Word: mockingbird
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...obit headlines have it right. For all of Robert Mulligan's impressive credentials in his 40-year career as a director of television and movie dramas, his signature achievement was the 1962 film version of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The picture - which won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck, and earned Mulligan his only Oscar nomination - had an immediate and lasting impact. Back then it provided a Hollywood echo of the civil rights agitation that had roiled the South and seized the nation. But Peck's role as Atticus Finch...
...Universal Pictures, the sponsor of To Kill a Mockingbird, wanted the role of Atticus to go to its top star, Rock Hudson, whom Mulligan had directed the year before in the romantic comedy Come September. But Pakula and Mulligan held out for Peck, the screen's flintiest rock of movie rectitude. Lee was in enthusiastic agreement, for she had based Atticus on her lawyer father and saw a kinship between him and Peck. On the first day of shooting she told him, "Gregory, you've got a little potbelly just like my daddy," and Peck replied, "Harper, that's great...
...these eight long years possibly come true this Tuesday. Also, spent time making calls to help remove three Republican incumbent Congressmen from Michigan: Knollenberg, Wahlberg and Rogers. I am very hopeful about that. Went to a double bill at my art house here in northern Michigan: To Kill a Mockingbird and Bulworth. And I was on Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher on Friday. This fall I have spent the bulk of my time helping bring Michigan from a swing state to solid for Obama...
...black underling. (You've heard of Huckleberry Finn? Gone With the Wind?) The novel is set in rural South Carolina in 1964, which is just about the time it would have automatically been turned into an Oscar-nominated movie. The obvious reference point is To Kill a Mockingbird, whose girl narrator, Scout Finch, is 6 to Lily's 14, and whose fictional setting is Maycomb, Ala., instead of Bees' Tiburon, S.C. But that was back when most big films tended to serious sentiment. Today, the dominant tone is irreverence, sarcasm, facetiousness. Can a time-capsule movie like this one have...
...monitoring her moods, so she never pushes an emotion; she's like a doctor with a sixth sense for detecting internal ailments. With no signs of exertion, Fanning wills Lily from fictional stereotype into persuasive movie existence. The Secret Life of Bees may not be a To Kill a Mockingbird on page or screen, but Fanning is the center of its soul and intelligence. It's Hollywood's job to find strong parts for this precocious genius as she matures into womanhood...