To Kill a Mockingbird

I HIGHLY recommend Hey Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird which is streaming on Netflix now. It is chock full of joyfulness. It covers everything you ever wanted to know about the classic Pulitzer prize winning book, the movie that earned Gregory Peck his Oscar and the author who has never written another book.

I stumbled upon this while I was thoroughly enjoying the movie CAPOTEstarring Phillip Seymour Hoffman and I saw that Harper Lee helped him do research for his In Cold Blood so I googled her and saw that she was still alive at 86. Then I added To Kill a Mockingbird to my DVD queue and noticed this cutely named documentary and decided to give it the 10 minute test where you watch the first 10 minutes and decide if it’s worth continuing and before I knew it the movie was all over too fast!

Side notes: I find it amazing how tiny little things become monumental in the creation of important, beautiful works of art like Harper Lee’s story here that contributed a great deal to our nation’s racial revolution lead by Martin Luther King Jr. Harper Lee worked at Eastern Airlines as a ticket agent for years before her friends Mr. and Mrs. Michael Brown (a successful music composer that her childhood friend Truman Capote asked to look after her) gave her a Christmas gift that simply stated “Take a year off work to write whatever you please” and look what she wrote! Six degrees of fate and destiny, huh?

By the way, the character Dill from mockingbird was based on Truman Capote. As if that weren’t obvious. Also worth mentioning, everyone knows that the character Scout was based on Lee herself but many don’t realize that she’s also Boo…the shy enigma who emerges from the shadows to do something good but then retreats back into the darkness. Lee has never given another interview after the initial success of the book and movie.