![]() ![]() 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. As the trial approaches, Atticus must choose whether to buckle under the mounting pressure or to stand his ground and fight for what is right.“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. ![]() With his decision to defend Tom, Atticus finds himself ostracised from the community, and the lives of his family put into danger. When local black man Tom Robinson is accused of raping a white girl, Scout's lawyer father Atticus Finch takes on the case, determined to try and give Tom a fair trial. Told through the eyes of 13-year-old Scout, Mockingbird is set in the pre-civil rights era Deep South of the 1930s. ![]() A portrait of simmering racial tensions in a small southern town, To Kill a Mockingbird is considered one of the greatest American novels ever written. In today's climate, its themes of prejudice and inequality seem just as prescient, while the book's steadfast lawyer Atticus Finch remains the gold standard for noble heroes. Adapted from the classic Harper Lee novel the production wowed Broadway's critics, earning itself nine 2019 Tony Award nominations. Storming onto Broadway in late 2018 Aaron Sorkin's acclaimed adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird is now planning to show at the CAA Theatre, Toronto. ![]()
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