Horton Foote: The Greatest Playwright You've Never Heard Of

Today we're talking about Horton Foote (1916-2009), the award-winning playwright and screenwriter. In the recently released documentary Horton Foote: The Road to Home, the celebrated screenwriter Anne Rapp helps us to learn more about this unsung Texas and American legend.

Foote was born and raised in Wharton, Texas, and he went on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, the winner of two Academy Awards for screenwriting, an Emmy Award for television writing, and was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts among numerous other theatrical and literary prizes. His best known works are the Oscar-winning screenplays for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983). 

Ann Rapp met Foote on the set of Tender Mercies, where she worked as a screenplay supervisor. She developed a life-long friendship with this unsung gentleman playwright.

With this documentary, she wants to share with everybody her inside look into Foote's humanity, integrity and empathy that played into his work during his whole life.

“To be a good writer, you don’t have to be educated, you don’t even need to speak good grammar. If you are an observer and a listener, and you find a voice to reflect that, then you can write. Horton was the best listener I've ever known.” - Anne Rapp

Time Stamps:

3:40 - Introducing Anne Rapp and her film Horton Foote: the Road to Home.
5:00 - When and where the film will be released to a wider audience.
9:08 - Who Horton Foote was.
13:14 - The first clip from the film: people talking about his writing and personality.
15:32 - What the film is really about.
20:35 - How it was for Anne to spend time visiting Horton Foote and recording him.
25:05 - What is Foote's home town Wharton, Texas like.
32:56 - The second clip: Ludie’s monologue from the play The Trip to Bountiful.
34:09 - Why it took 13 years for Anne to release this documentary.
42:00 - How Foote’s daughters reacted to the film.
50:10 - The experience of supervising Foote’s scripts.
55:33 - What it was like for Anne to work with Robert Duvall.
59:55 - What it was like to work with Robert Altman and how Anne became a screenwriter.
1:04:30 - The storytelling tradition in Texas.
1:09:22 - What Anne’s writing process looks like.
1:13:40 - What is the essence of Foote’s writing genius.
1:18:50 - How young people can get to know his work better.
1:21:10 - What Anne’s wish for the documentary is and what her next projects are.

Resources:

Horton Foote: The Road to Home (2020)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Tender Mercies (1983)
The Trip to Bountiful (1985)
The Major Plays of Horton Foote by Robert W. Haynes
Cookie's Fortune (1999)
Alamo Pictures

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Transcript for Factual America Episode 39 - Horton Foote: The Greatest Playwright You've Never Heard Of

Anne Rapp 0:00
I'm Anne Rapp and I'm the director, producer of the documentary Horton Foote: The Road to Home.

Speaker 1 0:08
Look at this big Texas guy, Horton.

Horton Foote 0:10
Yeah.

Speaker 1 0:12
Do you think that's been one reason why your plays have so much space in them?

Horton Foote 0:18
My plays come out of 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.

Speaker 2 0:32
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.

Speaker 3 0:46
Horton, I think, is way up there in the pantheon of American playwrights. Way, way up there.

Speaker 4 0:52
Anything of Horton, I like doing. It's a kind of thing you can't force his material as an actor. You can't push it. Cause it's very kind of delicate.

Horton Foote 1:01
I'd like to express my gratitude to the cast and crew of Tend to Mercy's.

Speaker 5 1:05
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.

Speaker 6 1:14
The winner is Horton Foote for To Kill a Mockingbird.

Horton Foote 1:24
The Orphans' Home Cycle is a series of nine plays, which is an attempt at writing about my family.

Speaker 7 1:33
It was never questioned to me that he would be this active. Because he can't not right.

Speaker 8 1:39
Lights come up and Horace Jr. enters.

Horton Foote 1:43
But to really, as a writer, I'm trying to strive for this sense of truth. And the truth can be very amusing sometimes. But then sometimes it's heartbreaking.

Speaker 9 1:54
Horton understood that in a play people to be interesting don't have to have any qualities except humanity to them.

Speaker 10 2:01
I have to tell you this, even when your father gets well, I can't live with him again. I don't love him any more.

Horton Foote 2:10
I'm on the side of those of us who have to struggle in the world.

Speaker 11 2:15
He knew that he was speaking for everybody.

Speaker 12 2:18
The details equal the universal.

Speaker 13 2:22
Oh Mama, I lied to you. I do remember. I remember so much. This house, the life here. Mama, I want to stop remembering.

Horton Foote 2:37
My wife is there. And my brother and his wife and I'll be there.

Speaker 14 2:46
There's a place for my body, between hunters grave and my two girls. And that's where I'll end up. Out on the prairie.

Horton Foote 2:57
So I've tried to write about New England, but it's never been with my heart and put the sense of I am home. And this is my home and this is my territory.

Speaker 14 3:08
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.

Intro 3:27
That is the trailer for the recently released documentary Horton Foote: The Road to Home. And this is Factual America. We're brought to you by Alamo pictures, a production company that makes documentaries about America for international audiences. Today we're talking about Horton Foote, the award winning playwright and screenwriter and helping us to learn more about this Texas and American legend is celebrated screenwriter herself Anne Rapp. So Anne, welcome to Factual America.

Anne Rapp 3:56
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Intro 3:58
How are things with you? Are you in Austin?

Anne Rapp 4:00
I'm in Austin, Texas. Yes, I am.

Intro 4:02
Alright. Well, I should give you a congratulations on the film Horton Foote: Road to Home. It premiered at Austin Film Festival, didn't it? And congratulations on the Audience Award.

Anne Rapp 4:17
Oh, well, thank you. Yes, we were thrilled to get that. That's always one of the nicest thing you know, especially a documentary at a festival like Austin. It's a wonderful festival. But it's known more for its narrative films. It's not a real documentary, particularly a documentary oriented festival. And so it was nice to get some accolades there. And people seem to really love this film. And so I was thrilled with that award.

Intro 4:48
I think, well, and I understand why you got the award. I mean, now that I have had the privilege of seeing it. Actually, that brings up a point. Do you know when and how this will get released to a wider audience?

Anne Rapp 5:03
We have not... I am just starting to take those steps. I have not gone down any particular road yet. I'm in the advice gathering mode of that right now. I am trying to figure out the best home for this. I am a first time documentary filmmaker, I've been a writer for a long time. I've been in the movie business for most of my adult life. I was a script supervisor for many years on a lot of feature films. And I've written feature films that have been produced. But this is my first, you know, segue into the documentary world. So I'm kind of learning it a step at a time. And now I'm in this sort of festival mode, I wanted to see what the reaction was for one thing. Because I thought that'll tell me a little something about where this film belongs. And one of the things that has been so lovely, and has given me a slight bit of direction is, so many people have said to me, every young writer should see this film. That there is no way a young writer, any young artist, as a matter of fact, can't benefit from watching this film and watching Horton Foote's process. And it gives me a little bit more of a guide on which direction maybe I need to go with distributing it. Because I want to make sure there's an audience out there for Horton Foote, but it's mainly an older audience, an arts audience, people like myself, who kind of know his work and kind of grew up on it or whatever. But that's not the only audience. I think there's also a much younger audience for this. So I'm trying to find that perfect place. And we'll see what happens. But it's, we're the newbie the newborn, just sort of, you know, catching our breath, and we'll find it.

Intro 6:56
Alright. Well, I think what's interesting for you, as first time documentary filmmaker, learning the rules, but the rules are all being changed because of COVID and everything, so no one really knows what's going on, do they?

Anne Rapp 7:10
That does change it a lot. You know, I've spoken to, there's an old friend of mine from Dallas, who I kind of came up in the industry with. And we all kind of went our separate ways and found our spot in the industry. But he became a kind of a player in the distribution world. And he's, I've already been talking to him for advice, and he that's first thing he said to me, he said, I have a whole game plan for this, if this were normal times. But these are not normal times. And the downside is, you know, it's hard to get out there and do things in person with it. And, you know, rile up an audience in person and all of that, because everything's virtual. On the other hand, there's maybe a better, a good market for it right now, because productions have been shut down for so long, and they're just starting up again. And so people are looking for content. But it still doesn't help you in that path to finding it, you know. So it's a difficult time. And it was, I've been working on this film for over 13 years. And believe me, when I finally got it finished this year, I'm ready to come out of the gate with it. And it's pandemic time. You know, the NGO side of me is like, what? I don't get my red carpet? You know, but that's not what it's about. We'll find it, it'll find this path, and maybe this will be in our favor. Who knows?

Matthew 8:41
I think you're gonna find an audience for this. I'm almost certain. And you just said, what is it all about? Well, we know it's about Horton Foote. And now for our audience out there, many I will guess depending on their age and where they're based, will not know who Horton Foote is. So maybe you can just give us a little background on this man who was also your friend, I believe.

Anne Rapp 9:07
Okay. Yes. Well, Horton was a, he was actually one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century. He started out writing in the, pretty much in the 40s. You know, but when he was young, he thought he wanted to be an actor. He grew up in a small town in Texas called Wharton, w h a r t o n. It's very similar to his name. It's outside of Houston a little bit. And he got this sort of calling that he decided he wanted to be an actor. And he went down that path for a while and he found his way to Pasadena, California, and then ultimately to New York. And very shortly after that, his skill as a writer became very apparent to a lot of people he was working with. And this story is all kind of told in the film. But he started writing. And he initially was just writing plays. And Horton wrote plays his entire life. If you asked him what his second home was, it was a theater, not television or movies, movie set. But he turned over a 70 year career. A lot of his plays were made into television shows and made into movies. But he always kept writing plays as well. And he had a big TV successful era in the 50s. And then he was back into writing plays in the 60s and 70s. And in the early 80s, is when his movies, he had a few movies before, it spread out. But that's when his little indie movie started taking off. So some people know him as, they go, Oh, I know Horton Foote movies, I know that he wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, he wrote Tender Mercies, or other people know is television. Other people know his plays. Most people don't know the whole bulk of it. But the most important thing about Horton to know, and what I've tried to tell in the film, is that he wrote for 70 years, his material was primarily all based on one small town in Texas. And it was based loosely on his hometown. He renamed it to Harrison, Texas, and all of the characters are, you know, mixtures of people and made up, make believe. And he was one of those writers who wrote primarily that one place. And was very successful at it across all these genres, you know. And so he died in 2009. He was 92 years old. And he died with a pad and a pen in his hand. He was still writing, he had just finished on Broadway. And they were in the process of doing a big nine play Opus when he died. And so he never stopped working.

Intro 12:25
I think early on in the film you've got, there's a segment there, which I think is quite powerful. You've got all these amazing people. Where do you begin? Edward Albee, you've got Robert Duvall, you've got Matthew Broderick, all these people. And I'm not doing justice to all the other ones that you've got in there, who's not only just sing Horton Foote's praises, but kind of put them in the context and perspective about the strength of this, I would say sort of unsung gentlemen playwright. So why don't we, and thank you for sharing those clips with us. Why don't we have a listen, or for those who are watching on YouTube, have a look at this clip. It gives you even more of a feel for who we're talking about, when we say we're going to be discussing Horton Foote today.

Speaker 1 13:15
There's a lot of people in the art 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.

Speaker 2 13:26
The most interesting thing about Horton's plays, is he doesn't write characters, he writes people.

Speaker 3 13:32
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 for maybe ever. That's the way his plays are. Anything of Horton, I like doing. It's a kind of thing you can't force his material as an actor, you can't push it, cause it's very kind of delicate.

Speaker 4 13:56
Things don't appear to be happening, but in fact, they constantly are. And the most subtle expression could be devastating.

Speaker 5 14:04
He had the capacity to have such a clear, honest eye about human beings and their foibles. But he loves them anyway.

Speaker 6 14:15
Horton was as honest a playwright, in terms of the truth of the human condition, than anybody that I know of.

Speaker 7 14:21
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.

Speaker 8 14:42
Horton's brain was a steel trap. And he knew exactly what he wanted and how it should be.

Speaker 9 14:50
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.

Intro 15:03
I think there's some powerful things that are said there. And I guess we'll explore them a little bit more in detail as we continue talking about Horton's work. But in terms of your film, I mean, could you give us maybe a little synopsis of what the film is? Because it's more than just saying, here's Hortons life? I mean, maybe you can give us a little background or, you know, what is, what is this Road to Home about?

Anne Rapp 15:33
Well, you know, I wanted to, there's a couple of things I wanted to accomplish with this film. Obviously, I wanted to, obviously, the first thing is I want to make all those people aware of Horton, who were not aware of him. He is what some people have called the greatest playwright you've never known. You know, he's very modest man who didn't toot his own horn very much, never beat his own chest. So, I feel like he hasn't had quite the accolades that he should have had, you know. But my other missions with this film, I wanted to give the audience not only a look at his work, and do a something of a historical, take a little historical journey with him. But I wanted them to also get to know the man himself. Because, with somebody like Horton, getting to know a little bit about who he is and where he's coming from, it gives you a much better sense of why he wrote the kind of material he wrote. And why he wrote in a way that he never wavered from even when he went through periods of time, where it maybe wasn't all that popular. He just kept writing what he knew and what he loved, and what he believed in. And he never changed for popularity, he never changed for the changes out there. He just waited for them to come back to him. And there's a reason for that, you know, when you're so grounded in what your stories are. And I felt like I was very, very fortunate that I had a personal relationship with Horton, when we started filming him. Because I had been, I've been the script supervisor, it started my career, actually, the movie Tender Mercies. I was hired to script supervisor on that. And I became friendly with Horton at the time. And we kind of stayed in touch over all those years, you know. This was long before cell phones, or computers or internet or anything. And we would write cards and letters, you know. We never lived in the same city. But we never lost touch. And so when I moved back to Texas in 2000, he was ninety years old. And he was living with his daughter Hallie in Los Angeles. But she would bring him down to the homestead, they still had their homestead in Wharton. And he would spend weeks or months writing down there, and I would always go down for these visits. And he would just, we would get in the car and drive all over town and spend a whole afternoon driving around with Horton, just looking out the window, and telling me stories about - so and so used to live here, and that guy killed his brother. And this used to be a cotton field, and the sheriff did this here and whatever. And I realized after a couple of those trips down there that I was kind of getting the backdrop of all of his work. And I asked him if I could put a camera on him, simply because I felt like somebody needed to be recording this. I was vaguely thinking documentary, but not really. I was just thinking this needs to be on film. So as this documentary evolved, you know, I wanted to give everyone that inside look that I had, you know. I wanted to share this, I could have stayed on the outside and done a very historical documentary and very archival thing that wasn't very personal. But I just, I had such a great personal experience with him, that I wanted to share that as well. And I think it goes, I think it goes hand in hand with his work. I don't think it's two separate pieces. Here's his work. Look at the man. His humanity, his integrity, his empathy, everything bleeds into his work, even when he's writing very flawed characters, and tough stories. That bleeds into his work in just a wonderful way. And I wanted to share with the audience who he was as a man. And so I tried to be on the inside. And I hope I accomplished that. Because I think it's important to that whole story.

Matthew 20:16
And in doing this, because as you said, you've been friends, since, what 1983? You'd been trading cards and letters. But now you're spending time with him on these trips back to Wharton, and you've got a camera on him. Did you learn anything, I mean, obviously, you learn new things, you learned about the facts and family history and stuff. But did you get to appreciate him in a different light once you started kind of spending this kind of time with him?

Anne Rapp 20:49
Ah, you know, I would find the best way to answer that, I think, is I just find him more and more delightful. Every time. You know, he was, lucky for me, he wasn't nervous with me on camera. He almost forgot the camera was there. Somehow he had a really comfortable presence with me talking to him about his work. And I don't think that I have the copyright on that. I think he was just a comfortable man on his own. He was kind of shy and understated in some ways, but he was a comfortable man in his own skin. He wasn't a recluse or anything. I think he kind of enjoyed sharing his life with me. And he was very conversational with me, because he felt comfortable with me. But as far as what I learned, knew about him, you know, if that was a different journey, what I found interesting with Horton is, I had gone to the, they gave us the full reign of his archives, which are a bit the library of SMU. So I got a lot of archival stuff, you know, from the family up there. And I looked at many, many interviews that Horton did in earlier days. You know, when he was younger, or news interviews or whatever. And also, I've heard Hoton speak publicly, you know, at various times in his life. And Horton always had this complete eloquence about him when he was speaking. He was very eloquent in this sort of soft, believable way. But I found that, as he got older, and when, I did most of the filming of him in the hometown. So I had him just relaxed in his environment. And what I found that was so delightful about him, was that he would reverse back to the language of the people there that he wrote about, you know. He could stand in front of a microphone in New York and just, you know, knock you out with his eloquence, but I got even a different language from him, which is, you know. He would say things like, just an example. He would say things like, we asked him a question in the film about where his plays come from, you know, basically, and he said, I do not know, but they are very powerful when they start going in me. You know, that's the language. That's not the same language of the eloquent Horton that accepts his Oscars. This is a man who won two Academy Awards, an Emmy Award, Pulitzer prize for drama, got the National Medal of Arts from Bill Clinton when he was president. The man has stood in front of a lot of microphones in front of a lot of people, and was comfortable there. But he would say things like, you know, when they approached him to write To Kill a Mockingbird, and he was hedging. He was too busy doing his own thing and he didn't want to read the book. And his wife read the book, and loved it and coaxed him to read it. But she said, the way Horton tells the story is - my wife said, you better get to reading that book. And that's something, that's all I like, Horton would write. But he would revert to that, just sort of organically and naturally, they were not put on. That was the way he talked when he went back to his hometown. And so those little nuances with Horton just thrilled me, you know. I knew both of them, you know.

Matthew 24:39
I think that's, because it's something I wanted to ask you about too. Because it's kind of cliche, but the other character, we have Horton, and then we have Wharton, the town. And, you know, or Harrison, Texas versus Wharton. Was there anything there that you, as someone who was familiar with his work, and now you're getting to see him in his hometown. Is there anything about the town that surprised you? You're from Texas, you know, so is it your typical Texas town or, you know, what would you say?

Anne Rapp 25:14
It is as typical as it gets. And let me just say this. I'm from a very small town much, much smaller than Wharton, Texas. I'm from a tiny little town in the Texas Panhandle called Estelline. My town had 300 people when I was growing up, it has maybe 95 now. Wharton was more like, I think it's got more like 3000 people, you know, so it's 10 times bigger than my town. But it's still a small town in Texas. And it was a very typical town. It was County seat of the county, so it had a courthouse on Courthouse Square, stores all around it on the square and then just dotted with houses around, you know, in the neighborhoods. It was, as most small Texas towns now. There's a big highway that runs from Houston, you know, East-West, and that's on the edge of town. So out on that edge of town is every Holiday Inn, Express and Chile, and all of that. It looks just like any other town, you have to drive off the main road to get into the town square and see the charm of the town. But what Horton and I bonded over, when we met each other on the set of Tender Mercies and I had his script in my lap, the whole movie that was my job, all the technical aspects of scripts. And so I had a lot of conversations with Horton. And we didn't talk about and we just met. He didn't know me from atom. And I was a greenhorn. This was one of my first movies. So I was, you know, I was a little nervous about it all. But we didn't talk about the arts. We didn't talk about movies. We didn't talk about theater. We didn't talk about any of that. We talked about, he was infinitely curious about where I grew up. He's like, oh, you're from a small town in the Panhandle. And what did your daddy do? Well, my daddy was a cotton farmer. And he said, oh, my goodness, you know, our town, his daddy was a haberdasher, and have a clothing store on the square, but their whole town relied on the industry of cotton, because it was cotton country. So we would sit and talk for hours about, not hours on the set, but cumulative hours about cotton farms and cotton gins. And the fact that we prayed for rain all the time, and they begged it not to rain, because it's different, completely different. And so I know small town as good as anybody out there. And this town Whartom, typical Texas small town. He made it something, you know, completely special, which every writer can do if they listen and pay attention. But if you just look at it from the outside, looks like every small town in Texas.

Matthew 28:07
Yeah. And so yet, I mean, like a lot of Texans, and I know, he ended up leaving and spending almost all of his adult life away from Texas. So I think mainly New York? You said he was living with his daughter in LA, but also I know he spent time in New England.

Anne Rapp 28:28
He was mainly, he was pretty much primarily in New York. And he lived also in Nyack when he started having kids. And then he actually moved up to New Hampshire for a while and raised the kids. He was up there in the 60s and 70s, kind of. And somewhere in there, I'm not sure what the exact dates are, but yeah, he raised all his children on the East Coast. He only moved to California, when he was older, and his wife had died. And he went to live with Halllie, who is the oldest daughter, who lived in LA. But he really didn't have a run much in LA. He was pretty much New York.

Matthew 29:14
What I was going to ask you about is, obviously, Wharton, the town is where all of his, well, most of his material comes from, what he wrote about. But how would you describe his relationship with Texas?

Anne Rapp 29:30
His relationship with Texas? Well, obviously he loved Texas, and it was in his bones to the core because that's all he wrote about pretty much. As he says in the film, he says, I tried to write about New England and I just never could quite, never connected with them. So obviously the Texas experience was, that was it. He never let go of that home. And it's still there. The kids have it, you know. So he had this genuine love of it. But you know, writers are all different this way. There are a lot of writers who had to be in the environment where they're writing. And Faulkner is one of those guys. You know, Faulkner essentially wrote about one county in Mississippi his whole, he got dragged out to Hollywood for a short period of time. And there's a famous story about that, where, you know, he was working in the studio one day, and he said, I am not working very well here. I want to go home. And they said, sure, go home, thinking he was going to go back to his apartment in LA. But he went home home to Mississippi, and never went back. So he had to write at home. There are other writers that, I think they need some distance, you know. I had a friend who was a writer, very southern writer. And his voice was always very southern. And I asked him one time, but he always lived in New York. And I said, why, because you've really maintained such a southern voice, and you still write so much as a southerner, you know, why have you lived in New York all these years? And he said to me, he said, If I stayed in Georgia, he was from Georgia. He said, if I stayed in Georgia, I felt like I was writing skits for my parents. So that was his experience. So everybody has a different way. I feel like, as a writer, myself, I write a lot about Texas and the South. But sometimes my muse likes the deep south than it does Texas. I've done some of my best writing in Mississippi and New Orleans, you know. And I struggle a little bit if it's too much in my face. And some writers are that way, you know, that you need a little bit of distance. One of my favorite musicians in the world is Terry Allen, who's a great Texas musician. And Terry says, sometimes you have to leave your place to fall in love with it. And I've always loved that. Because I get it, you know. And I'll leave Texas a lot, but I'm in love with it. And I think that's what Horton had to do, you know. But it was always ingrained in him, in every cell.

Matthew 32:15
I think that's a good point to take a little break here for our listeners. And also, over the break, we'll play a little clip from one of the monologues from one of Horton's plays that you interspersed throughout the film. And we'll be back shortly with Ann Rapp. You're listening to Factual America. Subscribe to our mailing list or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter at Alamo pictures to keep up to date with new releases or upcoming shows. Check out the show notes to learn more about the program, our guests and the team behind the production. Now back to Factual America.

Speaker 1 32:56
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. 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.

Matthew 33:43
Welcome back to Factual America. I'm here with Ann Rapp, director and producer of Horton Foote: Road to Home. Audience Award winner at the Austin Film Festival. I'm sure there's probably other awards on their way. Ann, why did it take you, I think you just said earlier, 13 years to release this film?

Anne Rapp 34:09
Well, there's a long answer to the long gun that it took me but I won't give you that long answer. I'll try to give you a shorter answer. As I mentioned earlier in the podcast, I'm not a documentary filmmaker by trade. So I had to learn a little bit as I was going on this. If I ever did another documentary, I think it would go a lot faster. Let me put it that way. But I wasn't even sure exactly what courses was going to take when I started filming Horton. I just kept a camera on him for two and a half, last two and a half years of his life. And I didn't go any direction in it, until he passed away. That's when I started getting all the other interviews and all of that. So, I kind of think of this film, and it kind of played out for me in three acts, in a way. The first act of this film was to have a camera on Horton. And that was the most exciting and that was when I was just recording what I could get from him. Then second, after that, I started getting other footage and other interviews and that kind of thing. And that I was very comfortable with too, because I've been in production my whole life. But once I started the editing process, that's where I was a little bit green at what I was doing. I had so much footage, this massive amount of footage. I swear to you, I have enough footage of Horton that didn't make the film, that I can make another couple of, I could do a couple of sequels of this. It still had just go from that man. There was babies I had to kill. And it just killed me to see him hit the cutting floor. But when I got into that editing process, it was daunting to me how, I knew the story in my head that I wanted to tell, I knew that it had to be about this man and his connection to this town. And I wanted it to be a personal journey of that. But it was just really hard for me to wrangle it all into that first, very first rough cut that you start with. And I went down a few of the wrong paths in getting that done, until I finally found the right path. And the translation of that is - I had to find the right guys to get into the editing room with. And that finally happened about three years ago. I also had another middle, we had another little lag period in the middle, when I ended up going back to work and doing some script supervisor jobs that would keep me busy, like six months at a time. And my other two producers at that time, neither one of them were documentary filmmakers either. And they were making a living doing what they do. And it was a hard thing. We weren't just focusing on this. Anyway, I finally got into an editing situation that felt really good, really comfortable here in Austin with some of the greatest guys. And they've helped me bring it in. And that is what has happened over the last couple of years, mainly. We've kind of, I kind of got this thing back on track in 2018. And then it's been kind of nonstop from that point to now. So to answer the question, I don't really know why. I feel like we had the lag time in the middle. But there's a part of me that, now that it's done, and now that it's done in this time, in 2020. I feel like it's karma. Because if there is ever a time that we need a good role model of someone who is full of humanity and integrity, like I said earlier, and empathy and all those things that Horton. A lot of us are a little starved for that right now, you know. There's a lot of fighting going on in the world out there, especially in America. And everyone who sees his films says to me, you know, that just soothed my soul for an hour and a half. Thank you so much for giving me that comfort. The word comfort comes up a lot. This film brings people comfort. And it's a reminder of, it's just a reminder of the way, for a lack of a better way to say it, the way we're supposed to behave, you know. And so there's a part of me that says this was all a plan. This was all karma. That now is the time for this film, you know. And so I don't regret, I don't look back and regret the time it took me.

Matthew 39:10
I think that's a very good point. And you raised some points I hadn't actually even thought of. The one thing that struck me because when I first started watching, I was like I had to stop it actually for a minute. Because I was like, wait a minute, Horton Foote died in 2009. This is him. And it's all about him, his life. So did this really just get released? I had to make sure, you know. Because I'd been told the film has just been released. And it doesn't feel like, feels like it was come out about 10 years ago. But I think, one thing that it does for me personally, is it made I can't, I'm not the screenwriter that you are, so I don't say this eloquently, but it's almost Horton speaking from the grave, right. And then, as you say, because I think you're very straightforward about this. This isn't some guy who had some sentimental view of the past or anything like that, that, you know, even the most vigorous of his plays are set in the teens, the 20s, the 30s and you know, whatever. But you know, there's a lot, there is something that maybe we all feel like we've lost. There's some sort of, is it civility? I don't know. And, as you say, there's also this empathy, I guess that comes with it as well.

Anne Rapp 40:25
Yeah. Civility. That's a good word. That's another good one, you know. It's true. You know, he never lost that and it didn't mean that he, he wrote, you know, some very tough stories and some dark stories. But, you know, you mentioning that you felt like Horton has come out of the grave. That reminds me of something that might be kind of interesting for you to know. One of the scariest things, when I got the film finished and it was done, finished, our last graphic went in, the whole thing. I knew the first thing I had to do was send this to his daughter Hallie, who's very prominent in the film. His second daughter, Daisy is also in the film. And I called Hallie first. And Hallie even had a little trepidation about watching it. I think she knew it was going to pull up a lot of emotions. I also know that because she's, she knows how hard I worked on this. And we've been friends for a long time. I think Hallie was nervous for me - oh, my gosh, what if I don't like this film? What am I going to say to Ann? So Hallie had a little trepidation. But Daisy, actually contacted me and said, can I see the film? And so I said, sure. And I sent it to Daisy right away. And it was very nerve wracking, you know, because what the family thinks of this film is more important to me than anything. Because I feel like if I do have one regret about the length of time it took me, it said Horton never got to see it, and see what I did with it. But I knew that if I'd please the family, I probably would have pleased Horton. So anyway, Daisy watched the film, I sent her the film one night, right before I went to bed and went, okay, it's out there now to the Foote family. And she and I talked, the next morning, she called me in tears, she was so happy about it. And she just went on and on about how she couldn't, she said, I knew you were going to make a good film, but I had no idea that you got my father like you did. And that you could, she just couldn't say it. And my whole body was, just, you know, I was just relieved. And I hung up, and I went for a walk. And about 20 minutes later, I'm on my walk. And I'm just breathing because I'm happy that I'm pleased the first person in the Foote family, my phone rings, and I look down and it's Daisy again. And she goes, there's one more thing I have to tell you. I forgot to tell you this one thing. She kind of starts crying again. And she said, you know, I've been in one of those kind of pandemic writer slumps, and I can't seem to get out of it, and whatever. And she said, when I saw this film, I felt like my father was talking to me. And I felt like he was saying to me, get off your butt, get back to work, get out of that slump. And she's told me this in this very emotional way. And I thought, well, now that's about as good as it gets, you know. For a filmmaker to hear that, having just made a film about her father, you know, I was... And sure enough, within 24 hours, once Hallie knew Daisy had seen the film, Hallie said, okay, I'm ready to see the film. And I got the same reaction from Hallie, of course. So it's been kind of wonderful in that way. But it's interesting that you said you felt like it kind of came out of that. That sounds kind of morbid. He came out of the grave. He just kind of transcended to remind us? Guys, stop it. Stop acting like that. You know, be nice again. And this film is not just about a nice old man. It's about a very talented artist who got in the cracks of everything. But it proves that you don't have to be a jerk to be a good artist. I've had so many people tell me over the years that, you know, I have worked with a lot of movie directors and a lot of big, famous celebrities. And for the most part, my career was full of people who really were nice. But every once in a blue moon, you'd run across somebody who was just a jerk to everybody. And there would always be that one person that says yeah, but isn't he a genius. It's like, yeah, he's maybe a genius, but you don't have to be a jerk to be a genius. And Horton is kind of proved that, you know.

Matthew 41:03
I think he's, I guess, in his way was so reserved, at least that's what, kind of reserved in a way. In the sense that he wasn't trying to be the center of attention, certainly. But yeah, what struck me, he strikes me as one of these people who's just one big giant nerve ending, basically. He senses things, you know. There's this emotional, what we call these days, I guess, emotional intelligence, which many of us are lacking, I think.

Anne Rapp 45:43
Well, you know, Horton was the best listener I've ever met in my life. And all good writers, the two things that you need the most - you don't have to have, you don't have to be educated, you don't have to be, you don't even have to speak good grammar to be a good writer. All you need is observation skills, if you're an observer and a good listener, and then you find your own voice to reflect that to the world, here, you can write. And Horton was probably the best listener I've ever known. He was always the quietest man in the room. And, again, when I talk about celebrity, you know, I've been around a lot of, in my long career in the movie industry, I've been in a lot of social settings with celebrities that feel the need to, that they have to carry the conversation, that they have to hold a chord a little bit, that everyone's relying on them to kind of keep this. And not Horton. Horton was the opposite. Horton was the quietest guy in the corner, just soaking up every little thing, you know. And, he was, and he just didn't miss anything. And, you know, when he would say, when he was talking to me back in those early days, I wasn't even writing back when I first met him. I didn't start writing for years after I met Horton. I was just a script supervisor, which is a technical job on the set. But I was telling him all these personal stories, because he would ask me all these questions. And then he would say, you're writing this down, aren't you? And I would go, oh, should I write that down? He goes yes, write that down. Don't forget that, you know. So we connected it to writing. But he was, he wasn't just, he was just infinitely curious. I've never seen anyone as curious as he was. But you talk about also, what an understated guy he was. And he didn't really need a lot of attention. His hometown, this is something else that we, you know, touch on in the film, his hometown, they didn't really know who he was much. They didn't turn him like some big deal. And he, you know, he tells a really great story in the film about when he got the Pulitzer Prize. And I'm not gonna be a spoiler alert here. Everyone who's listened to this, you got to watch the film and see how Horton Foote found out he won the Pulitzer Prize. And that was exactly who he was, you know. It never occurred to him to seek attention. He didn't, I never saw him do it, you know. And he said this, he said a wonderful thing in one of the many interviews that I would pull out of the archives that I didn't use for the film, just some of them are burned into my memory, little moments. There was an interview he did, it was quite, it was probably 30 or 40 years ago, because he was, Horton would have been about maybe 60 in that interview. And it was Dan Rather interviewing Horton Foote. It's a beautiful interview. And at the end of the interview, Dan said to him, Horton, what do you think should be on your tombstone? And Horton just stopped. And you could just tell by the look on his face, no one had ever asked him that. And he had never thought about it. But he considered it a valid question. So he better come up with an answer, you know. And he just, he took his time. And then he said - "he tried". That's what he would have wanted on his tombstone. He tried. And I just, that's one of those moments that's just burned into my memory, from just seeing that in the interview in the archives, you know, beautiful Horton moment. And that's who he was. That's who he was, you know.

Matthew 49:57
Well, as you said, you met on this set of an amazing film, was one of my, I haven't seen it in a long time, but I love Tender Mercies. I mean, you already kind of explained what a script supervisor does, but how do you supervise Horton Foote's script? I mean, that sounds like a daunting job for someone who's new to the business. And what was it like? I mean, that must have been an incredible experience. I think Richard Linklater is in the film, talks about the 80s being an exciting time for independent films. Robert Duvall, Tess Harper, others in this film, must been an amazing experience.

Anne Rapp 50:36
Oh, gosh, it was. The very idea that I even got hired on that film. I was just, I was a script supervisor in Dallas, who was just starting out. I mean, I had literally done like two little small local films. They weren't big films at all. They were just some films that a local guy had written something and he hired a local crew, and we kind of all threw in and about half of us knew what we were doing and other half didn't, and I was in this other half, and you learn as you go. And when Tender Mercies came to town, Dallas was one of those, that was one of the first what they call the runaway production cities in the country. When productions first started going out of LA. And because they started figuring out we can do production cheaper than all the stuff that we have pay for in LA. So Dallas was one of the first cities, so the early 80s got really hot. And they were actually doing a lot of those, at that time in the early 80s, there were a lot of movies of the week. The major networks, did movies of the week. So there were two experienced script supervisors in Dallas. And they got all the jobs that came from LA. And so all of a sudden, this little film shows up one day, and it's an Australian director, and kind of a low budget, you know, Australian cinematographer and editor. And no one knew much about it. And it didn't went on anybody's radar really. And those two script supervisors, you know, the production manager called and figured out who the experienced script supervisors, and both of those girls were like, well, I already got a job, I'm gonna stick with this job I've got, this television movie of the week. And the other one was on something like that, too. So the job, all of a sudden, it was like, there was no one to do this job unless they wanted to bring someone in. And it was recommended that they talk to me. I have little experience and why they took a chance on me, I don't know. I feel honored. But they threw the job at me. So that was an amazing experience in itself. But to answer your question about how do you script supervisor Horton Foote's script. You have to understand that the script supervisors job, they call it continuity in England and in a lot of other countries, but that job is a highly technical job. You take that script, and you break it down technically, every way you can, that, you know, the actor's journey. The film is shot out of sequence. There has to be one person who's at circus net, who totally keeps track of these minor nitpicky details about, you'll shoot the scene in a house and a guy walks out the door. And in the movie it carries on where you jump outside, he comes out the door, gets in his car and leaves. You're likely to shoot that scene outside two months later in a different city. You have to match the door, you have to know when he walked out the door, did he have his coat open? Was his hat on? Was it in his hand? Did he have his briefcase in his left or his right hand? There's continuity from scene to scene. But then also when you shoot a scene, you do 10 or 12, 15 shots of that scene. And you have to recreate it over and over and over. And somebody has to say, when you've moved all the furniture out of the room, then you move all the furniture back in to shoot another shot? Was that chair here? Or was that chair here? And was those blinds open? So when you talk about, those are the kind of things that script supervisor does. It has nothing to do with, of course, it also had the responsibility of if an actor missed the line, I had to tell him his line. If an actor mismatched his action, if in the master, he walked over there, and then all of a sudden we're in his close up and he walks to a different place. That's a script supervisor's job. So there's added thing that you have to go in there, you're the mistake catcher. So my job was more about shooting Horton's script than it was about the content. It wouldn't do at all about the content of the script. So it was just, a script supervisor is the director's right hand person. And you track all of those details, so the directors mind can be on the creative. All he has to worry about is the performance, because I'm the one who's going to tell him, they sat down on the wrong line, or they stood up on the wrong line, or that sort of thing, you know. And so that job was not very related to what Horton did.

Matthew 55:30
And what was it like working with Robert Duvall?

Anne Rapp 55:34
Oh, gosh, Duvall. I was very honored to work with him again later, much later in my career, as well. And stayed friendly with him and still am on a level. Robert Duvall was one of the most flawless actors I've ever worked with. And I mean, I worked with a lot of actors in my career, and great ones. But he was just masterful. There's no doubt he won an Oscar for that role, beautiful performance. But he was such a pro that he had, I don't know how he did it, and I worked with very few actors that had that gift that he did. Where he had it so worked out in his head. That's what he was going to do in each scene. So he didn't have to worry about the physicality. You know, a lot of actors get thrown like, oh, gosh, every time I sit, they're sitting down and they're not, something doesn't feel comfortable so it affects their performance or whatever. He would have it so worked out that all of that stuff was done, taken care of, out of his way. So that all he had to do was go into that emotion, and be that person and have the emotion he needed in that scene. And he never, he never made a mistake. The first half of the movie, and I was again, like I said earlier, I was very green, so it was a little nerve wracking for me working with star like him. But I never had to say anything to him because he never made a mistake. He never missed a line. He never mismatched his action. So about halfway through the movie, I just say good morning when he walked in the set or something. And that was it. And so I had no interaction with him. And about halfway through the movie, I was much younger at the time. This was 1981 that we shot it. The crew had this habit, we shot, we had this nine set that we shot on, this old motel set, just out in the country on this long, long dirt road. And this is typical of film crews. Film crews, if the weather's nice, they'd had to get outside on their lunch break. And throw a football, or somebody will put up a volleyball net, or some of them played baseball, throw a baseball around. And the guys on Tender Mercies, they got into this thing of, they had a football and they would try to figure out who could throw the longest pass. And I was a little jock. I grew up as a jock. And I could run and catch. Now I couldn't throw it out of my shadow. But I became their little, the catcher. And I would crack off running down the road. And these guys would throw these long passes, and I run out fast, but then I'd have to run the ball back to them. I couldn't throw it back. I run two thirds back and then I'd throw it or something. Then I'd run out again. And one day Duvall was out on the set watching. And he got intrigues with this. Because usually he wasn't out there at lunch, but he was out there one day at lunch. And when I came back to the set that day, he goes, hey, Tex, he calls me over, calls me Tex, you know. I'm like, yeah, me? Yeah. And he goes, You got brothers, don't you? And I said, yeah, I've got one brother and I got two sisters that might as well be brothers. Because they're jocks too. And he said, boy, you get that football. And I became his favorite person on the crew, because I could catch a football. Had nothing to do with whether I was any good at the job. Because Robert Duvall didn't need me. He didn't need me to tell him anything. If every actor was like Robert Duvall, there would not be a position called script supervisor. Because no mistakes would be made. Maybe they'd have somebody that had to check the prop department or that, you know, the set dressers or something, but you wouldn't have to worry about actors. And I worked with very few other actors who were that good at the whole package. He was amazing.

Matthew 59:42
And then you've moved into screenwriting and you worked with other legends, and you worked with Robert Altman. I mean Cookie's Fortune, I guess. What was that like? I mean, he's legendary.

Anne Rapp 59:57
Well, you know, Altman has actually started my screenwriting career. I had been script supervising for a long time. And I just started trying. This was when I was in, this was probably back in, gosh, I'm drawing a blanks. This was probably in 90, somewhere around, it was the early 90s. And I started trying to write some stories down. Because I had too many people tell me you're such a good storyteller. Why don't you try to write some of these stories down. So I started trying to do it. And I felt like I was kind of all over the map. And so I went away to Oxford, Mississippi for a year. I took a year off. Went and lived in this town, Oxford, and took a short story workshop by one of my heroes, named Barry Hannah, who's no longer with us. But Barry Hannah was a brilliant short story writer. And I found out that he taught there. And I was working on the movie up in Memphis called The Firm, with Sydney Pollack and Tom Cruise and that all crowd, and someone said, you need to go down to this town, and go visit Oxford. It's about an hour south of Memphis. And I would go down there on weekends and stuff. Anyway, bottom line is I figured out that Barry taught there. I went there, I saved enough money to go there for a year. And I started writing short stories. And I got one published at the end of that journey, in a little literary magazine in New York. And it just inadvertently found its way to Altman. Now, I knew Altman socially, because my ex-husband used to work on some movies with him. And I used to, I've gone to the racetrack with him. And I had been out drinking with him, but I never worked for him. But it was a one page story that got published in the New York journal. And he read it and called me and I was on another film set by that time. And I just messaged call Robert Altman, and I called him back at lunch. And he talked to me for about 30 minutes about how much he loved that story and did I have any more. And we had this whole conversation about movies are more like short stories than they are novels. And I was scared to send him any more stories. And he kept bugging me to send him some more stories. And I thought, Oh, he's read the best one. That's the only one I ever had published. If I send you more, they weren't done to be as good. So he'll write me off. And I said, Bob, let me write some new stories. He's like, no, no, I want them now. So I, you know, got courageous and send him some more stories that I had written for Barry's class. And he loved about three of them. And he put me under contract to write for him. And it started out as a contract for a year. And it turned into two years and turned into three years. And in those three years, we got Cookie's Fortune was the first film and Dr. T and the Women was second film we made. And then we had done a television episode of our short lived series called Gun that he was a part of for a short while. And all three of these, all three, the two movies and the television episode were based on my short stories. And so I had this kind of miraculous run with Robert Altman, because he just tapped into me for a while, and somehow liked how I wrote. And we were very different in a way. Altman's cynical, and I'm not as cynical as Altman. We sort of, I kind of smooth his edges and he roughed mine up a little bit. And somehow he just liked my voice, and we have a good run. And it was, that's one of the greatest things that's ever happened to me, my run with Robert Altman. I miss him like crazy, you know. He was another great one.

Matthew 1:03:44
That's an amazing story. And speaking of stories, and I don't usually do this, I don't usually do, when we do research, I try not to read other interviews, because it kind of prejudices myself when I'm going to ask questions and things. But I did read the Texas Monthly interview. And you talk about, I think it ends with you talking about the storytelling tradition in Texas. And we've had other Texas filmmakers on of your generation and now millennial. And so these are people who've grown up with TV, but they still talk. It is interesting, and I've told you, I've been over here a long time, but I was born and raised in Texas. So there's something about, there is, you know, is that something you and also, I guess, Horton was drawing on as well. This sort of, I don't know what it is about Texas culture. And it's not just Texas, there's other parts of the United States thata have this. But, especially Texas seems to have this whole storytelling tradition.

Anne Rapp 1:04:47
Yeah, well, you know, I was born a long time ago, and long before, we got a television when I was maybe five or six, you know. But even in those days, you didn't watch TV at all during the day, you might turn it on for 30 minutes of news in the morning, there were only, you only had three networks to look at. Then you wouldn't even turn it on at night until after you'd hit supper and done your homework and everything. And your family might let you watch one or two shows. And that was it. You know, that's the farm life. But we were very remote. The town I was born in, Amarillo, Texas was 100 miles away and it was the biggest town of any size near us. So we were in the big middle of nowhere. So the entertainment at night, a lot of times was not TV and it certainly wasn't any of this internet phone stuff. It was people just recapping the day and telling after dinner, we called it supper then, we didn't call it dinner. But you would either sit on the porch, or I don't want to make it sound like, you know, cliche in any way. You would sit outside or people would go up to other people's houses, and you entertained each other with stories. And it was, you could make a story out of just some mundane thing happened at the post office that day. And next thing you know, somebody had spun some yarn with it. And then, whether it was true or not, and then someone would play off of that and tell you their little story of what happened. And those guys would talk into the night, you know. And Horton's from that same era, you know. He was even, obviously, way before me, when they didn't even have television. So it was oral storytelling is a tradition. People talk about how oh Texans are storytellers, and southerners are storytellers. And this other people in the country are not? And I always think about that phenomenon. I think, you know, people in Ohio, people in New York, people in Oregon, they didn't have, they were the same as we were. They had to tell stories at night. So there must be something about the culture of Texans and southerners. And I think they're two different things. Texas is a bookend of the South, in my opinion, I've always thought Texas and Florida are bookends of the south and you've got South and I have a real affinity to the south as well. But Texans, the East Texans are different than West Texans. And there's a, I'm from a very patriarchal society, which is the West Texas society whereas you get farther east and on the Louisiana border, that's more of a matriarchal world. So the patriarchal folks where I came from, are a little bit more stoic and a little more buttoned up and a little less emotional. Whereas you get more East Texas and into the South. It's more of, that's where the Tennessee Williams hysteria comes in, you know. But I do think there is an element of Texans and southerners that they don't mind spilling all their flaws. They don't, they don't hide their flaws. Somehow they're more vulnerable, openly. And I think that that's what intrigues people from different parts of the country that aren't that way. That lends itself to storytelling, a little bit in a different, maybe not more, but in a different way, you know. And that's why there have been so many great writers that come out of the south, for that very reason. That it is not odd to be odd. It's not weird to be weird. You know, southerners don't hide it. And so it makes that storytelling is, like free for all. And maybe that's what it is. This is just my speculation. I don't know.

Matthew 1:09:10
And getting back to the, you know, these short stories you did and then Robert Altman tapped into them. I mean, how do you get that, how do you make this great script? How do you get the words to jump off the page? And do you think, are you thinking of actors, I don't mean necessarily specific actor, but are you thinking of actors when you're doing this?

Anne Rapp 1:09:33
I don't think I have ever written anything with an actor in mind. I might have a characteristic of somebody in mind, whether it's a real person or an actor or what. Certainly, I pull from people I know, somebody has, you know, Cookie's Fortune, there's some family, there's a lot of family stuff in Cookie's Fortune that I kind of pulled from some of my own experience. But when I start writing these, when I start writing my stories, you know, I start hearing voices. And I don't really even see the faces so much. I sort of see a vague, maybe vague image, but it's more about hearing their voices. And I don't, I don't see anyone in particular, I just see this conglomeration. Every character I've written has a little bit of, probably all of them have a little bit of me in them, but this one might have a lot of my sister in it, and this one might have a lot of greataunt an this one might have a lot of just somebody I knew, you know. And I have never ever written for particular, in fact, when you write for Robert Altman, you're always shocked at who he's cast. He's got one of them. crazy ways, he had one of those crazy ways of casting. He would cast somebody and I'd go - really?! And then that person would end up being my favorite one in the movie. And not, not like I had favorites. I love them all. But an example of that was in Cookie's Fortune, Liv Tyler. I've worked with Liv twice when I worked as a script supervisor on the movies. And she is the sweetest, kindest kid. She's not a kid anymore, but she was then. But even she, they even came across her acting, she's soft. And she a little delicate and a little fragile. And I wrote this rebel child in Cookie's Fortune, this rebel. And the ordinary person would have gone out there and cast a rebel actress, you know. And kind of stereotyped it a little bit. And Bob cast Liv and when he told me that, it was kind of a double edged sword for me, because I thought Liv Tyler, cause I loved her dearly. I've met her and I just adored her. And I thought she was really good, but I thought - really? she's gonna play Emma? Okay, I'm like, you know, but you go with what Robert does so. And she's genius in the film, because she didn't, she played it from a different place, you know? So that's why you don't write for an actor. That's why you don't write for, you write this and then you let somebody else interpret it. And you know, when you're writing, that's what you're going to do, you know.

Matthew 1:12:36
And I guess where I was going with this question, because I wasn't thinking necessarily even so much specifically, a specific actor. But what struck me, if we take this back to Horton Foote, is that he struck me, you could describe him as a playwright who is an actor's best friend, you know. Because you think about it, you know, he does the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird and Gregory Peck gets Best Actor. He does, you know, Tender Mercies, Robert Duvall. The one thing he didn't win, Horton, was a Tony. But I don't know this, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone from one of his plays didn't get a Tony.

Anne Rapp 1:13:17
After his death, they did a black version on stage of The Trip to Bountiful and Cicely Tyson won a Tony.

Intro 1:13:24
There you go. You know.

Anne Rapp 1:13:26
Of course, Geraldine Page won a Tony as well for The Trip to Bountiful in the film.

Matthew 1:13:32
Right. Exactly. So what was, what was his genius, do you think?

Anne Rapp 1:13:39
You know, I would ask actors over my career about, or even not even actors. I could ask directors and people who work closely with actors, you know, what does it take to be that, the difference in the good actor and a great actor? And the answer I would frequently get from the people who really knew and got in the cracks of that was honesty. The best actors are the ones that are the most honest. They find their own truth in this character. And then they portray it, honestly. And I think the same thing goes for writing. That Horton's honesty went into those characters. So if you take a writer like Horton, who is infinitely honest, every one of his characters are honest. There's an honesty to it. And then you pull an actor like Robert Duvall, who there's never a dishonest moment in his acting. Geraldine Page and those guys. Then that's where the magic happens. And I would just say that it's all about honesty. And no matter how hard or soft or tough or gentle, or whatever that character is and what they're doing, it has to be honest. And if you are a serial killer, you can't just say he's a serial killer. You need to know why. And you need to know what, okay, there's one good thing about that serial killer, what is it? Will he support his mother, you know? I don't know. But you got to find the honesty in it, you know. And Horton was a genius at that. That's why actors love doing his work. Because they didn't have to do any of that work for him. I've seen actors so many times on sets, when I was a script supervisor, where they had to take dishonest material and make it honest when it came out of their mouths. And some actors could do it and some couldn't. And the film, you know, would suffer or benefit from whichever one happened. But honesty is key in it. I think in all of art. And that's why Horton was, he just gave you that foundation.

Matthew 1:15:09
And do you have a favorite play or screenplay? What are your favorite plays or screenplays of his?

Anne Rapp 1:16:16
Horton's?

Matthew 1:16:16
Yeah.

Anne Rapp 1:16:18
You know, I have to say, the film, even though I worked on Tender Mercies, and the obvious answer would be Tender Mercies. Because it's so close to my heart. The film that just, it's like a velvet dagger to me, is Trip to Bountiful. And that's because, like most of Horton's work, everybody finds something in there that they relate to, you know. And I relate so closely to Trip to Bountiful in so many ways. About going home and home is really not there anymore. But it's there in your memory. And she, I cry every time I see that film. You know, I cry. I've seen my film 300 times probably or more, just through all the different variations, gyrations of it. And every time I get to the moment in the film, where we have a clip of Geraldine Page getting out of the car and looking at that old fallen down shack in the high grass. And saying - I'm home. And it's so sad. And I just, I still go. And that film just rips my heart out. One of his plays that I love, that I've never seen it staged, and before I go, I want to see this staged somewhere. I got to find a performance of it and just go, that on the page is as good as it gets, is a play he wrote called Habitation of Dragons. And there's two, if you'll notice, there's two monologues in the film that I pulled from Habitation of Dragons. They also did a television show of that. So there is a TV movie called Habitation of Dragons. But it was originally a play. And just reading the words on the page, that one's also one of my, it just knocks me out, you know.

Matthew 1:18:22
I think you raise a good point there. You know, I think you spoke earlier about how this speaks to, people talking about how this speaks to young artists and writers and they should see this film. I mean, for those listening to this podcast, how do they, I mean, obviously, we can see some of the movies. We can probably stream them somewhere. But, you know, are his plays, are they still being staged? What would your advice be? Or is it about just going to the library and seeing if you can find any of his plays published?

Anne Rapp 1:18:57
You know, you can find his plays published, there's collections of them. And it might take, for instance, there's a big fat version that I looked up for a friend just the other day. There's a book about that big that is a collection of his one act plays. And oh, there's some genius one act plays in there. That he wrote and did over the years. And you know, you can find that online. Just go Google it and find a number of booksellers that sell. There's all kinds of variations, you know, there'll be a collection of three screenplays. Obviously the movies are easier to find. Because you could find Tender Mercies, you can find To Kill a Mockingbird, everyone can find that. You can find Trip to Bountiful, you can find his movies. But as far as the plays, you can find them published. And I think it's easier now to even get the little published versions of just a play. I think there's services that do that. But every once in a while, you know, they stay in there, they still do his plays. College theaters still do his plays. And to be honest, I am hoping that if I can get enough people to see this film, and to give Horton a little presence again right now, I would love to encourage college theater programs or any kind of theater programs and theaters to bring back some of these Horton Foote plays. I'm hoping that film does that. I'm hoping my film makes the world aware of him a little bit more again. You know, earlier, we talked a little bit about where is this film going to be distributed. Obviously, it's probably going to hit some streaming service or a PBS American Masters or something out there is going to work. But I'm going to make sure, this is where I'm just learning this next step, but I'm going to make sure that I keep some kind of control over the educational rights to this film. Because I want to see this film available in college theater programs and writing programs. I want it accessible to that, because I think it can only be a benefit to the young playwrights of today, and young theatre directors of today. These plays are, they're amazing. And they're going to stand, withstand time. And they're great vehicles for so many characters, that actors can stretch, directors can stretch. There's an endless wealth of work there that I would like to see revived. And maybe this film will make a little bit of that happen.

Matthew 1:22:10
I sure hope so, too. Anne, we've, I'm aware that we, I didn't even ask if you had anything on after this. We're probably cutting into something else you're supposed to be doing.

Anne Rapp 1:22:22
No, I was free this afternoon. So that's good.

Matthew 1:22:26
But what's next for you? I mean, I know you've got this on your hands at the moment. But do you have any projects in the works, in addition to everything that's going on with the Horton Foote doc?

Anne Rapp 1:22:39
Well, you know, it's funny, because I'm kind of one of those people that, especially as I've gotten older, I don't put all my eggs in one basket. I kind of do a lot of different things. And, as far as screenplays, I do have two screenplays that I'm still trying to get off the ground somewhere. Completed screenplays, that I would love it if I could find a home for them. And one is a film that I wrote quite a few years ago, but people still to this day, a lot of people still want to make this film. So it might happen. And another one is just a more recent script that I wrote just a couple of years ago. But those are written and done. It's just a matter of trying to get those, find a home for those. But as far as a creative endeavor, about a couple of years ago, I started writing a book that is sort of a memoir, it's I call it, it's memoir-ish. And it's a lot of personal stories. And I found a little side angle to come in on it, so that I'm not hitting a straight head on memoir. And I had to put that aside this past year, year and a half, because it's been non stop documentary. So I'm dying to get back to that book. And then as far as one other creative outlet I've got, whether this will ever amount to anything outside my own little studio, I don't know. But I started drawing about three or four years ago. And I'm completely obsessed with the easel now and drawing. Every time I have time and the space, all I want to go do is that. Somehow that has just been the one thing that cleanses my palette better than anything, my emotional palette. So what I want to do is get back to the easel and get back to the memoir. If I got one of these movies off the ground, there's nothing I would like more than to go make another movie, you know, who knows? That's kind of what's up. So, you know, I've got a couple of plates spinning out there.

Matthew 1:24:56
Okay, that sounds great. And it sounds to me that you're very efficient with your time.

Anne Rapp 1:25:02
I'm pretty efficient with my time, you know, I don't know, I can procrastinate with the best of them, believe me. And slough off. But you know, if I don't do something creative every day, there's just something that's not right at the end of the day. If I haven't created a little something, whether it's a paragraph of this or I've gone in and fixed a nose. I like to paint faces or draw faces, I'm in the kind of faces thing. And if I get a nostril right, then, in one day then I did something, you know. And I just, I've always had this urge to keep creating something. I've had a lot of people in Q&A's, since we've been doing a little bit of screening work with this film, say what's your next documentary? I'm like, oh, my gosh, do I have to do another one? But I've had people ask me, would you do another one? And if you'd asked me that question a year ago, I would have said no way. It's too much work. This took me too long. But the answer now that I have the finished product, and I'm really happy with it and all that. Basically, the way I answer that question now is, I would only do another documentary if I had as much passion for the subject matter, as I did for this one.

Matthew 1:26:29
But I think one thing that, if I may say, what you bring to the documentary world, which don't, you know, there's obviously a lot of amazing documentarians, but I think it's your writer's craft, is a, not so much unique, but it's quite a benefit, I think. Because you said it was an hour and a half, it's like an hour and 17. But I think it's really, it's tight, I would say. You're not, you know, having watched, I'm watching a lot of documentaries these days, hosting this podcast. And that isn't always the case. You know, you always feel like, Oh, that's maybe ran about 10-20 minutes too long. This didn't feel that way at all. And also an idea, I mean, there's a lot of good storytellers out there, in terms of, whether they know it or not. Maybe not even on the written page, who are putting documentaries together now. But I think it is something, if you do consider doing, I think you've got a great idea for the arc of the story and how to, obviously you do, because that's your profession. And so thank you. I meant to say that earlier on, thank you for making this film.

Anne Rapp 1:27:46
Well, listen. It was an honor. At times, it felt like a job. And it felt like I was pushing a wagon up the hill by myself. But it was an honor, in the end to be able to make this film about Horton, you know, and it was worth. There were times where I wasn't sure it was going to be worth the time I've spent. But in the end, it is, it's well worth it. Because I love that guy, and you can't not fall in love with him, you know. If you've spent any time with him, and I think you can't watch this film and not fall in love with him. He just, he's, I'll use the word everybody's using. He's a comfort.

Matthew 1:28:38
That's probably where we should leave it. I think the thing that strikes me is he's almost exact same age my grandfather was. And I think there is something grandfatherly too about him, that's probably comforting to us all. We probably could all use a good grandfather these days. Well, I would just want to thank you Anne, Anne Rapp, the director and producer of Horton Foote: Road to Home. Thank you so much for coming on to the Factual America podcast. I want to give a shout out to This Is Distorted studios in Leeds, England. Please remember to like us and share us with your friends and family wherever you happen to listen or watch podcasts. And this is Factual America, signing off.

Factual America Outro 1:29:22
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