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Horton Foote RIP
Here’s what made Horton Foote a good writer: he wrote about people in conflict with themselves. What’s more, the people knew it, which was the source of their anguish and the conflict within Foote’s work. No heroes, no villains, just people wrestling with the angels and demons of their nature.
No script has ever channeled the soul of a novel more successfully than Foote’s for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” His original script for “Tender Mercies” was a small miracle that, equally miraculously, found the perfect actor in Robert Duvall. (He wasn’t as lucky with his script for “Of Mice and Men,” which had not one, but two miscast actors - Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.)
Foote kept the faith with his characters and he kept the faith with his first love, the stage, because he adamantly refused to write about anything other than small towns and the people that live in them. I can’t imagine that his work won’t be remembered and enjoyed long after far more fashionable writers are hived off into the obscurity that usually swallows people who don’t transcend their own period.
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