Conversation with Horton Foote and John Guare

July 12, 2001

GUARE: Well, see, that�s the sad thing. I remember I once went to Ring Lardner, Jr.�s house, and he had a row of leather bound scripts�a long row, I mean, a lifetime�s work. I said, "What are those?" He said, "Oh, those are unproduced screenplays." So, how many unproduced screenplays do you have?

FOOTE: Well, mine are not leather bound. I�m happy they weren�t produced, to tell you the truth.

GUARE: Really?

FOOTE: Because I did very little�I hate this term, "writer for hire," which is the great Hollywood term. On all these scripts, I was a writer for hire. And I learned fast that, if I really wanted to function as a writer, I�d better learn to find a way to get in there as a producer. I learned a very valuable lesson from To Kill a Mockingbird, which was my second screenplay. Gregory Peck, God bless him, had in his contract that Alan Pakula and Bob Mulligan had the final cut. Universal hated the film and was going to rip it apart, but thanks to that clause in Peck�s contract, the picture was saved�.

GUARE: What was your first film?

FOOTE: A film called Storm Fear. It was a very low, low, low budget film with Cornel Wilde and his wife.

GUARE: Jean Wallace.

FOOTE: Jean Wallace. But the most extraordinary thing about it was, Cornel was a very smart man in many ways, and not a bad director. But he wanted to make a cheap film. So I said, "There are two actors who I think are wonderful, and they�re blacklisted. And if you�ve got the courage to stand up to the blacklist, you can get them cheap."

GUARE: Who were they?

FOOTE: Steven Hill and Lee Grant.

GUARE: And did he hire them?

FOOTE: Oh, yes.

GUARE: Really�.

FOOTE: Yeah. Both of them are wonderful in the film.

GUARE: Was it an original screenplay?

FOOTE: No, an adaptation.

GUARE: Of your own work?

FOOTE: No, no. And a strange terrain for me. It was in the Catskill Mountains, or someplace like that.

GUARE: Storm Fear.

FOOTE: Then To Kill a Mockingbird came along.

GUARE: How did you get that picture?

FOOTE: Well, I�d worked with�

GUARE: You�d worked with Robert Mulligan.

FOOTE: Yes, he directed some of my television plays. Alan [Pakula] had wanted to do The Chase very badly. But the day he called up to say he wanted to buy it, Sam Spiegel bought it.

GUARE: And he did do it, very badly.

FOOTE: I think so.

ON WRITING: I have a question about The Chase, because the novel has an unusual copyright. The first printing of the novel is a number of years after the copyright.

FOOTE: I wrote the novel after the play.

GUARE: But was it published along with the movie as a novelization?

FOOTE: No, he bought the novel, and two of my short plays. He kind of wanted to do an overall tapestry� which then went far astray.

GUARE: Did you like working with Sam Spiegel?

FOOTE: Well, I liked him because I found him amusing and I admired his films, but I was horrified at the end. I just felt he had no idea of what my story was all about.

GUARE: I worked with Sam Spiegel. He bought a play of mine at one period.

ON WRITING: Which one?

GUARE: Landscape of the Body, in 1978.

FOOTE: I love that play, by the way.

GUARE: Well, he loved it. He said, "It made me cry. It moved me. And it�s very unusual for me to be moved." And the butler, said to me�James, his Irish butler said�"I haven�t seen the master be so excited since he and Miss Hellman were pulling The Chase apart." Oh, chills went over me.

FOOTE: Ms. Hellman said she used my play as a departure.

GUARE: And she did. And she was most successful. Were you friends, personally?

FOOTE: No, I was scared to death of her.

ON WRITING: Why?

FOOTE: Because she was�

GUARE: She was Lillian Hellman.

FOOTE: �a tough lady. And then they finally brought me in.

GUARE: They did?

FOOTE: I felt like the mother of Moses, you know? Being hired by the Pharaoh�s daughter to be the nursemaid of her own son. It was all done when I came aboard. There was nothing much I could do but fiddle a little bit. And one thing I did do, I had a sequence chopping cotton�Lillian Hellman had walked away, through with it�and Sam was talking to her in New York. He held up the phone so I could hear, and she was in a rage. She said, "And I�ll tell you this. They may chop cotton in Texas, but in Louisiana we pick cotton." And I said, "Well, that�s what she knows." You have to chop cotton before you can pick it. You chop it to get the weeds out.

GUARE: I hope Sam paid you well to rewrite your script.

FOOTE: He did. And when I went to London to work on the film with Otto Preminger, he let me stay in his apartment for two weeks. It scared me to death, because I had my children, and all these Renoirs, Picassos and God knows what surrounding us.

ON WRITING: What was Preminger like to work with? Some people speak of Preminger very warmly, but I always had the impression that he was kind of a monster.

FOOTE: Did you work with him, John?

GUARE: Otto Preminger? He wanted to buy a play of mine once, and we met a few times. I liked him, personally, very much. I thought he was very charming. I went to his house once, and I wanted to get ice for a drink. I said, "Do you have any ice?" He said, "Yes, push the Renoir." I said, "What?" He said, "Push the Renoir." And�I think it was the Renoir�I pushed the frame, and there was a freezer behind the picture. But I�d seen his movies that he was making around that time, and they were insane. Strangely, I thought his movies were insane, and he was quite surprisingly a man of great charm.

FOOTE: I worked with him for six months on Hurry Sundown. And he was wonderful. But finally, we didn�t agree about the screenplay so he hired another writer. Then he called me up about six months later and said, "I want you to do me a favor." He had paid me a lot of money�and I said, "What is it?" He said, "I want you to put your name on the film." I said, "I haven�t even seen the film." And I have never seen it, to this day. I hear it�s pretty rough. But I figured he paid me all this money, I�d do it. Maybe two lines of mine are in there, but I don�t think so.

GUARE: But he wanted your imprimatur on the film.

FOOTE: I guess so, I don�t know. But I�ve had some happy film experiences. I know you have, John, because Atlantic City is a beautiful, wonderful film.

GUARE: Well, I�ve only had three films made. In 1970 I worked with Milos Forman on his first American film, Taking Off, which is now a lost film. I mean, it sort of doesn�t exist.

FOOTE: They don�t have the print?

GUARE: I don�t know where it is. Lew Wasserman hated the film, and there were copyright problems. The film had scenes of people auditioning for a show running through it, and some of it was quite cruel. And after the film was made, Milos, I don�t believe, had gotten signed releases from people. The picture was shown, but then�it was difficult. But Atlantic City and Six Degrees. And the others have been on the Ring Lardner shelf.

FOOTE: Well, Six Degrees was a happy time. I thought they did an awfully good job with it.

GUARE: The three films I�ve had made have all been wonderful experiences. And each one wonderful in a way that made me realize they were also very unusual. They were three very rare times.

FOOTE: I thought Six Degrees, in many ways, was the most successful in the sense that, without being boxed in, it retained the flavor of the theater production.

GUARE: Well, that was because I had in my contract�for some reason, since Lincoln Center does not take subsidiary rights to original work they produced�

FOOTE: They do not?

GUARE: They do not. They have no share. They believe that if it�s a not-for-profit theater, the writer should retain all the rights.

FOOTE: That�s very unusual.

GUARE: Very unusual. So because of that, I had, in my contract, the right to choose the director. And I used that right, and I interviewed a number of directors. It was very interesting, because they were terrific directors, they were wonderful. I would go to them very clinically and say, "Describe the film you�ll make of my play." And one director said, "I really feel that the way it jumps around in time is too confusing. An audience won�t be able to follow that. I want to straighten out the chronology�"

FOOTE: I�ll bet he did.

GUARE: "I want to show this poor black kid growing up in the ghetto, and how he moves on." I said, "But he doesn�t meet our people, then, till very late in his life." He said, "Yes, that would just be a small part of his life." I said, "Oh� Thank you." And then another director�a very good director�said, "I love your play, but," he said, "I think the lead character in your play is the detective." I said, "But that�s the smallest part of the play. It�s like two lines." He said, "Yes, but I want to make him a black detective, who is this authentic African-American man going out to find a false African-American man." And I said, "That�s a wonderful story, and you must make that�but not on my dime." And then I met Fred [Schepisi], who said, "I just love the way the story�s told, and I want Stockard Channing in it." And so I knew Fred was the right one to do it.

FOOTE: Well, that�s amazing. Because being Australian, I would have thought he�d have little�but then, I had the same thing with Bruce Beresford.

GUARE: On?

FOOTE: Tender Mercies.

GUARE: How did he come to that? Had you written it for�

FOOTE: No, I hadn�t written it for anybody. Soon after I�d written it, I felt it was right for Bob [Duvall]. And he had agreed to do it. We had one well-known director but Duvall didn�t want him, so he was out. And everybody else in town turned it down. Breaker Morant had come out, and I loved the film. But I thought, my God, this is an Australian director. But they didn�t listen to me. And Bruce�s story is, he got so excited that he thought it was going to be grabbed up. He ran to the phone after he�d read only half of it and said he wanted to do it. He said, "If I can get along with the writer, I want to do it." So they flew him over. We got along well. And I think he had a wonderful feeling about it.

GUARE: Louis Malle once said, "A confident director loves to have the writer on the set." You know, when we were doing Atlantic City, the producer said, "What is the writer doing on the set?" And Louis said, "If you have someone here for the hair, why would you not have someone here for the words?"

FOOTE: I was on the set every frame of Tender Mercies. And I was co-producer, too, which got me into the editing room.

GUARE: Just to talk about writers being producers, what exactly does that give you? What�s the difference between just being a writer and a writer/producer?

FOOTE: I think if you�re just a writer, then you have no way of being part of the mechanism. I mean it�s, again, writer for hire. And they soon let you know that they own the rights. Which I think is the most tragic thing about a screenwriter in that situation.

GUARE: Isn�t Tennessee Williams one of the only writers who holds the copyright on a movie? I believe that was something Audrey Wood got, that the copyright to the film, A Streetcar Named Desire reverted to Tennessee.

ON WRITING: Audrey Wood was his agent?

GUARE: Audrey Wood was his first agent.

FOOTE: Lucy Krohl got me the copyrights to my screenplays twice�she got it on The Chase, and on Traveling Lady, on�

GUARE: �Baby the Rain Must Fall.

FOOTE: The copyrights have returned to me.

GUARE: Well, see, that�s what a writer needs, a good smart agent.

FOOTE: When we were doing live television�and we were paid $1,000 for a television play, I thought we were rich�I owned all of my copyrights.

GUARE: They always talk about the Golden Age of Television in the �50s. When I was 14 years old in Queens, seeing A Young Lady of Property on TV affected me profoundly. I would read about all these new writers that were coming�Chayefsky, and Foote and Vidal�and I wondered, did you all know each other? Was there a collegiality?

FOOTE: Well, yes, there was, actually. Not from Gore [Vidal] so much, because he was in and out a lot. But Paddy and I became very close. And Tad Mosel, Robert Alan Arthur�. Nash came in a little later, [N.] Richard Nash�

GUARE: �Who wrote The Rainmaker. And J.P. Miller?

FOOTE: He came in a little later.

GUARE: Days of Wine and Roses. I remember it so vividly, with Piper Laurie. And Cliff Robertson?

FOOTE: Yes, Cliff Robertson. On Playhouse 90.

GUARE: At that time, was there any stigma against writing TV plays?

FOOTE: No. You see, it was so new. And actually, it was very near theater, because you couldn�t stop it. Dorothy Gish went up on her lines in one play of mine, and it seemed like a year and a half�it was only probably three seconds�but you couldn�t prompt her. So it was like the theater in that sense, you couldn�t edit it, you just had to go.

GUARE: Yeah.

FOOTE: I was really writing one-act plays. And Paddy always, from the beginning, felt he wanted to go more towards cinema. I fought it like everything, because I didn�t want television to leave New York. And Lillian Gish kept saying to Fred Coe�she felt he was a pioneer, like Griffith�"Hollywood�s going to take it away from you. Be careful."

ON WRITING: Fred Coe?

GUARE: The first great TV producer of Philco Playhouse.

FOOTE: He had no money�but he could get writers for $1,000 a script. He was the one who featured the writers instead of the actors. He couldn�t afford big stars, so he ended up making stars out of the writers.

GUARE: How much time was there in those days from the time they would receive a script, that it would end up on the air?

FOOTE: Very quickly. Because he had this stable of writers. You had to come in and tell him something, which I hated and never did. I always wrote mine first. And he used to laugh about Trip to Bountiful because I came in and said, "I have this play about an old woman who wants to go home." And he said, "That�s okay, that�s fine." And two days later I brought it in, because I had already written it. This going in and talking a script out would just kill it for me.

GUARE: But did he want writers, TV writers, to all work together? Did he want them to write in an office?

FOOTE: Oh, no. He was very free that way, and very supportive. I think he brought in some of the writers and kind of worked with structure and all those things. But at least with the people I know of�Ted, and myself, and Paddy�it was always a done deal, you might say. Some things might have changed at rehearsal, as can happen�.

GUARE: And how long a rehearsal would they have?

FOOTE: My memory, John, was about two weeks. It was only an hour, so it was like working a one-act play. You felt you had plenty of time. And then the air days were exciting, because there were two days of those. The first was the rough setting up of everything, and the next day you had a couple of run-throughs, full-throttle. And then you were on the air.

GUARE: And they�d be reviewed the next morning?

FOOTE: Yeah. There was a TV critic named John Crosby for the Herald Tribune, and Jack Gould was the critic for The New York Times.

GUARE: I remember him, yes. And what happened when all this moved out to California?

FOOTE: It just vanished. I did an adaptation of a Faulkner work called Old Man, which I lately did again. But this was the early one�with Geraldine Page and Sterling Hayden�it takes place on the Mississippi River during a flood. And we had to do it in the studio. The legend is�and I heard people say it�s true�we cracked the foundation of the CBS building, we brought in so much water.

GUARE: Really.

FOOTE: And John Frankenheimer was very in favor of live television, but in the dress rehearsal, he said, "Horton, we can�t do it live. I�ve got to shoot it out of sequence, or we�ll drown the actors." And we did, and put it on tape, and that was kind of the death knell of live television, which I felt very badly about.

GUARE: So you were the one who killed live television. I wondered who�.

FOOTE: John Frankenheimer did.

GUARE: And then it just moved to California.

FOOTE: Because the minute you�re going towards film, that�s where the soundstages were.

GUARE: It�s so funny how industries can just stop. Like the movie industry in Italy�or England�just doesn�t exist as it had up to the end of the �60s.

FOOTE: Well, for myself, it was a godsend. Because, you know, you can�t sit down and write a one-act play every three weeks. All my one-act plays were gone. I was saved from embarrassing myself, because I didn�t have many more left in me.

GUARE: But you never moved out to California.

FOOTE: Oh, no. I never, never, never, never. I saw too many examples�and again, I sound like I�m trashing California, I think it�s a beautiful place. And I know much good work is done out there. I think it�s a question of temperament. It�s just not something that I can do.

GUARE: Why did you pick New Hampshire, instead of going back to Texas?

FOOTE: Because it was at a time in the theater when things were changing. And I was interested in the change, but felt very apart from it. And I just wanted to get quiet and write.

GUARE: But that�s what, I must say, is always amazing about you�you always held on to your center. You never bowed to fashion.

FOOTE: But this is not a virtue, it�s a disease, it�s an obsession. I�m not sure it�s a virtue. I�ve been advised many times to forget it, but it�s a compulsion. But I�ve discovered some of those same compulsions in your work.

GUARE: Like what?

FOOTE: Well, people who live in and want to get out of provincial towns.

GUARE: Just wanting to escape.

FOOTE: Suburbs. See, I write about a small town, you write about a suburb.

GUARE: Queens doesn�t even qualify as a suburb. No, it�s not even a suburb. There were communities out in Queens like Jackson Heights, and Forest Hills, and Kew Gardens and Sunnyside that had started as these utopian communities in the �20s.

FOOTE: I remember Jackson Heights very well. We used to go out there.

GUARE: And when we moved there, it was countryside, and there was a golf club.

FOOTE: Very genteel.

GUARE: Very genteel. But it was a place that was always a stepping-stone, a rung on a ladder. You lived there temporarily, till you found your true home in Westchester. And if that didn�t happen, then you were just there. So that�s always been my thing, how do you get where you want to be when you�re already there?

FOOTE: That�s the theme of this new play, Chaucer in Rome.

GUARE: And also, when I grew up, my uncle had been casting director at MGM from 1934 to �56. He discovered people. He, for instance, found Jimmy Stewart and managed his career. He�s also the man who�s famous for saying about Fred Astaire�s screen test, "Balding, can�t act, can�t sing, can dance a little." But he was a true monster. And the bitterness that it caused in our family, and the nervousness that it caused in our family was that, somehow, work had nothing to do with anything. It was all random chance, and you were discovered, and success was something that was conferred on you by luck. My father worked on Wall Street and had not one, not two, but three horrible events happen to him professionally. One was that his boss was sent to Sing Sing for embezzling the stock exchange pension fund. And it wasn�t until Lake Hollywood that I was able to even begin to have all these things accessible to me as a writer. We have all these events in our lives. But what I admire about Horton is that the events of his generation, the generation before and the generation before that, are so accessible to him in immediate terms. And that seems to be one of the great problems of a writer is, we have these great events happen to us. But how do we become accessible to those events in our lives in a way that we can write about them? Just because you�ve lived through something doesn�t mean that, "therefore, now I will write about it."

FOOTE: No, it�s true. You wrote an essay called, The War Against the Kitchen Sink, and really, my feelings were a little hurt because I�ve been known, at one time in my career, as the "kitchen sink style."

GUARE: Well, Arnold Wesker, the British playwright said, "I take issue with your essay. I�ve just seen Lake Hollywood, and you should be proud to be a kitchen sink writer."

ON WRITING: What is a kitchen sink writer?

GUARE: A kitchen sink writer writes a sloppy and sentimental play, and then hopes that attention to surface detail�like the presence of real running water�will give the play the appearance of reality.

FOOTE: Yeah, absolutely.

GUARE: And people say, "Well, it�s so real." So it�s mistaking surface reality for an inner reality.

FOOTE: And at the end of that essay is a very beautiful paragraph about transcending, and the power of the word. But my whole point was, in getting to know John�s plays better, I find little footprints in all the plays that say, this is John Guare. For instance, he often writes little songs all through the plays. Then there�s someone who wants to be a songwriter�

GUARE: Who wants to be an artist, but doesn�t have any of the gifts for it. What do you do with the size of your dreams, and the reality of the size of your gifts? So it�s about the collision between our�

FOOTE: �Reality and fantasy.

GUARE: Yes. Our dreams, our needs, and what we can bring to those needs. I think that�s what Six Degrees is about, and what Chaucer is about. But what I love about Horton�s work is that his people just need. They have these immense needs that they�re not even sure what they are.

FOOTE: I�ve just seen Chaucer in Rome, which I thought was a wonderful play. And I thought, somewhere in here was something we share in common. It�s so interesting that my characters wouldn�t know a Picasso if they met it in the middle of the road, while John�s characters are intellectually very alert and they�re very articulate�but underneath, there are the same desires, frustrations, unhappiness�. I think of these two long monologues where this mother and father, a heartbreaking couple, reveal their fears and obsessions. This whole section�which was just absolutely stunning to me�you couldn�t map it out. You couldn�t. I sat there and thought, my God, what an inspiration this is. How impossible to have sat down and conceived this. I knew it just came to him.

GUARE: The play was written very quickly. In Rome there are 80 million people coming, in one year, to confess their sins. That�s an awful lot of sin, and I wanted to write about that. And I didn�t know what those monologues were going to be, or who was going to say them, until I came to it.

ON WRITING: Did you write the monologues before you knew which characters were going to say them?

GUARE: No, the characters came to me at the time I needed the confessions in the play. Then I realized it would be his parents. I write about my family. I write about my parents, to the point where it drives me crazy.

FOOTE: This is what I�ve discovered�not that it drives you crazy, but I�ve discovered them as a point of reference all through your work.

GUARE: I wrote Lake Hollywood, which is about�I mean, again, material becoming accessible to you. My father went to New Hampshire once to meet my mother�s family, just once. And it wasn�t till the end of my mother�s life that I learned that what had happened was, she brought my father up to meet her family. And she said, "Whatever you do, don�t give Uncle Martin a drink. That�s the only thing I ask of you." And my father gave Uncle Martin a drink, and Uncle Martin was dead by the end of the weekend. And my father never went there again. Well, suddenly that became one of those gnawing voices. There�s an interview in The New York Times where I said, "This is a play about a family secret."

ON WRITING: Chaucer in Rome?

GUARE: No, no, Lake Hollywood, my Horton Foote play.

FOOTE: Which you�ve redone since it was done at The Signature, right?

GUARE: Yes, we did it at The Guthrie. And so in The Times interview, I said that it was a play about a family secret. And I got an urgent letter from a distant cousin of mine saying, "Do you know about the suicide of your father�s brother that your father caused?" Now, I had no idea. Everybody�s dead who can explain�it was in 1924�why this young man committed suicide. I have no idea. However, it�s churning there, to say, "Why would�." And reading Horton�s The Orphan�s Home Cycle, it�s brought that up in some way: How do I get to those parts? How do we get to those gnawing parts of our lives, the parts that like rats gnaw at us at two or three in the morning. And I�m sure Horton is not saying, "This is what happened." It�s his imagining his way into it to explain it.

FOOTE: That�s right.

ON WRITING: In terms of how you approach a story, Horton, it�s almost as if you introduce these characters, and it�s like, "Let�s just hang around with them a while�." And a story kind of just comes out of hanging around with them.

GUARE: But I think you�ll find�without leaping into Horton�s answer�is that the story is waiting. By page three we know the situation that these people are in. What is most artful about Horton�s work, I believe, is its seeming artlessness. That we�re just hanging around these people, and they�re just talking. And suddenly we realize that an extraordinarily powerful human event is about to take place.

FOOTE: Maybe John wouldn�t agree with this, but, see, I think the style of your writing is given to you, somehow, like the color of your eyes. I mean, I could pick up a John Guare script and know who John Guare is. And I think even a writer who is not so idiosyncratic, like Katherine Anne Porter, has an inescapable voice. I just think it�s inherent in the nature, and I don�t know that we control it any more than I think we control what we want to write about.

GUARE: But how you control your subject is where craft comes in.

FOOTE: Absolutely.

ON WRITING: John, when I watch your plays, it�s almost as if they�re this wonderful onslaught of ideas. Is that something you start with?

GUARE: When you say it�s a play filled with ideas, it�s a play about people who are filled with ideas. What you�re trying to show is always the energy�whether it�s high or low�the interior energy. What�s going on inside that person�s mind. And so it�s not that I�m filling the play with tons of ideas, or with a myriad of ideas. It�s about people who have all these ideas.

FOOTE: Or passion.

GUARE: Or who have a passion for these ideas in this play. I mean, Lake Hollywood is a play about people who are just trying to hold their lives together, just trying to stay alive. Who were thrilled that World War II might happen, because it would be some rescue out of the Depression. And people who were still living in�as my mother was�still living in the shadow of 1918 with the deaths it brought from influenza.

FOOTE: And in The House of Blue Leaves it�s about poor, pitiful actors�.

GUARE: The plays are about the energy that people use to get through their lives. A director friend, Mel Shapiro, said, "You have to realize, there�s no subtext in John�s plays. They�re in such a state of panic that they say exactly what�s going on."

FOOTE: But there is subtext in your plays.

GUARE: I hope so. But it seems funny, I think, in Horton�s plays�this is an interview where I�m speaking for myself, then I speak for Horton. But it�s such a joy to talk about Horton�s work. Because I think that, my plays are mostly urban plays where people are by themselves, people can lock themselves off. But Horton�s people all live very public lives, in this small town. There are no secrets. Everybody�s on display to everyone else.

FOOTE: Yeah. And they�re really very verbal. Sometimes they talk too much.

GUARE: There was a play of Horton�s called A Young Lady of Property, that I saw on television in 1952 or �53.

FOOTE: 1952.

GUARE: It was about these two girls on a porch talking about movie stars. Now, I didn�t know that you could write about movie stars with such passion. I thought I was the only one who thought about them. I didn�t know that you could use those aspects of daily life as instruments of passion.

ON WRITING: What kinds of things have you learned from other writers?

GUARE: You don�t know the things you learn, you don�t know. Writers are always opening doors for other writers. That�s the importance of the writer�s voice. The difference between being a writer for hire�which means suffocating your voice�

FOOTE: Sublimating it.

GUARE: Sublimating it and suffocating it, yes. Writing in the corporate voice. Imagine the liberating effect that Tennessee Williams had on language in the theater�on a range of neurosis and madness. It opened up areas that hadn�t been dealt with before. It allowed you to say, "Oh, I understand that world." Every writer�s voice can expand another writer�s breadth of vision.

FOOTE: It can be exhilarating. Now, when I saw Chaucer, I almost didn�t sleep the whole night long. I really felt a celebration, I was glad that I was a writer.

ON WRITING: Is it difficult to maintain your voice when you�re doing an adaptation of someone else�s work? For instance, Horton, how did you find your way into To Kill A Mockingbird?

FOOTE: The thing that was helpful to me was I had read a review by R.P. Blackmur, who was a very esoteric critic and great connoisseur of Southern literature. Mockingbird didn�t get universally good notices as a novel, it had some people that didn�t care for it. But the title of Blackmur�s review was Scout in the Wilderness. And he compared it with Huck Finn. And it opened a door for me. Whatever R.P. Blackmur meant, I suddenly became very interested in the character of Scout and in investigating that. And then, the other thing was that Harper [Lee] told me that the little boy next door was based on Truman Capote, who visited every summer there with her. Well, that just made me go wild, you know?

GUARE: Did you know Truman?

FOOTE: No, never did. Never did. But Harper was very close to him.

ON WRITING: Do you think it�s gotten more difficult for writers to keep themselves apart from, as John said, the corporate voice?

FOOTE: I don�t think this is a particularly new problem. I think it happened in silent films, and it certainly happened on Broadway when I came to it. I�ve often told this�and I won�t tell you who said it, but it was a very well-known playwright who was very kind and had me down to his place because he was afraid that I might be seduced by Hollywood. He said he had two rules for writing, the first rule was, "Never write a play about anyone you wouldn�t entertain in your own living room." And the second one�and I found some wisdom in this one�was, "Never watch the actors, watch the audience." I couldn�t live by the first, because I wouldn�t be able to write about half the characters in my plays. But people were looking for formulas then in theater, just like they�re doing in movies. And, you know, how many plays do we remember? Tennessee and Arthur [Miller] are very blessed because they were from that period and have survived, right? When I was coming along, I would have murdered to play the lead in Winterset, by Maxwell Anderson. And you never even hear of it anymore.

GUARE: Have you tried to read it recently?

FOOTE: No.

GUARE: We�ve lost the gift. The magic in those plays�which must have been considerable�does not�

FOOTE: �Transfer.

GUARE: �Does not transfer to today.

FOOTE: I played it in summer stock, finally.

GUARE: Leo.

FOOTE: Leo, yeah.

ON WRITING: What gets lost?

GUARE: It�s in blank verse.

FOOTE: An attempt at blank verse, really.

GUARE: And the size of its ambition�

FOOTE: He was enormously ambitious as a writer. He turned down all kinds of offers to stay with the theater.

GUARE: But I think the lesson of Horton is, you are one of the few writers I know who straddles the world of movies and theater without any loss of integrity.

FOOTE: Well, the movies came about because�my first lesson was with Tomorrow, I was very much a part of the production. I was on the set all the time, very welcome in the editing room. And we did it for $400,000. And I learned a lesson�many lessons�of economy. But I liked being a part of it so much, that�s what I decided to do from then on if I could do it. And I did about five films that way. Bountiful we did for $1,800,000. But we were so poor and so broke that the last day of shooting we had to finish, because we were absolutely out of money. And in the film, if you remember, Geraldine Page is at one of the bus stations and she goes to sleep on the bench. Well, Geraldine had started to work early that morning, and it was then about 10 or 11 at night. And she literally fell sound asleep. So they used it, they just woke her up.

GUARE: That�s economy. That�s method acting, and that�s economy.

FOOTE: And that�s also because a very great actress was willing to do it. She did it for peanuts, and made it possible. But that�s what you need, you need to find a way�and this I can�t address�but you need to find a way that is really a collaboration between actors and writers and directors and people on the set, so you get these costs down. And then you can do films that you feel good about.

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