And one more thing: A protagonist has to have a flaw. A protagonist has to be put through something and be changed by it. Scott said, “Atticus can’t be Atticus for the whole play. How? I didn’t know yet.īut the second note was the one that changed everything. The first was “We have to get to the trial sooner.” Yes. The first Mockingbird work session lasted 45 minutes. These work sessions usually last three or four days and I fly home with dozens - sometimes hundreds - of notes and write the next draft. That’s regular working procedure for Scott and me. ![]() I sent the first draft to Scott, and the next day he called and asked me to come to New York for a conversation. It was a greatest-hits album performed by a cover band. Basically, I’d just taken the most necessary scenes from the book and stood them up. Probably the best thing you could say about it was that it was harmless, which is probably the worst thing you could say about To Kill a Mockingbird. Six months later, I turned in my first draft and it was terrible. This was a chance to be in a theater again, a chance to work with Bartlett Sher (whom Scott was dangling in front of me as director), a chance to be in a rehearsal room with a company of world-class actors, and a chance to work with this material. And while it’s been a very happy accident, what I love most is writing plays. I’m an accidental writer of movies and television shows. What could I do but make it all less than it was? Why invite the comparison between a legend and … not a legend? Why put on a nightly PowerPoint presentation on the difference between Harper Lee’s skills and my own? It would be like entering a head-to-head competition with Tom Brady in which points were awarded based on passing efficiency and handsomeness. She hid from the limelight - which can’t be easy to do when your best friend since childhood is Truman Capote - and in spite of the money that comes from a blockbuster book and movie, she lived the balance of her life very modestly in the town where she was born, Monroeville, Alabama, which served as the inspiration for fictional Maycomb County, where the story takes place. ( Go Set a Watchman, the rejected first draft of Mockingbird, was published in the final years of her life.) She never wrote again. To Kill a Mockingbird was her first novel and her last. It sells more than a million copies a year, and it continues to be taught in every school district where it hasn’t been banned for making Jim Crow laws look bad.Īdding to the lore was the book’s author, Nelle Harper Lee. It was the first time we liked reading a book more than watching television. ![]() It was the first time we were lulled into a bucolic world, seen through the eyes of a child, without knowing we were about to get kneecapped when we turned the page. ![]() It was the first time the hero wore glasses. For some of us, it was the first time we read about injustice. We all read it together in seventh or eighth grade. This wasn’t just any Pulitzer Prize–winning novel it’s one that holds a sacred place on America’s bookshelf. It was also a suicide mission, and I understood that right away. “After several years of trying,” he said, “I’ve got the stage rights for To Kill a Mockingbird.” He wanted me to adapt the novel into a play. The last three times he’d called me to say, “I have something very exciting to talk to you about,” I ended up writing The Social Network, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs. “I have something very exciting to talk to you about.” That’s how Scott Rudin, the EGOT-winning producer, began a phone call to me three years ago.
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