Horton Foote, who died yesterday at 92, was a prolific playwright who became Hollywood's go-to guy for rustic rural drama. Foote, who had had his work produced on Broadway since 1940, began writing scripts for TV with 1953's The Trip to Bountiful, which starred Lillian Gish, and broke into movies with the 1955 Storm Fear, directed by Cornel Wilde and based on a novel by Clinton Seeley. His real big break in movies came with his second job, also an adaptation: he won an Academy Award for turning Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird into a screenplay for the 1962 movie directed by Robert Mulligan. Foote and Mulligan would work together again on the 1965 Baby, the Rain Must Fall, which marked the first time Foote would get to adapt his own work for the movies. (It was based on his play The Traveling Saleslady.) Perhaps more importantly, Mockingbird began Foote's movie partnership with Robert Duvall; he would personally recommend the actor, who Foote knew from the New York theater scene, for the role of Boo Radley. It was Duvall's movie debut. Ten years later, Duvall would take the lead role in Tomorrow, a small movie written by Foote, based on a story by William Faulkner; seventeen years later, Duvall would tell an interviewer that it was his "favorite role, ever." The two would work together again on 1983's Tender Mercies, directed by Bruce Beresford from Foote's original screenplay. It won Foote his second Oscar, as well a Best Actor Academy Award for Duvall.

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The Hollywood director Robert Mulligan died yesterday at the age of 83. After attending Fordham University and serving with the Marines in World War II, Mulligan broke into directing for television, working his way up from a job as messenger boy. During the era of live TV plays, he directed such notable broadcasts as Gore Vidal's 1954 adaptation of William Faulkner's Barn Burning; Vidal's The Death of Billy the Kid starring Paul Newman, which would provide the basis for the Arthur Penn movie The Left-Handed Gun, also with Newman; the 1955 A Man Is Ten Feet Tall, starring Sidney Poitier; and, in 1959, The Moon and Sixpence, which marked the first of Laurence Olivier's rare appearances on American TV. (Both Mulligan and Olivier won Emmys for it.) By then, Mulligan had already made the leap to feature films with the 1957 Fear Strikes Out, a biopic starring Anthony Perkins as the emotionally troubled baseball player player Jimmy Piersall. That success helped established his reputation as a gifted director with actors who could apply a delicate hand to sensitive material.

Those virtues would come in handy with Mulligan's best-remembered film, the 1962 To Kill a Mockingbird.

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Truman Capote's In Cold Blood:  A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences was born to be a movie.  The book was an immediate best-seller on its release in 1966, and plans were afoot to film it almost before it rolled off the presses.  Capote's improbable inspiration was a 300-word piece in the New York Times — then, as now, little more than a blurb — about a murder in a remote corner of Kansas; something about it captivated his imagination, and he spent the next seven years crafting, along with his friend and fellow novelist Harper Lee, a masterful true-crime story about the pointless killing of the Clutter family.  Just as Capote had no idea at the time how obsessed he would become with the story of the Clutters and the murderous drifters, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who took their lives, the public had no idea that the book he wrote about them would launch a new genre of fiction — the 'non-fiction novel' — and stand out as an early example of what would become known as 'the New Journalism'.  It would also cast a huge shadow over Capote's life and career; of all his works, none save Breakfast at Tiffany's would so resonate with the public.

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