To Kill a Mockingbird: Book vs. Movie
Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) adapts Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, with Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. Scout and Jem watch their father defend a Black man in a hostile Alabama town.
From Books Adapted
What changed from the book
Scout overhears a conversation the book keeps from her
Foote staged the conversation about Atticus taking Tom Robinson's case so that Scout could hear it. In the novel, the children are not present for that discussion.
The arrangement came from his own childhood: he remembered hearing his parents talking on the porch through his bedroom's open windows. He used that memory to bring an adult conversation into the child's experience.
How it was adapted
Foote shortened the children's timeline
The movie reaches the end of the novel's main story, but omits and rearranges some of the children's earlier adventures. Screenwriter Horton Foote said the book's passage through several years needed a different structure for a movie.
He aimed to gather the action into roughly a year and keep it within the town. That meant writing new scenes as well as removing material, rather than simply selecting passages in their original order.
Lee gave Foote permission to make the script his own
Lee declined to write the screenplay and chose Foote for the job. They discussed the book at length. He told her that adapting it would eventually mean taking responsibility for it as his own work; she supported that approach.
She also helped Gregory Peck hear the book's language. During a visit to Monroeville, he recorded her reading passages aloud and used the recording to study Atticus's regional accent.
About the book and the movie
- Author
- Harper Lee
- Year
- 1960
- Pages
- 336Buy book
- Audiobook length
- 12 hr 17 minGet audiobook
- Narrator
- Sissy Spacek
Scout Finch grows up in an Alabama town where she and her brother Jem turn their reclusive neighbor, Boo Radley, into the subject of games and frightening stories. Their father’s defense of a Black man accused of raping a white woman brings a different kind of fear into their lives. Through school, family disputes, and the approaching trial, Scout begins to question rules that the adults around her take for granted.
- Director
- Robert Mulligan
- Writer
- Horton Foote
- Year
- 1962
- Runtime
- 2 hr 9 minWatch on Amazon
- Cast
- Gregory Peck, John Megna, Frank Overton, Rosemary Murphy
- Genre
- Crime, Drama, trial
- IMDb
- View on IMDb
Lawyer Atticus Finch agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of rape in Depression-era Alabama. His children, Scout and Jem, watch the town’s hostility enter their everyday lives while continuing their games around the house of the unseen Boo Radley. As the case reaches court, Atticus tries to give them an example of fairness that many of their neighbors refuse to follow.
No comments yet. Vote, then say why.