that and the picture show, I
didn’t know much about the whole thing. So I
figured that was like Mr. Armstrong’s call, the
sense of…I had to do something.
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Leaving Wharton for a Life in the Theater |
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I was 16 in March and I graduated in May, so I
was for all good purposes still 15, and rather
immature I imagine. I thought I was the most
sophisticated, mature person in the world. But
I can’t imagine a 15 or 16 year old boy of mine
coming to me and saying, you know…I’d have tied
him to the bed I think. My father was more
sensible than that. He said, “I think you
should go to college.” I said, “I’m not going
to go to college. I’m going to be an actor.
It’s just a waste of time.” I think I was
afraid if I got to college, I would somehow lose
my drive. So he said, “Well, I’m not going to
let you go off to be an actor.” He said, “I’ll
make a bargain with you. You go on up to Dallas
with your grandmother,” who had then moved there
for the year, “and get a job and work, and if
you still want to do it, I’ll help you.” And it
was the middle of the Depression, you know, and
God knows the poor man – I’m sure he was worried
out of his skull about his own business, and
then this child saying, “I’m going to be an
actor.” So I went to…got a job ushering in a
movie house and found a teacher—I think it would
be called elocution today--but in any case she
called herself a dramatic teacher. And I would
learn parts and recite them for her, and she
would, you know, coach me. And the year was up,
and I said, “I’m going to be an actor,” so poor
man. He owned a house down here, which is the
only piece of real estate he ever had. And I
didn’t know this at the time, but he sold that I
think for $3,000, which was to get me for two
years of my schooling at Pasadena Playhouse. And
the year he sold it, the oil was beginning to be
discovered in many parts of the county, and a
friend of his who was a banker came and said
there were some people that were putting up an
oil pool, and the shares were exactly what he
sold this house for, $3,000. Well of course he
never burdened me with this, but he didn’t do
it. He gave me the money instead,
and the oil pool was very successful. They all
became very wealthy men. But anyway, came that
fall, I worked in my daddy’s store all that
summer, and they put me on the bus and when I
said goodbye to my grandmother, she was crying,
this grandmother. When I went to
Houston my other grandmother got so overcome
they had to take her aside. I mean you’d think
I’d been sent out to be executed or something.
And my mother was very composed until the bus
began to pull back, and then I looked back, and
there she was crying too. And I’d never been
out of Texas, never been out of the South. I’d
been I think…New Orleans maybe, to Dallas, but
that’s all I’d ever been. And the minute we
left Dallas my heart began to sink and I
thought, “My God.” And there was girl there on
the bus who was a sister, she said of James
Hall, who was a very well-known movie actor at
the time. And she’d found out, I guess because
I was telling everybody I was going to
California to be an actor, so she began to
entertain me with all these tales about movie
stars and Hollywood. And I swallowed it for a
long time, but then the tales got bigger and
bigger and bigger, and I looked at this girl and
I thought to myself, “Well, what is James Hall,
the famous movie star’s
sister, doing
riding a bus going to
California?” And I thought she was making a lot
of it up. But in any case, then I saw my first
hill and my first mountain and I really got
excited. I’d hit California.
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The Pasadena Playhouse |
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They had a school—a practicing school, and they
had a full-time curriculum. They had fencing,
eurhythmics, and diction and we rehearsed plays,
make-up, costume designs, built scenes—so it was
kind of a…I learned many skills. Not a lot
about acting. They kind of just, they had the
theory that you learn to act by acting, and I
don’t think you do, really. I think you can, I
suppose. But you can also pick up some pretty
bad habits that way. And the first play they
threw us into was a Roman comedy. Well I’d
hardly read…I’d read very few plays in my life—a
little Shakespeare. So you can imagine, I don’t
think anybody in the class, I mean they were all
older than I was, but I don’t think any of them
had read a Roman comedy, and didn’t know what in
the world to do with it, and it was very
discouraging, because Mr. Brown felt that’s how
you learn, putting them in all these plays.
Well you learned about plays but you didn’t
learn much about acting, I don’t think.
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From Actor to Writer |
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I’d worked in the World’s Fair and saved some
money at a show out in The World’s Fair and came
back here and, right in this room mostly, and
wrote Texas Town in about six weeks,
again with the lead for myself. Back I went,
and the company were doing a show with Agnes (De
Mille) called American Legend in a Texas
town, and we then moved downtown to share Doris
Humphrey and Charles Weidman’s studio with them,
so we had a much more sophisticated place. That
night, Brooks Atkinson who was the Dean of
Critics came down, and Clifford Odets and Lee
Strasburg and I don’t know, a lot of people—and
in those days you had to sit up late at night
for the papers.
And as is custom, all stage-struck we’d stay up
at all hours, and so at four o’clock my brother
went out to get The Times and came back
and well, Atkinson loved it. He loved
everything about it: he loved the directing, he
loved the sets, he loved all the actors except
one. So I thought, well that was me of course,
and I said, “I’m going to show him. I’m never
going to write again.” But that summer we went
away as a company, and we did a lot of plays,
and I did a lot of parts. And for some reason,
I was very satisfied with what I did and we got
some very positive responses, and it just left
me. I just suddenly said, “I don’t want to do
this anymore, and I want to write.” I knew
nothing about it. It was a terrible, terrible
moment in my life. I’d written simply from
instinct. I’d never gone to college, never
thought about a structure of anything except an
acting part, which finally served me in good
stead because that was really how I got into the
structure of a play was how I worked on them as
actors.
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Writing for Live Television |
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Don’t call it “the Golden Years.” That
embarrasses me so. It wasn’t so golden, you
know. It had a lot of warts. But it was a neat
time. It was a good time. And I’m not nearly
as sentimental about it as Paddy Chayevsky and a
few of those writers who I think felt very
bitter about its…I left it. Really what I was
doing, I had some one-act plays stored up.
There was no place for one-act plays in those
days, so I just drug out my one-act plays,
because in television it was much nearer the
theater. It was live and you couldn’t stop the
camera, and once dear Dorothy Gish was doing a
play of mine and she forgot her lines, and you
couldn’t prompt her. So there we all just sat,
for about what looked like an hour. It was
probably just a half-second, while somebody, you
know, was able to get her back onto the line.
We had so little money, we only couldn’t afford
more than three little sets, really. It was an
extravagance to have more than that, and the
room wasn’t very large. So, it was like
theater. And you’d rehearse, and then you’d
have a dress rehearsal, and then you’d do the
performance almost like a stock company. And you
got to using the same actors. I used Kim a
great deal and Eva Marie and Lillian Gish and,
oh I don’t know, Dorothy Gish. And we just had
a family. E.G. Marshall who was the other actor
in Roads to Home who I couldn’t think of.
I don’t know. It was just a very heady time,
and we were discovering each other. I mean I’d
never heard of all these actors, Rod Steiger and
all these people were, you know, working for
peanuts, glad to do it.
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The Trip to Bountiful:
The Genesis |
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The germ of Bountiful really came from
that picture right there on that wall which was
the house that was in my mother’s family. I
never saw the house, but I used to go back to
this little town that had disappeared – there
was no town left, and where the house stood, the
river had just eaten away the land, and yet the
life in that house was so vividly carried orally
down through the years. I often thought about
these abandoned houses that people grew up in
and leave and can’t live there again. So for
many years, in a way I guess, that play was
growing out of this kind of thinking about those
circumstances.
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The Trip to Bountiful:
Casting Mrs. Watts |
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Well, when I wrote Trip to Bountiful,
Fred Coe who was the producer and Vincent
Donehue who was the director – Fred said, “Who
do you want for it,” and my first thought was
Shirley Booth. I had done a project for
Shirley. It had never come off, but I had some
experience with her, and she said, “Oh darling,”
she said, “pretty soon I’m going to have to
start playing these parts and I don’t want to
play an old lady.” So she wouldn’t do it. And
Fred said, “Well what do you think of Lillian
Gish?” Well, I knew who she was of course, and
I’d seen her in Hamlet, but I thought,
“Well, I don’t know.” And he said, “Well she
did The Late Christopher Bean for me, and
she was wonderful.” So
Donehue
and I went down to meet her, and she was all of
55, and I thought she was an old lady of
course. Here was this gorgeous creature. She
had on a lovely black dress and pearls and in
this lovely apartment which she still has. And
she was very, very gracious, and said she wanted
to do it. And she has no vanity. Of course I
have pictures of her, you’ll see she looks…no
make up, and she played this old woman, but not
so old now. I mean, my God, the character
really isn’t supposed to be older than around
60. Of course at that time I thought she was
doddering. But, again a great, great
friendship. I adore her. Eva Marie Saint was
in that. It was the first thing of mine that
she ever did. And then we took it to Broadway,
and Eva was playing it when they cast her in
On the Waterfront, and she said she wouldn’t
take On the Waterfront
if they made her leave the play.
So she couldn’t do the matinees, but she shot
On the Waterfront in the daytime and played
Bountiful at night. And Jo Van Fleet,
who won the Tony, was in it. And she didn’t do
it originally. On television, Eileen Heckart
did. We took it to Westport to try it out.
Then Jo Van Fleet joined us. And Lillian is an
enormous energy and enormous drive. It was
like, she was very different than Geraldine. It
was like two great instrumentalists taking a
piece of music and transforming it in their own
style. But both were very effective.
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To Kill A Mockingbird:
Adapting the Novel |
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They had offered it to Harper, and she didn’t
want to do it. So, I had worked with Bob
Mulligan and Alan Pakula before. Not really
with Alan, but we were friends and he wanted to
do The Chase, but Spiegel had gotten it
ahead of him, and I knew him. So they said,
“Well, I think it’s best if you and Harper
meet. And if you feel compatible with each
other, then you’re the one we want, and she
wants you.” So, Alan brought her out to the
house. I was living in Nyack, New York at the
time. We had a marvelous evening. I mean she’s
a wonderful woman. I’m still very close to her,
and she’s warm and witty and funny, and you know
we came from the same background. She was born
in a house like this with a porch like that.
So, you know it was in that sense a real
marriage. And she said, “I don’t want to see
you again or fool with you again until it’s all
done.” So there’s no looking over your shoulder,
you know. And Alan was living in New York, and
I wrote it in…I had a study up in the third
floor of my Nyack house, and I would work, and
he’d come over every two days, and we’d talk
about what I’d done. It was great help. And
there were two things that helped me at least,
because what you have to do with an adaptation,
at least I do, is to try to get into what I
think of as the psyche of the skin of somebody
else, which is very painful. Then there’s a
point at which you have to say, “Well, this is
mine and for good or bad I’ve got to go with
this.” And there was a review by R.P. Blackmur
called “Scout in the Wilderness” which compared
the themes and the characters of Mockingbird,
not necessarily exactly, but in terms of with
Huck Finn, which was the book I was raised on
and adored. So, it gave me a certain kind of
way into the material, a way of thinking about
it. And then Alan made the suggestion, which
was very helpful, not to follow the time scheme
of the novel, but to compress the whole thing
into terms of a period of time. And make it one
season, I mean like spring, fall, winter. I
think in Harper’s it goes two or three years.
And that really then made me structurally begin
to rethink it and gave me…maybe I might have not
had dared do that if Alan had not said to do it
in that sense. And then there’s that point
where you begin to invent certain things, and
then I knew that the character of Dill was based
on Truman Capote and that Harper had told me
that. He’d lived next door to her. I wrote a
lot of scenes for him that weren’t in the novel
which gave me a kind of sense of style for that
character of what I would imagine he might be
like as a little boy. So it was a very happy
time, you know, it was very pleasant, and then
she read it and was pleased with it.
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To Kill A Mockingbird:
The House |
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In those days you know, it was the old rigid
studio system, and once it went on the set the
writers were not asked on at all, so I wasn’t
around. But I not only – I was with the great
deal of the casting, I was there all of the
pre-production, and I did some of the screen
tests with the little boys and girls. I played
Atticus and made one great contribution, I
think, because when I went down, Alan said, “I
want you to look at the set that they’re going
to build.” We had to do it on the back lot at
Universal. And my God that designer had
designed a house that looked like Tara. I said,
“Oh no,” I said, “they lived in a house like I
lived in. That’s not that kind. We lived in a
bungalow.” So the designer argued, but then I
just said, “You’re just crazy. This is just
ridiculous.” So, they decided I was right for
some reason, and the Pasadena freeway was coming
through, and they condemned a house in Pasadena
which they moved onto the back lot and that’s
the house they used. And of course Harper said
it was exactly right, I mean that’s the kind of
house you grew up in. The only thing that’s too
bad about the back lot, we couldn’t get the
yard. Because it was the kind of yard we had
here when that house wasn’t there. There would
have been much more space around that house.
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To Kill A Mockingbird:
Robert Duvall |
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He was doing a play of mine for Neighborhood
Playhouse – Sandy Meisner was directing. And
Sandy called me and said, “You’d better get down
here and see this young man. He’s very good.”
So Bob Mulligan was in town, who directed. And
Kim Stanley was there. And Bob and his wife and
Kim and Lillian and myself went down to see this
play, and saw this very gifted young man who
played an alcoholic, but I mean an alcoholic who
committed suicide the next day after the play
was over – or that night or whatever. You heard
later on in the play that he’d done it after his
scene. And he just bowled us over. And I was
asking Sandy all about him and he said, “You
know something, that boy neither smokes nor
drinks.” And I said, “Well how in the world did
he find this?” He said, “Well, he went down to
the Bowery and watched people and just absorbed
it.” So when we were casting, you know, we
couldn’t find a Boo. And Lillian said, “What
about that boy?” which was Robert Duvall. And
that boy, they said, “Well, he’s just fine.
Let’s get him.” And that was how
he started.
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Baby the Rain Must Fall |
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Baby the Rain Must Fall.
Yeah. Well, that was kind of a hybrid. It was
neither one nor the other. I’ve seen it lately,
and I’m much happier with it then I thought I
was at the time, because it was a studio film
done on location. And so it’s not like my later
films which I personally prefer, because they
didn’t dare – they just couldn’t go whole hog.
For instance like, I never meant him to be an
Elvis Presley type, a singer. He should have
been a country western singer who’s kind of
bumming around,
not very talented. They just couldn’t, they
couldn’t handle that. They
wanted him to be, you know…Not that I wrote it
that way, but that’s how they performed it, so
it came out that way. There were many things in
it that I think was quite impressive now that I
look at it. The realities come through quite
wonderfully. We shot it in three towns: we shot
it here, and in a town called Columbus which is
not far from here. And then, no really only two
towns – then out in the country some places. We
had to build the house, because we found the
house we wanted, and it belonged to a very rich
lady in town who was a close friend of ours and
we said, “Oh, we’ll have no trouble getting that
house from her,” and they went to call on her,
and she said, “No. There’s so many pretty
houses in Wharton. Why do you want to use this
ugly old house?” and she wouldn’t let us use it.
And mother called her and she said, “No Hallie I
just don’t think I want to. I’m embarrassed.”
So they wouldn’t do it. So we duplicated the
house, only we had to build it.
Wood:: And what did Wharton think of…
Foote: Oh they just went wild. They just
stopped the town. I mean nobody did anything
for the whole three weeks we were shooting
here. It was just like a picnic. They were all
out there watching and businesses closed up and
they just went…marvelous.
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The Chase |
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They had I don’t know how many scripts. And
finally they brought in Lillian Hellman. How
many directors? I don’t know. They were
talking to Kazan, this and that one. Finally he
ended up with Arthur Penn who I think is a
gifted, wonderful man. But Arthur had not seen
the play or had not read the play and had not
read the novel and felt better not to do it. So
that they had Miss Hellman’s script, and she
said openly in public that it was a departure.
She used my play as a departure. And indeed she
did. She departed…And so they were having
trouble, and she left for whatever reason, so
Sam called me up, Sam Spiegel, and he said,
“Would you just come in these last weeks and at
least helps us? I mean at least see what you
can do about cleaning up a few things and help
us with casting and whatever, and just be
around.” And I felt a little bit like,
you know, Miriam the mother of
Moses, when she put Moses in the thing, seeing
your baby go off. But I read it. and I said,
“Well this is really not mine. I’ll just have
to be very objective about this and be as
helpful as I can technically.” And that’s
really what I did.
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Hurry Sundown |
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That’s the only thing I really have to tell you
I have nothing to do with. I had a marvelous
time, because I really enjoyed Otto Preminger,
and I took it for very superficial reasons. I
never had worked with a kind of auteur director,
and he was considered that in Europe,
particularly at the time. I never had worked
with that kind of person. And he had liked
Baby the Rain Must Fall a lot and loved
To Kill a Mockingbird, and so I thought,
“well, why not?” And I knew the novel was a
sotts (?). It was written by two
non-southerners who had come down to do a little
research and to find…and that’s how it was
really. I mean it was all right. So I hoped I
could…I did a whole version and we had a
wonderful time with him because he’s a bright,
marvelous man, but he said, “Look, this isn’t
the kind of film I make.” So we were very
friendly and he paid me a lot of money, and we
said goodbye. And then I was living in the
country in New Hampshire and the phone rang, and
it was Otto. And he’s a very dynamic man. He
said, “Don’t ask me any questions, but will you
do me a personal favor?” And I said, “Yes.” He
said, “I want your name on that film.” And I
said, “Well, Otto…” He said, “Will you just as
a favor to me?” I said, “Okay, as a favor to
you I’ll do it.” That’s
how my name got on it. I never
had seen the script. It had nothing to do with
what I wrote. I’ve never even seen the film,
but I hear it’s not very good.
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The Orphan Cycle:
Family was an Inspiration |
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But, in any case, the overall thrust of the
story is that my father had come from what was
known in those days as an aristocratic family.
His father, his great-grandfather had been the
first Lieutenant Governor of Texas, and then
when the Governor went off to the war, he was
the acting Governor for two years. And he had a
plantation here, and then he died the year the
war ended, and Reconstruction changed a great
many lives. Now my father really grew up in
great poverty. His own father’s family had been
shipping people in Galveston, and their boats
had been sunk, so they were broke. His father
died at 36, and he and his mother were separated
at the time, which was unheard of in those
days. He was raised by his grandparents. His
mother married again, a man who didn’t want him
in the house really. And he had to go to work
very early. He only went to the sixth grade in
school, and I don’t imagine the schooling was
very much. And then he met my mother, and there
was a courtship in which her family, who didn’t
approve—not just my father, for some strange
reason the father didn’t want any of the girls
to marry. But she did. They eloped in this
little town, and I still can’t figure out how
they got by with it. But I’ve heard many times
described how my Grandmother Everly (?) was—in
those days people would come out from Houston
with expensive dresses and go to one person’s
house and bring them, and the different women in
town would come. And Everly(?), she was there
with a group of women, and my grandfather
appeared and Christine Hamilton(?), who just
died last year, she was ninety-seven, said she
was one of the young women there at the time,
and that they all knew something terrible had
happened, because he wanted to see Mrs.
Brooks(?) right away, and she went out, and she
didn’t come back. So he told her the news that
the daughter had eloped. And then
reconciliation, which my birth was partly the
responsibility for that. There are things that I
made up – there is no child before me. There is
not child that died. Lots of inventions, you
know. That was just kind of the basic
framework. I eliminated characters, added some
others. The character Bessie, which puzzles
many people, did exist in a way. I mean I never
saw her, but my mother used to tell me about
this little girl that would come over who was
great company to her, and sometimes they’d talk
a lot, and sometimes not talk at all, and would
never – always call her by a different name. My
mother’s name was Hallie, and she called mother
Mary. And my mother, being quite a remarkable
woman, never questioned that. She was just a
lovely little girl, and they were dear friends,
so she would answer to Mary.
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The Orphan Cycle: 1918 |
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I think the first I wrote was 1918, which
served two purposes. I was born in 1918; I was
just an infant. I had heard so much about the
flu, and not having any precise memory of it at
all. And also having been effected by the fact
of the great change that had taken place in
America after the First World War and the kind
of…well, oversimplifying really, but there’s
this loss of innocence really I think, in a
certain sense. And asserting itself into all of
that was my father and mother’s personal
situation. They had to elope to marry. It was
when my mother became pregnant with me was when
she was forgiven, and then this house was built
for them, and they came here to live. So, those
things kind of combined into the first play, and
then out of that I began to think backwards and
forwards into different events. From 1918
I went back to their first year of marriage and
then their courtship, and then from there I went
back to before my father knew my mother and
wrote all eight of the plays. And then Robert
Galla(?), who is a friend of mine, read them and
thought there was one missing. We kind of
talked about it, and he said another aspect of
Horace’s life, and then I wrote The Widow
Claire which was the ninth. And that was
all I really wanted to write at that
time. I don’t know whether
I’ll ever do any more about them.
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Tender Mercies:
The Genesis |
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And I began to work at the H.B., which is
Herbert Berghof’s place in the Village, and I
was directing and began to come back and do the
plays there. But they don’t pay, and I needed
money which is often the case in my life. My
agent said, “You know you’re just so silly.
They love your work out in Hollywood, and you
don’t have to adapt something. Just get an idea
and tell them the idea, and they’ll pay for it,
and then pay you to write it.” I said, “I can’t
do that. I’ve never done that in my life.”
“Well you certainly can,” she said. So I
thought, “Well I’ll just get an idea, and see
what happens.” So I got interested in my
brother’s son. I had loved country music as he
did, and he played the drums. And he’d gone to
college and had finished college and had come
back, and he said, “You know I have to tell you
something. I’ll never be happy until I try
music.” So there was a pick-up band at this
college by a man named George Strait. And he
began to be the drummer, and their experiences
were much like my experiences as an actor. I
mean they’d go
for a gig, as they called it and arrive,
and they’d already hired another band and
not pay them, and so I began to think about this
as almost a parallel to my theater experiences.
So the idea was really based on a young band
like this finding themselves, and of course I
had no idea that he was going to become George
Strait and all of that hoopla.
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Tender Mercies: Bruce Beresford, director |
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Then we couldn’t find a director. Nobody wanted
to direct it. They thought…I don’t know what
they thought. So they suggested Bruce
Beresford, and I thought, “Are they out of their
minds? What in the world!” And I went to see
Breaker Morant which I thought was
wonderful, but I thought even more so, “They’re
just wasting time.” Well they sent it to him,
and Bruce said later, “I never read scripts
right away.” He said, “It’s usually two or
three months before I get around to them, but
something told me, ‘read that script.’” And he
said, “I read it,” and he called immediately and
he said, “if I can get along with the writer
I’ll do this.” So they flew him out, and he
charmed me. I don’t know what his reaction was
to me, but I sure fell for him. And he said,
“Well, I want to go down and see Texas now.” So
I took him down to see Dallas and we moseyed
around, and he said, “This is just like
Australia.” (laughs) So he felt no
problems at all, and he jumped in with both
feet. And we had a wonderful time.
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Tender Mercies:
The Score |
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Now in Tender Mercies, Bruce Beresford,
who’s a very forceful, persuasive gentleman
said, “Horton you’re absolutely crazy. You’re
just wrong. And I’m going to bring over a man
from Australia, and he’s going to write a score
for Tender Mercies and you’re going to
see how wrong you are.” And all during the rough
cut he would insert music, like Copeland, I
don’t know, somebody he thought was germane, and
I kept saying, “Bruce, trust me, trust me.”
Well he brought this dear man over from
Australia, and he did write a very fine score,
and Bruce called me up two days after, and he
said, “Horton, you’re absolutely right.” So we
had no score, except there’s source music in
Tender Mercies.
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Tender Mercies: Robert Duvall |
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He
came down to Texas well over…looking for this
accent that he finally found. He found it in
East Texas someplace. Then he came down before
the shooting, and he found a little string band,
a country western band. And he began to tour.
They didn’t know who he was, and he was playing
guitar and singing along with these boys. And
every weekend during the shooting, he’d go off
with them and play some more, sing some more.
Well in all this poking around which he does, he
ran into Lefty Frizzell's daughter. Lefty
Frizzell was of course one of the great icons of
country music. To my shame I didn’t know that.
I’ve learned all this since. I mean I’ve heard
country music all of my life, but I was not in
that sense familiar with it. And his daughter
had four unpublished songs of Lefty Frizzell’s,
which I understand some of the top country
people have been trying to get a hold of, but
she took a liking to Bob and let him use one,
and that’s the one that is done in the opening
credits which I happen to like best of all. And
then I knew he’d written a song called “God Has
Forgiven Me, Why Can’t You?” And I used the
title of that in one of the things. I didn’t
really know he could sing. Hallie said to me,
“Did you know Bob could sing?” She had heard
him sing “Wings of a Dove,” so that night that I
had read him, after he finished reading, he and
Gayle sang “Wings of a Dove.” So naturally I
felt that would have to be in there. Actually,
the integration of the music as it is is pretty
much what happened within an editing room, you
know. When we didn’t have a score, a newer
score wouldn’t work, then we began to use this.
I thought it was brilliantly done, myself.
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Tender Mercies:
Baptism |
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I think that so often people are embarrassed by
it. They think they have to comment on it and
let you know that...and I did try not to be
judgmental
and to show it as near as I could
remember, because my God, particularly in the
South you can’t deny that this kind of religion
has an enormous impact. Now you can argue about
the impact, but it’s warp and woof of their
lives in a way that New York is just no
longer…you know their Baptist Church out there
is just packed, most week nights as well as all
day Sunday. And it’s in this town—we now have
two big Baptist Churches—three; the Mexicans
have their own Baptist Church. And then
countless black Baptist Churches, I mean it’s
just a ring of the county. I mean I guess there
are 25 black Baptist Churches in the county. So
you just can’t say that…and the thing that was
interesting to me was the response to the
baptism. Because, particularly when it was
first shown, I would go into an audience in the
East and they would just go: (makes
whispering noises) “Did you see that,
what’s that?” They’d never seen that
before—somebody dipped, and they really didn’t
know what it was about. And it was really like
watching a curious, exotic right of some kind.
(CUT WITH ABOVE) Well, as a child, you know, it
always puzzled me, this business of being
baptized and what it was supposed to do for
you. And I must tell you, I had a rather
cynical attitude. I didn’t ever really see many
changes you know, but it was a bemused thing. I
think there are changes that do happen in
people. I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t
people that have deep religious conversions and
convictions, but I don’t think just the act of
baptism is really going to do it for you, do
you?
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Writing Techniques: Fact or Fiction |
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Cousin George is based on someone – the idea is
based on someone. I can’t tell you who. You
pick them up all over. I mean for instance, in
Bountiful the line Mrs. Watts says, “I
admire my husband, but I never loved him.” Well,
I heard somebody in the East say that. I don’t
know anybody down here who ever said that, but
other parts of it were from here. So I put that
in. And the line from Tender Mercies
where a woman says to Mac Sledge, “Were you
really ever Mac Sledge?” That was told to me by
a very well-known actress who had that
experience, and I used it for Mac Sledge. So,
you pick things up along the way. You don’t
know ever what’s the source of them. It’s like
a montage, or it’s like a collage more than a
montage. Collage, in that everything finally
goes towards creating this, you hope, this new
thing. Because you’re not really reporting. It
takes another dimension, I think, I hope. And
that’s why I always worry here, because there
were certain things. I was a little careless
when I first began writing, and without knowing
it, I would phonetically approximate names.
Like my cousin said, “Oh you think you’re so
smart. You called Doctor Green, Doctor White.
That doesn’t fool anybody.” Little things like
that that you have to be very careful about,
because they think they’re unraveling a great
mystery.
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The Influence of Music |
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I have very strong feelings about music. If you
notice in the films I use and insist on
using—when I’m in control, I’m not always in
control—on specific sources for the music. I
don’t really like scoring very much. Sometimes
it’s there. It’s there in Bountiful at
times, and I think very effective, but I resist
and resent most film scores, because I think
they’re manipulative. They’re there when
they’re not necessary to be there. So in that
sense, particularly in Valentines Day and
1918 and Courtship are unusual in
the sense that the music is part of the life.
Well you couldn’t help…I mean for instance,
sitting on that porch out there, my father loved
to sing. He wouldn’t have a particularly good
voice, but he had a fairly good voice, and my
mother—he saved music from the time he was 17
on, and they’d play these old popular songs in
here. Or down there, back there on that road
was what they called “The Flats” when I was
growing up, and there were all the black
barbecue places and the juke joints were all
down in there. Well you’d hear that music all
night long, and then the Methodist Church wasn’t
too far over, and you’d hear that music, and
then way off you could hear a Mexican dance
maybe some night. So actually I have this
theory...all these simultaneous sounds was
always very appealing to me, because some nights
you’d sit out here and you’d just be flooded by
music. And then when my younger brother was
growing up, he was a great devotee of
country-western music, so we had that all the
time. That was another sound that was
permeating. And then my mother often played
classical music, so I would hear that. And I
had an aunt, who was my father’s sister, who
also had no money, although she was raised by
her mother and step-father, and she’s Lily Dale,
and she was not untalented. She was never
trained as a musician, but she adored music and
went to all the great concerts in Houston, so I
heard about music a great deal.
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