Home >  A & E

Thursday, February 20, 2003

By Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

As all good "Seinfeld" addicts know, George Costanza tried to read "Breakfast at Tiffany's" but just couldn't (or wouldn't) do it. So, he took the easy road: He went to the video store to rent the movie. It was checked out, but that didn't stop him. He simply showed up on the doorstep of the family watching it and plopped himself down on their couch.

	Gregory Peck won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird."

While not suggesting you watch the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird" instead of reading the novel with the rest of your neighbors as part of the One Book, One Community project, the film is worthy of your time, too. You can see it for free today at 7 p.m. in Clapp Hall on the University of Pittsburgh campus.

A free panel discussion, " 'To Kill a Mockingbird' -- From Pulitzer Prize to Oscar," will start at 2 p.m. tomorrow in the William Pitt Union Assembly Room. Harish Saluja, director-writer of "The Journey," will moderate a talk with Pittsburgh filmmaker Tony Buba; Vernell Lillie, founder of the Kuntu Repertory Theatre; cinematographer John Rice; and City Paper critic Harry Kloman.

The 59-year-old Buba can't remember the first time he saw the film, suggesting, "It sort of blends into your own childhood. I don't know how it affects kids today, where they can't walk through the town" or while away the hours unsupervised. "Mockingbird" has much to recommend, Buba says: a restrained, dignified Gregory Peck, luxuriously long takes, amazing child performances -- "no false moments in them, no fast comebacks" -- along with properly sparse music and beautiful black-and-white photography.

Here are some interesting tidbits about the 1962 release, which landed at No. 34 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 greatest American movies.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" was shot entirely on a Hollywood back lot, where 15 acres were converted into the fictional town of Maycomb. Its 1930s courtroom is a re-creation of the interior of the Monroe County Courthouse in Monroeville, Ala., author Harper Lee's hometown.

The movie starred Peck as widowed Southern lawyer Atticus Finch, the very picture of decency and quiet courage; Mary Badham and Phillip Alford as his children, Scout and Jem; Frank Overton as the sheriff; William Windom as the prosecutor; and Brock Peters as Finch's client Tom Robinson, a black man wrongly accused of beating and raping a white woman.

"Mockingbird" marked Robert Duvall's motion-picture debut. Before his turn as the pale-faced, mysterious Boo Radley, object of the children's fright and fascination, he had appeared on stage and done some TV work.

Young Badham was an inexperienced 9-year-old from Birmingham, Ala., when she was cast as Scout, a role that would earn her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress (she lost to Patty Duke, "The Miracle Worker"). A recent story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch says Badham is now a 50-year-old mother of two living in an undisclosed location in central Virginia.

She works two jobs, testing students for college placement and assisting an artist who specializes in restoring oil paintings. Badham said she retired at 13 because "by then, the industry had changed so dramatically. It was not the same industry I had joined. Scripts were getting more loose with their language, more sexually explicit, more violent."

Badham once told a reporter from The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk she won the role because of one line to a talent scout. He said, "You're a very little girl for your age." She replied: "You'd be little, too, if you drank as much coffee as I do." Scout was nothing if not feisty and forthright.

After a week's run in Los Angeles in 1962 to qualify for the Academy Awards, the movie opened at New York's Radio City Music Hall on Feb. 14, 1963. Lee was pleased. "I can only say that I am a happy author. They have made my story into a beautiful and moving motion picture. I am very proud and very grateful."

The book "Inside Oscar" says Universal Pictures pitched "Mockingbird" to Academy Award voters with this campaign: "The Pulitzer Prize novel that has become a legend in its own time is now a memorable motion picture." Life magazine suggested, " 'Mockingbird' fairly sings out for this year's Oscar," while McCall's enthused, "What a sheer delight to see a movie that informs, amuses, enchants and makes you think all at the same time."

In the Oscar sweepstakes, "To Kill a Mockingbird" was nominated for eight statuettes: picture, actor, supporting actress, director, adapted screenplay, cinematography, art direction-set decoration for a black-and-white movie and music score.

It won for Peck, who triumphed over Burt Lancaster in "Birdman of Alcatraz," Jack Lemmon in "Days of Wine and Roses," Marcello Mastroianni in "Divorce -- Italian Style" and Peter O'Toole in "Lawrence of Arabia," as well as writer Horton Foote and the trio behind the art direction and set decoration.

Elmer Bernstein, nominated for an Oscar for the "Mockingbird" musical score, is back in the contenders' circle this year for the "Far from Heaven" score.

In an interview with the Post-Gazette in 1997, Peck said of his "Mockingbird" role: "That's the one most people think of, if they think of me at all."

ABC aired "To Kill a Mockingbird" on Christmas Day 1997. A network executive said he scheduled the movie because "a whole generation of TV viewers has little, if any, idea of how it speaks volumes about bigotry and prejudice."