I think I was about six years old and a little boy my age was living here with.

So he invited me over to play with him, and my mother never let me out of the yard of my grandmother's yard.

Either one I could play, but but for some reason she decided it was a good thing for me to learn how to get around, and I had a lovely time with him.

We played games and all, and I was so proud of myself.

And I came back through these dirt roads and I don't know what ever got into my head, but I started running and I ran as fast as I could to home and my mother saw me and I was all covered with dust and perspiring and sweating and she said, what in the world has gotten into you?

What's happened?

I said, oh, mother, you never know.

I said, I could have been killed.

She said, what happened?

I said, well, I was just coming through the cotton field, and all of a sudden I saw a mad dog and the mad dog was coming right toward me as fast as it could.

And just before he got me, Mr. Pittman, who was the town marshal, came along on his horse, and he reached down and grabbed me and put me on the horse.

And saved my life and my mother was half hysterical and calming me down.

And when my father came home, that night, she told him all about it.

And the next morning he went downtown and Mr. Pittman came along and he said, Pitt, I want to thank you for saving my boy's life.

And Pittman said, how's that, Hal?

He said, minute.

He said that.

He said, I knew I'd been rooked and he said, I don't know how he got out of it, but he came home and they never let me forget it.

You wrote your first story.

Yeah, I wrote my first story.

There's a lot of people in the arts who should be a lot more famous than they are, but when you look at the list of 20th century playwrights, I don't think he has any superiors.

The most interesting thing about Horton's plays is that he doesn't write characters he writes people.

His writing is almost like poetry.

I mean, it's not something you would want to be loose with.

It's very musical.

It's very beautiful.

It's like, you know how you can get a song in your head and you can listen to that same song from maybe ever.

That's the way his plays are.

Anything of Horton I like doing.

It's the kind of thing you can't force his material as an actor.

You can't push because it's very kind of delicate.

Things don't appear to be happening, but in fact, they're constantly are.

And the most subtle expression is could be devastating.

He has a capacity to have such a clear, honest eye, about human beings a their foibles.

But he loves them anyway.

Horton was as honest a playwright in terms of the truth of the human condition than anybody that I know of.

You'll hear lots of people talk about how what a gentle, kind, sweet person Horton was.

And he was all of those things.

But Horton Foote was one of the fiercest individuals I know through just sheer will made these human beings come to life in the way he saw them, not by the way he thought people wanted to see them.

Horton's brain was as steel trap and he knew exactly what he wanted and how it should be.

He worked in theater.

He worked in film, and he worked in television.

So everybody sort of sees part of his career, but they don't see the whole thing.

After To Kill a mockingbird, people mostly knew To Kill a mockingbird, but they didn't know Horton Foote collaborating with him.

I guess to me is like collaborating with any writer, director whose work I admire and enjoy.

He just happens to be my father.

Horton I think, is way up there in the pantheon of American playwrights.

Way, way up there.

You know, he's America's Chekhov.

You know, and I don't I'm not the only person to say that the details equal the universal.

So subtle, so beautiful.

You're not going to hit you over the head with it.

And it's up to you to kind of.

Feel it.

Some of our greatest writers and the greatest writers in the world have actually been writers who write about a specific place.

The trick is to be able to write about themes that appeal to all of us issues, and conflicts that all of us have and find it in that place.

And Horton certainly did that.

Once you understand that, understand that.

Here's a reall, really powerful, important American writer.

We try to get back at least twice a year.

It's not always so easy because we were in New York for 3 or 4 months, and even before that.

And California.

So.

But my father said to me, I want to in Texas and start writing.

And I thought, you know what?

We've got the time he should do it.

Good night.

Lily Dale.

Good night, young man.

Now, you take care of yourself.

They leave.

She did look pretty, didn't she?

Yes.

He exits.

I told him that whatever you said to him, just now, you were delirious.

I wasn't delirious, mama.

I don't think you understand him.

Is all.

He's been good to me and your sister.

He's gruff.

I know, and doesn't talk a lot.

I'm leaving tomorrow.

Mama, how are you leaving?

Honey, when you're so weak, you can't even make it cause it's two in the morning.

The orphans home cycle is a series of nine plays, which is an attempt at writing about my family.

The different generations.

It begins with the death of my father's father and ends with the death of my mother's father.

They got the title from the poem of Marianne Moore's and the line was the world is an orphan's home.

And from my father's point of view, that was pretty much so, because he always felt his, his, his father had had died when he was 5 or 6.

So that my father only went to the sixth grade in school and went began to work around town, picking up whiskey bottles and getting the money to fish and sell the fish.

And Carella, I know when we first entered into this, he was absolutely terrified because I think part of him thought, how in the world am I ever going to distill this sort of nine play saga into nine hours?

Has a cut?

I think he'd be thrilled to see these plays because it's never really been done like this in an American way.

It was never a question to me that he would be this active, and that's the one thing I love about him.

He's never he doesn't it doesn't occur to him the word ageism doesn't occur to him.

You know, it's like because he he can't not write.

Do you have any objections to that plan?

No.

I guess not.

But promise me you'll wait at least a year.

Will you keep that promise?

I learned so much about storytelling, writing, acting and directing from Horton and listening to him.

Then I knew what an innovator he was.

What?

That was the pictures.

Did you see him?

Beautiful.

Aren't they beautiful?

Oh, my God, let's show them to your dad and that's the set.

That's the full.

And here's for Barbara Hogenson.

They still don't know about the booth.

So, Horton, these are the white model pictures for dividing the stage.

The first one, you can get a sense of what the whole stage.

Okay, that's the whole.

That would be the whole stage picture.

You know, there was our dining room and the couch and chair.

I write mostly about this one town, Harrison.

I call it, and.

I can have people repeat things that they've heard in Harrison.

Different families tell the stories.

Always a little differently.

Of course.

And what I tried to do, I try to get not to the literal truth because that's almost impossible.

But try to get to the essence.

It always surprised me how many audiences could relate to Horton's work.

Because I thought, gosh, it's so southern, it's so Wharton.

How could they possibly?

But in different parts of the country, there will be something that, oh, that's like my grandmother living in a small town.

Everybody knew everything about their neighbor.

You know, they were not many secrets.

A very slow pace of life, but lots of crises.

You know, things did happen.

He has just captured it so well.

Sister, I'm in trouble.

I, I don't know how to tell you.

But it's pretty bad.

I got into a gambling game last night, and I lost $75 to little Bobby Pate.

I feel awful about it.

I hope papa never finds out.

Actually, I need more than $75.

That's only part of my trouble.

I wish I was in the Army right now.

I wish I was in France.

I. I wish I was dead.

I do.

I. I do.

There's a letter just now waiting for me at home from this girl in college Station.

She's having a baby.

She wrote me.

She thought I was the father.

I could be.

She don't want to marry me.

She don't want to have the baby.

She's she's.

She's getting rid of the baby.

She wants me to send her $100 right away.

I can't help it.

How can I help it?

Everybody in this damn family watching me all the time.

Be like papa.

Be a fine, good Christian man.

Like Papa.

Well, I'll never be like him in a million years.

I'm no damn good.

This area was all part of Stephen F Austin colonists that came in about 1820.

And of course, the Texas Revolution took place in 1836.

Texas became a state in 1845.

And I think the town of Horton was established about 1845.

There was a house here, and the widow went out to the garage and hung herself.

And nobody ever knew why or how or what.

But that's the kind of intriguing thing that a dramatist could make a back story, whether it was true or not.

But it kind of is the kind of thing that gets you going.

My father was a walker, and we used to walk at night after supper.

And my mother and my father and my brothers were still babies.

And there was an older man.

My father would say, That's Mr. Armstrong.

He was picking cotton in the cotton fields of Mississippi.

And he got a call to come here to preach.

And he came here to preach.

And he spending his life doing that.

Well, I don't know.

I got intrigued about that call business.

And I was about 13.

And I began to hit this call.

This is distinct as if you talking to me that I wanted to be an actor.

And I just didn't know what I was going to do with that call.

But I listened to it.

Then we had a thing called the Tent Show, which was an acting group that had a tent, and they went all over the South.

And I just thought that was magical.

And I thought that was the greatest thing you could do is to get with tent show.

And travel around and act.

And I had a strong fantasy life about tha.

I had gone to Pasadena for two years and had got found my way on the East coast with an acting company.

And Martha's Vineyard.

My father gave me $50 and he said, when this is gone, don't ever come back.

But that's it.

And I believed him.

And I took this and headed for New York.

Agnes de Mille, who was then a upcoming choreographer, came down with us to do a some improvizations of something.

She was working on that she wanted us to do.

And I was always doing improvizations about Texas.

And she called me over and she said, are listen, here.

Did you ever think about writing?

And I said, no, I never did.

And she said, well, I think you should because I think you have marvelous material.

I knew they had to have a title, and I knew you had the name.

Characters.

So I wrote a little one act play called Horton Dance and took place at the opera House, where young people who shouldn't be drinking beer but drinking beer.

And I used real names of all my buddies.

And I thought they would be so pleased and happy.

But one of my classmates asked to see it.

And she showed it to her mother.

Horton almost went up in flames.

And so I learned a very early lesson.

You don't use real names.

You don't use real town.

So I got, I got I renamed Horton to Harrison.

And used fictitious names from then on.

There's a little bit of people in there, just a little bit.

Seen my mother in law in them.

Never seen myself in one.

You would ask Horton.

Oh, well, this play is about so and so.

And he would with a twinkle in his eye, say, oh, do you think so?

Like talking to a psychiatrist.

You can never get a straight answer out of him when you talk to him about characters in his plays.

Well, do you think that could be well, that's interesting.

Oh, no.

Certainly not.

No.

It's not that person.

But he was very co.

I wrote Texas Town, which was a three act play.

And I was to play the lead.

And for the opening night, Brooks Atkinson, who was the dean of a New York critics for some reason, decided to come.

And he saw it.

And gave me one of the best notices I've ever gotten in my life.

But he didn't like my acting.

And it infuriated me.

And I said, I'm never going to write again.

And I'll show him.

And I'll, I'll be a great actor.

Well, it has life goes on.

It left me this notion of being a great actor.

And I wanted to become a playwright.

From then on, never acted again.

And only wrote.

Once when I was still in South Texas.

I had this dream.

It's just as plain to me.

I dreamed I was a boy still 8 or 9.

And there was this preacher, and I was crying.

He kept saying forgiveness.

And I kept crying.

That's all he said.

Forgiveness.

And I woke up to tell my mama and papa.

And of course, they weren't there.

No one was there.

And I was all alone.

But who was there to forgive?

Forgiveness.

That's all he said.

Look at this big Texas guy.

Horton.

Yeah.

Do you think that's been one reason why you're plays?

Have so much space in them?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I only know I'm kind of my plays come out of a lot of meditation, out of a lot, a lot of meditation.

I do not know where they come from, but they are very persuasive when they start going in.

Me.

They make demands.

The region speaks for everywhere.

And you know, he did to the depths.

You know, of his soul.

He knew that he was speaking for everybody in that specificity of his characters and his location, his his time.

That's a confident writer.

This is where I was born.

Kids.

You were born in this house?

Yeah.

And is that when you were living here?

Your parents still weren't speaking to your grandparents?

Yeah.

That's right.

But you could go down that alleyway.

Right here, right back in here.

I bet it was back in there.

Go down there.

That brick house.

No.

Is that where your dad would get the bottles?

Yeah, yeah, right in there.

All right, let me go back.

Because.

What the bars would just put the bottles out.

Yeah.

And then what?

He could get deposits on them.

Yea.

That's right.

All right.

Michael, if I could get down here.

Oh, honey, you think that you don't work?

Yeah.

It's okay.

Yeah.

Michael said it's okay.

I've already looked at this.

This is beautiful.

Wow.

So you think this was a building or.

That was a building?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

This was also a famous black barbecue.

Oh, yeah.

And you think this was the house of prostitution?

No, I think it was over here to the right, wasn't it?

What?

House of prostitution.

Oh, these were all.

No, they have all of them were.

Yeah.

It was like whorehouse road.

And your father would go up.

Down them as a kid.

Imagine the things he saw.

Horton.

Yeah.

I ain't no orphan.

You know, I got a mama and papa somewhere.

I don't know where, but somewhere.

I asked Uncle Delbert and Aunt Velma where, but they would never tell me.

I asked if they were ever going to tell me, and they said they would someday.

But that day never came.

And I don't reckon I know my mama and papa.

I passed them right on the street.

Of course, I don't know if they want me now, even if I did find them.

Why did they give me away in the first place?

Boy, the likeliness that that that would be that.

Horton, as most of the kids his age and my mother's age, there was no television and families talking together was the entertainment and he'd sit there and you'd hear him talk about, oh, what's happened in town?

How the crops are mis so-and-so died.

Then they'd get into the more interesting, especially to kids.

Oh, well, let's hear about that.

And I think that's when he really started just soaking up everything around him.

I don't know, in the right place at the right time.

I don't know how he does it, but he still does it today.

My dad asked, well, you can be in a room with him and he just may be sitting there, you know, very pleasantly not saying much, but he's absorbing the relationships between people and the situations they're in.

And he was comfortable with anybody.

He would just go over and spend time talking to, to everybody.

He was always going somewhere and watching the other people, you know, like, and not not judgmental, just wanting to absorb all of that and ran into a deer that was crossing the runway.

And now Knight of the storm on the DuPont show of the month.

Through his connection to a number of people who were then experimenting with television, Horton was at the right place, at the right time from roughly 1951 to about 1957, and I think it was a natural fit because his stories are intimate stories about family and therefore they're mostly people talking.

But about things that are really significant and that captures well on television.

Horace, I have to tell you this, even even when your father gets well, I can't live with him again.

I don't love him anymore.

I can't ever love him again.

I knew that when I left him.

Callie said I should have told you before.

Under the surface, there are all these things that happen in his work which are not very happy.

You know, for example, the main event in Orphans Home Cycle is where a mother says to her son, her only son, I don't want you to be with me.

I mean, what's more violent than a mother telling her son, I don't need you, and I don't want you around me?

I think that's the key to Horton's work.

You understand that?

There's all these other things that are going on under the surface.

Don't leave me, mama.

Please, mama, don't leave me.

I went off, Papa.

I don't him to be left alone.

Mama.

Mam!

The 50s TV is such a special er.

People at home on a Saturday night, and they're living room gathered around a TV to watch this intimate story.

Texas story.

You know, I think that really spoke to the country.

And you had there attention.

It was very successful for television.

But he didn't think of himself as writing teleplays.

Horton wanted to be a playwright.

He wanted his plays to be put on the stage in New York.

I started seeing Horton's plays.

I don't remember when, but right when they were first being done in New York City was is where I live, and I've admired his his talent ever since.

I first experienced his work.

I would assume that he knew.

Pretty much why he was having these characters in his mind, and why he thought they should be on stage and be in a play, and he probably figured out the way most of us do by writing the play.

Why he he was doing what he was doing.

It's much the better way than planning everything out in advance.

I kind of see his work really in spiritual terms.

The revelations just come the feelings just kind of appear fully formed based on a little a nuance, a little something someone says or something that implies, or it all becomes clear.

It all builds up.

You just have to know you're on a ride.

It's all very intentional.

It it's a slow process that leads to these beautiful, you know, revelation.

He was writing about the amazing ability of many people to carry on, and he would say to me very often, I don't know how people do it.

Michael.

I don't know how they can endure what they endure and go on.

I'm I'm on the side of those of us who have to struggle in the world and are easily bruised and damaged, and it's too, maybe too sensitive for their own good.

Those people always attract me.

I was looking for something to do as a one act play, and I knew a man.

They called him nub, and he had an arm cut off here.

He'd had it cut off in the.

He was working in the cotton gin and I wrote a play about this man who, looking for his arm, and the owner of the cotton gin, takes no responsibility for it.

Like I told pinky, this is a busy time of year for me, and it's going to get busy and busier all through the fall as we have a bumper cotton crop.

So I appreciate it very much.

If you would take this $5 now and let me be excused.

And I've told pinky to tell you that he doesn't.

Who I'll give you $5 every week up until Christmas.

But I do hope you will not spend it on whiskey.

But for nourishing food.

And it's a tragedy, really, because the man finally kills him.

But I'm telling you this.

The broad outlines of the story and.

But I hope in it you get to.

Realize certain insensitivity that we feel towards our fellow man.

Because what you really, as a writer, trying to strive for is a sense of truth.

And the truth can be very amusing sometimes.

But then sometimes it's heartbreaking.

It's like architecture really, in some ways put a little thing here and take it here and put it here an.

Watch it grow.

I could have had him, you know, if I wanted him.

He asked me out that first night.

You remember?

But I let him know I had my mind on other things besides, I didn't find him one bit attractive.

Did you?

Well, they can call me an old maid if they want to, but I like my peace and quiet.

I've seen the girls that get married.

I wouldn't trade places with a one of them.

Not one.

I can go where I please, do what I please spend money like I please every friend I have.

That's married envies me.

It would take more than Mr. Ralph Johnston to make me give up my independence.

He writes great parts for women.

They centrally figure into the plays and they're they're vulnerable, but they're very strong and their survivors, they're always survivors on a certain level.

And so it's very uplifting to play them because you don't feel like you just serve some doormat.

You know, wife or, you know, just sort of there to fill in information for people.

There's a kind of a meat.

And the substance and it's wonderful experience playing them.

I have some help and I really do mean this.

And I again, Daisy is a good critic and Halley is a wonderful critic.

My wife, Lillian was a wonderful critic.

He didn't seek out other opinions.

He just didn't do it.

He had a sort of resolute belief in what he did, but the one person who did read his things and he trusted implicitly was my mom.

She and her younger sister got to go to a great colleges.

My mother went to Radcliffe and decided she wanted to go into publishing or something, and it was, I think her junior year and she walked into this bookstore that my father was managing, and when he walked out, he said, that's the girl I'm going to marry.

And it was just so just instantaneous.

I think his family was a little bit surprised that he was marrying a Yankee, and that made her kind of suspect.

But she overcame all that and everybody just loved her.

She just kind of ran the show.

The one thing that I always worried me was I felt like she was this really smart person, but when you're you didn't get women, didn't get to do sort of what they were capable of doing.

So she channeled and actually was good for my father.

A lot of that smartness and drive into his writing career, and it wasn't a perfunctory thing.

He really trusted her opinion.

She was his sounding board.

My mom just had a real belief in and an affinity for his work.

Daisy has a friend in New Hampshire.

When her husband died, he was very young and she said, well, we're we're like the swans.

We mate for life and that that led dad love that he felt that way about my mothe.

And I think since Lillian died, everything he's written is always far.

Lillian.

Oh, excuse me.

My mind was a thousand miles away.

When did I meet Henry?

I met him back in my hometown of Lovelady.

It was on a Saturday, and he was riding through town with a bunch of boys.

One of the boys knew the girl.

I was with and they stopped the car and we were introduced.

Everybody that knew Henry back in Lovelady was just crazy about him.

He had sis Roberts just wild about him and they tell me her papa offered to set him up in a grocery store just to get him to marry her.

They say she took to her bed and cried for a week when she heard how I got him.

Here's the ring Henry got me.

Of course, for a long time I thought it was a genuine diamond.

Then some mean old devil and Tyler proved to me it wasn't.

But I don't care.

I like it, just the same.

It usually looks prettier, but kind of turns green when my hands perspire.

Ever since I got on that bus.

My hands have just been ring and perspiration.

To talk about adapting someone else's material for film, which I've done a number of times now, haven't always had the films made, but I've worked on them and I have found for myself first.

The first thing I have to be, I have to like it.

And I have to be in sympathy with the point of view of the writer and because it's a very painful process, it's you're getting inside someone else in a curious kind of way.

And yet you want to be objective at the same time.

When they offered it to me, To Kill a mockingbird, I didn't want to do it because I was working on something of my own.

I didn't even bother to read it.

And Lillian, my wife, read it, and she said, you better get that book.

So I valued what she had to say.

Always.

And I did.

I took it and I did like it a lot.

So I called Alan Pakula and Mulligan and Bob Mulligan, who was the director and produced i, that I was wanting to do it, and he said, well, it's been offered to Harper and she's turned it down, but he said, I think that before we go any further, you should meet with her.

And to be sure that you get along.

And it was love at first sight.

And so there was this connection between the two of them.

And then Harper said, you know, just do it the way you want to do it.

And she always said to people that it was perfect the way he did it, that if anybody wanted to know how they should do adaptation, that this is the way that it should be done.

I went to work and for instance, I used whatever I could use.

I used this porch because there's a moment in the novel when the sheriff comes to talk to him about defending this black man.

But the children are not privy to this at all.

And I remembered sleeping in this room and my mother and father talking on the porch, and my windows were open, and I could hear everything they said.

So I had the sheriff tell Atticus and make him the offer so that I could hear her.

But beyond that, I didn't do much.

I used all my feeling about the South that I could muster up and I think that permeates it.

And we suddenly I realized, and she realized that we were writing about the same place, only very differently.

And we became fast friends.

We just learn a single trick scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

Sir, till you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.

The winner is Horton Foote's For To Kill a mockingbird.

When I got the Oscar, I hadn't gone to the ceremony because I didn't think I was going to win.

Accepting on behalf of Horton Foote will be Alan Pakula.

And my phone started ringing and I thought I'd been elected president of the United States.

Went to kill a mockingbird.

Did so well.

Everybody in Hollywood wanted to say, oh, good, we found this great southern writer who can adapt other southern writers works and Horton, of course, reacted to that, that some of the novels he didn't like and besides, he wanted to do his own work if he was going to work in film, he had to make sure that he didn't become alienated from his first love, which was theater.

And since Hollywood is driven by directors and producers not writers, Horton had problems from the very beginning.

I'm sure nothing's changed in Hollywood from the time Horton Foote first went there to the present day, and that's basically it's like, oh, you're a writer.

You got some skills.

We can use.

Do you want to?

How much of a company man do you want to be?

I think it was probably pretty clear that Horton was going to express himself.

There was a period in the 60s, 70s and his work was not all that popular.

A lot of writers or artists will.

Adapt to the commercial demand for product and Horton never wrote for the commercial value.

He wrote what he felt, and he always said, I don't decide what to write.

It comes to me and I have to write it.

I write what I feel, and if I don't feel it, I can't write it.

People always want to show things they don't trust.

The power of his writing, like example, when he wrote a play called The Young Man from Atlanta, one of the central characters was this young man from Atlanta.

And you never saw him.

Everybody wanted to do his A movie and all this.

Well, the first thing they said was, we want to see the young man from Atlanta.

We want to bring him in and dad just said, no.

And they kept coming back and having these meetings, and it was just excruciating.

And the one thing I think with my father that people should know is they just shouldn't push him artistically, you know, he doesn't.

He he'll he's a collaborator and he changes things and he can be ruthless.

He'll cut things.

He's not sentimental about that.

He will rewrite things.

But if you try to get him to compromise because you think you understand better than he, what is happening in the play or the film, he'll just walk away.

Just walk away and never regret it.

But there was a sacrifice for that by sticking true to who you are.

You're not necessarily sure if you're always going to be the one that they want, but then Lillian spoke about her passion for recording all of the plays on the screen and how she was systematically going about trying to record all of them so that there was a heard.

My mother started producing with him, and she was a really good producer because she was sort of hands on and very.

You know, she liked to kind of control things and slowly what happened over the years is he started working independently in the American short Story series, doing some things for PBS television, and she would work on the details and make sure that his, his writing didn't get betrayed by the time the 80s rolled around, there was this kind of indie film world emerging, and I love the way he jumped into that.

It was an independent spirit meets an independent time.

Then he was able to come to Hollywood and do films the way he wanted to do films.

And I guess it's kind of like skirt lengths and tie widths.

If you hold them long enough, it'll come back around.

My agent kept saying, just think of something and anything they want to do a film with you and I tried and I couldn't, but then I got to thinking about.

A thing that was happening in my family, my brother's oldest, the only son he had was in college.

He had joined a band at the college, and they were kind of playing around locally, and it just seemed to me that anybody looking for work in the arts, that they experiences were alike.

So I thought I'd tried to do that.

And one of the heads of 20th Century Fox was coming in, and I met with him, and he said, I like it a lot, and we'll make a deal.

He said, there's only one thing that I would suggest.

I think there should be an older person in this film someplace.

And I thought, well, that's easy to do.

So Lucy Krull was my agent and she wanted to Hollywood, and she picked up Hollywood Reporter, and the guy had been fired.

But when he said so, we had no deal.

But it's so funny how things like that work out.

The thing about the older person began, I hadn't thought about it at all.

And it began to work in my thought.

Somehow, and it soon became about this older person and was tender mercies.

Well, tender mercies was such a special project.

He always said he never wrote for people, but I think he did.

I think he did because some of the ideas that come from me and my ex-wife and yeah, we, you know, and he, he wrote that original screenplay and then when he, when I read it, I said, this is a terrific he thought he was going to pick up a script and take it home.

And I said, no, I'm going to read it to you.

I thought I just was so sure he'd like it.

And I read and then I read it for him and he was struck with it.

We were going to produce it ourselves, but we didn't get very far and nobody wanted to do the film.

I was in despair.

We got a producer to produce it.

The whole Wolves and we got Bruce Beresford to a strange Australian director, and I thought, oh Lord, if Americans don't like this, what's a Australian going to do with it?

Well, I'd never heard of Horton Foote before.

I got the screenplay of Tender Mercies, and I became completely captivated by it.

You know, the characters, the honesty of the approach, the quality of the dialog, writing, which was just extraordinary.

And I became so excited.

I even dived on the phone and called the hoboes who were producing the film before I'd even finished the script.

I thought, well, if it's this good, halfway through, it must be good all the way through.

So I phoned them and said, I'll direct it, I'll direct it, and then the next thing I came over to meet.

Horton in Texas and this very charismatic young man arrived full of energy and excitement and, and we got along very well.

I found out later that they'd actually offered the script to lots of directors who turned it down.

I'm very glad to say.

God, why did they do that?

And people still come up to me now, nearly every day and say, tender Mercies has meant so much to my life.

So when I went down there, there was a place in Italy, Texas.

I think it's near Waxahachie, where we filmed.

I get up and sing with the band on Friday nights to get, you know, to practice up for the part.

It was an interesting feeling.

You'd be singing a song.

I only sang.

Two people would dance by the two step or the waltz, you know, it was really pretty neat.

So, you know, it was it was, it was a wonderful experience that, you know, to do that.

Horton was both brilliant enough and lucky enough to be dealing with a lot of Texas people who both sometimes can talk a lot and be saying something completely opposite of what they think they're saying, or more than likely not talk much and not be able to express exactly what they want, particularly the men in Tender Mercies.

For example, in the in the proposal scene, you ever thought about marrying again?

Yeah, I have.

You that thought about it lately, I guess it's no secret how I feel about you.

A blind man could see that.

Would you think about marrying me?

Yeah, I will.

I mean, it's the most indirect wedding proposal that you've ever seen.

But at the same time, we understand what's going on, that this is a guy who's having all kinds of trouble with his emotional life.

And that's become the whole point.

A guy who couldn't even express any emotion that he has, feeling that he's now made a connection with the woman that's so profound that he thought he was totally open.

But that's, of course, become his goal.

Now, the great strengths of Horton's work is to understand that there's something there that's not being said.

There was a song you used to sing to me when I was little.

I think it was something about a dove.

Mama says she never heard you sing it to me, but I think it went something about on the Wings of a Snow white dove.

He sends his something.

Something love.

I don't remember that.

I don't.

When Jesus went down to the waters that day, he was baptized in the usual way.

When it was done, God blessed his song.

He sent him his love on the wings of a dove on the wings of the snow white dove.

He sends his pure sweet love sign from above.

On the wings of a dove.

I'm overcome and I'm very grateful to the academy.

I'd like to express my gratitude to the cast and crew of tender mercies in particularly to my old and dear friend Robert Duvall, for his marvelous work, which was the heart and soul of our film.

I don't think the town really realized what they had.

I think they just thought he was a personality from somewhere.

It's easier for me that they really not to interested here, and I don't mean this as a putdown.

I think it's healthy.

When I got the Pulitzer, I was sitting back in my desk and they called me from New York and said, don't get too excited, but I think you've gotten the Pulitzer.

And my wife has passed on by then.

And I was back there by myself, and I didn't know who to call because I didn't.

Then I thought, well, I'll just walk around town and I can find out who knows about it.

I got a soul spoke to me.

Hello, Horton.

Nice to see you.

You going to be here for a while?

And I was too embarrassed.

And to kind of intrigued to find out why I would be told that I'd won the Pulitzer.

I never was told the paper didn't put anything about it.

But it could.

It's better that way.

As far as I'm concerned.

There was a great sense of Broadway that Horton might receive a second Tony nomination and might even receive the Tony Award.

That somehow has eluded him.

His 70 year career in the theater.

I.

Think Horton liked awards.

I know that he was very proud, very proud of the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton and we're very pleased to see him receive laurels from our president.

And you know what he said when he got the medal of the Arts to Clinton?

He said, I love you, Mister President.

And he said, I love you, too.

Horto.

I just thought that was so funny.

I said, you have no sham.

Why did he come swimming in the middle of the afternoon in the lake in Florida and walk and continue to walk until he got water over his head?

Why?

Lily, why?

Lily.

Lily.

Dale.

Why?

I tried to be a good father, but I just think now I only wanted him to be like me.

I never tried to understand what he was like.

I never tried to find what he would want to do, what he would want to talk about.

Life goes so fast, Lily.

Dale.

My God, it goes so fast.

It seems like yesterday he was a baby and I was holding him in my arms.

And before I turned around, good.

He was gone.

And I thought when he comes back, he'll come into the business and we'll be close.

I was never close to him.

Lily, Dale.

How was your day?

Fine, son.

How was yours?

And then he was gone.

I want my son back.

Lily.

Dale.

I want him back.

I wanted to do a story about a great aunt of mine who had been in love with her first cousin.

And the family on either side wouldn't allow them to marry.

So I thought it would be the breaking of the news that you can get married or whatever, but it just didn't work and I was.

I learned long since that you don't push something if it's not going to work.

You walk away from it and I did.

And what happens is that often did in those days, then that's another, more correct solution.

Would appear.

And I decided that what interesting is to start the play at the end of her life.

And that's what I did.

And that became the trip to Bountiful.

Come home.

I mean, in the popular mind, a lot of people like his work because they associate it with maybe primarily Trip to Bountiful and they misinterpret that story because it's a story of the sweet return of a sweet woman to her sweet home, place, and it's about the old days.

So people want to be nostalgic, who want to think about the past.

Then they think that that's what Horton's work is, that it's essentially sentimental.

Horton's works are not just about recovering some kind of sweet past, if you look at even Trip to Bountiful along the way, it becomes quite clear that she didn't love the man she was with, that she couldn't be with the man that she loved.

And when she comes back home, there is no home.

And her one best friend in the world has died.

I mean, what's so happy about this stor?

Home.

I think the greatest example of how his stories translate, kind of whatever medium you put them in, has got to be Trip to Bountiful.

It starts as a TV movie and it becomes a great stage play.

Comes a movie, then more recently, it becomes a great stage play again with an all black cast, with Cicely Tyson in the role.

And sure enough, she she wins a Tony.

It's an amazing tribute to her amazing tribute to the work, to the universality of that story.

One of the things that I liked about the film is that I can take the trip visually.

I could see her in the bus.

I see her waiting at a weigh station and you saw the trip.

Mama, I haven't made any kind of life for you, and I try so hard.

I try so hard.

Oh, mama, I lied to you.

I do remember I remember so much this house, the life here.

The night you woke me up and dressed me and took me for a walk.

Because there was a full moon.

And I cried because I was afraid.

And you comforted me.

Mama, I want to stop remembering.

It doesn't do any good to remember.

I'll be buried here someday.

Well, my wife is there.

And my brother and his wife.

And I'll be there.

And she was back there.

These are the Brooks's.

Your mother.

Let's go over here.

This is the Brooks's.

This is.

No, no, no, my uncle Tom Brooks, my uncle John Speed Brooks, another uncle.

And this is my father.

Albert Horton Foote and this is my mother, Allie.

I'm getting very emotional.

He'll be one of those people.

Kind of like Geraldine.

You know, she died in between shows, and she said, just before she died, they were, you know, she was that had done a matinee, and she.

And this guy, he dropped her off at home, and she died at home taking a nap before she went to the theater.

And she said, you know why we're the two luckiest people in New York.

And he said, why?

She said, because we get to act twice today.

And I think that's how he feels.

You know, I get to write today.

I get to I get to be in a play rehearsal today.

I get to see one of my plays today.

I get to talk about getting a movie made or doing, you know, a project, thinking about something.

The Gulf was quiet when I got there.

It was a kind of primitive stillness about the place.

Could have been a hundred years ago, or 200, and I, as my ancestors see the coast for the first time, as it had always been, except for the chimneys and the foundation and the car and me.

And then I rode out to find the graves a mile from the house again.

No flowers, no trees, but weeds.

A jungle of weeds, Johnson grass and buffalo grass as high as my waist, and silence.

A terrible silence.

No one had been near those graves for years.

Lonnie.

The tombstones had tumbled over, broken the graves themselves, lost in their covering of weeds.

I thought to myself.

Here lies power.

Here lies ambition.

Let Leonard have them.

All right, 75,000 200,000, came on home to 100.

$150,000.

I consider loved.

Okay.

Like here she is.

Here she is.

She's.

Oka.

We went from.

You need to come with me.

75,000 $100,000.

Between 75,000 100,000.

We had to Kill a mockingbird on stage.

It was an attempt to really create a new version of that from his screenplay.

And 13 days before he died, he came to the theater and saw the show.

And the audience cheered and were so thrilled that Horton was there amongst them.

As this play was about to begin.

And at the end of it, I walked over to him and Daisy was trying to lift him up and I said, well, Horton, how'd you like the show?

And he said, buddy, I'm, I'm La Bell get very emotional right now.

But he was so moved and transfixed by the production, by the performances.

Afterwards, the audience swarmed him for autographs.

People couldn't get enough of their program signed by him.

I loved seeing it because it made me feel that Horton had really had a third act while he was alive.

He was very much embraced for all of the great characters he had created in the stories that he had given us.

It's a real adjustment.

My father, not being around.

I hate it.

He was my best friend in many ways.

You know, it just is terrible.

Not having him around.

You know, and we all have these impulses to kind of call him up on the phone or ask him a question.

And we, you know, you kind of do it in a vacuum, but you can't.

Here we are making the pilgrimage to Wharton, to say our goodbyes.

And these torrential rains came, and they used to say that if it rained on an opening night in the theater, that the gods were crying for the success of the play, and I, I wondered if the gods were crying for either the loss of our dear Horton or his ascendancy.

The first time that Horton came to East Tennessee, it was raining, and I said to him, oh, I'm sorry about the rain.

And he looked at the rain and he said.

He said, it's okay.

I find something very comforting in rain.

It's like.

It's like a mother's tears.

And that's what I thought.

It's okay.

These are mother's tears.

What was the name of Mr. Frohman's theater?

The Empire.

It was right across the street from the Metropolitan Opera House.

And they've both been torn down.

I read somewhere I attended them both.

Many time.

I loved New York, and I loved Paris.

I loved Algiers, I loved Rome, and I loved Egypt.

Oh, not this Egypt.

Egypt, Egypt.

Magic.

Egypt.

I used to tell Hunter that when I died, I wanted my body cremated and my ashes taken to some of those beautiful places.

I'd known as a young woman.

But now I don't care who's there.

Left to take my ashes anywhere anyway, there's a place for my body between Hunter's grave and my two girls.

And that's where I'll end up in a coffin in Egypt this evening.

Out on the prairie and in the spring, the wildflowers will cover our graves with primroses and Indian blankets.

And blue bonnets.

Listen, you hear that?

The wind on the prairie.

I think there'll be a storm tonight.

I never mind them.

You know.

Storms comfort me somehow.

His voice is so singular, and I think he's certainly one of our greatest.

And that his writing was even better and better and better as he got older.

Such a testimony to what's possible for an artist.

The work with Horton.

I'll miss it.

You know, because he really, really kept to his own truth.

He did not ever try to be popular or to please anyone.

He really didn't.

He?

That's pretty rare.

I mean, what an example.

For every creative person I was just so inspired to see him in his 90s legal pad in his hand, writing his very, very exciting to see someone just still at it.

The foot never came off the accelerator.

Horton understood that in a play, people to be interesting don't have to be extraordinary, don't have to be bizarre, don't have to have any qualities except humanity to them.

And so he never wrote flashy characters or flashy plays.

He just wrote that very, very difficult thing called The Truth About People, about him.

A gentle and sweet man who ought a sharp eye and a sharp mind.

Now that we're through today, the work returns to the orphans home cycle.

It's huge undertaking, and I'm thrilled and honored to be directing it.

Lights come up stage left on the Roberdeau house and Horace Junior enters.

He loves this place.

You know.

He loves his home.

He said to me just now, mama, what is wrong with me?

I love my home.

Why can't I live on here?

And he talks all the time now about his papa.

You know, like he was doing coming back in the car from Galveston.

How unfair it was fine.

Man.

Like your papa had to die.

I know what he means.

Poor boy.

That he is living and not worth much.

Did you ever have doubts about your worth, Horace?

He got to see the first six red.

And once he saw them red, I think it really gave him relief.

I think he saw that it was a possibility.

And they were heading in the right direction.

And he was hard at work at the last three, just before he passed away.

So in a weird way.

I think he was he didn't need to stick around, you know.

You know, in other words, he saw probably what was going to take place.

And I think sort of gave him permission to let it go.

And what I think would really please him is all these young kids, I mean, they're just giving up basically a year of their life.

And every one of them has said, no, this is too important.

People really wanted to be involved in this project.

And I find that really moving.

After you give me the money, there was one point where where I took the initiative to leave the house instead of you opening the door, I'd just like to look at that again.

Right.

Well, and I'd like another shot.

No, there's two different times you leave.

There's this time, and then there's the other time.

I get the impression that Horton really paid attention to the world.

He lived in, in a very straightforward and hard hitting way.

You know, kind of smacks you upside the head with a feather.

But you really feel it, you know, you can take the train back to Harrison tonight.

You go straight to Inez and tell her just what happened.

And she'll put you up.

I don't have any money for my ticket home.

Yes, I forgot, I have my money and my sewing closet.

I'll be right back.

Mama's gone to get him money to get back home on.

She gave him $2 to get here, and sh.

Are you giving him money?

Well, you see, Mr. Davenport, you're a grown man.

Aren't you ashamed to take money from your mama?

When I was your age, I'd been supporting my mother and my brothers and sisters for eight years.

Nobody ever gave me anything.

And I never asked for anything.

What kind of man are you going to make taking money from a woman at your age?

Take the money.

The house in Wharton, no matter how many times I've been away from this house, I've always felt was my home.

Because I've tried to write about new England.

And I guess I've done a fairly good job.

But it's never been with my heart.

And for the kind of kind of sense of I am home and this is my home and this is my territory and it's been ups and downs, but a lot of ups and I've always somehow gone back to what I now call Harriso.

It's a very awesome responsibility.

That's why I'm so careful about people don't think I'm manipulating them.

And using them to build this town, because in one sense it is my town and it isn't really Horton.

This is very subjective to me and also it's strange to know when I go out in the cemetery and to realize that there are generations out there that I've known and I reminded of who they are and what they were and how what they accomplished in life.

It's the never ending story with me.