Goodman Theatre

For Immediate Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Chicago, IL - March 10, 2008) For one night only on March 17, Goodman Theatre becomes a picture show-complete with fresh popcorn-for a celebration of the classic films of Horton Foote. Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips leads an evening of seven movie clips with commentary followed by a screening of Tender Mercies, Foote's 1983 Academy Award-winner. The Films of Horton Foote takes place on Monday, March 17 beginning at 5:30pm. Admission is free, but reservations are required: 312.443.3800. The Goodman's landmark 10-week Horton Foote Festival honors "[one of the] strongest, most individual and most abidingly relevant voices in theater" (The New York Times). Currently on stage is The Trip to Bountiful featuring Lois Smith, through April 6.

About the Films

• Horton Foote received an Academy Award for his screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), an adaptation of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about childhood and racism in Alabama, starring Gregory Peck.
• Based on Foote's play, Baby, the Rain Must Fall (1965) stars Steve McQueen as an ex-con and Lee Remick as his long-suffering wife.
• Tomorrow (1972) is based on a William Faulkner short story and stars Robert Duvall as a lonely farmer who takes in a pregnant woman.
• Matthew Broderick and Hallie Foote appear in the World War I story 1918 (1985), based on Foote's play.
• Hallie Foote stars in Courtship (1987) as a young woman whose parents disapprove of her relationship with a young man.
• Convicts (1991) is an adaptation of Foote's nine-play series The Orphans' Home Cycle. Robert Duvall stars as a plantation owner who employs convicts to keep his farm from failing.
• Foote adapted John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1992) for the screen, starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.
• In Tender Mercies Robert Duvall plays Mac Sledge, a country singer and recovering alcoholic transformed by his relationship with a young widow and her son. Foote based his Academy Award-winning screenplay on his nephew's experiences as a drummer for singer George Strait. Duvall also won an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Michael Phillips is the film critic of the Chicago Tribune. He was the Tribune's drama critic from 2002 to 2005. Before that Phillips served as drama critic of the Los Angeles Times; the St. Paul Pioneer Press; the San Diego Union-Tribune; and the Dallas Times Herald. He was arts editor and film critic of the Twin Cities weekly City Pages, and reviewed film for Minnesota Public Radio. He fills in regularly for Roger Ebert on At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper. Three times he served as a drama juror for the Pulitzer Prizes and he had the honor of chairing the jury a fourth year. Phillips teaches at the University of Chicago Graham School of General Studies, the USC/NEA arts journalism workshop in Los Angeles and the O'Neill Theater Center National Critics Institute in Waterford, CT. He lives on Chicago's northwest side with his wife, Andrea Lenaburg, and their seven-year-old son, John.

Academy Award-winner and playwright Horton Foote's realistic portrayal of locales and characters of southeastern Texas has been his signature for more than five decades of writing for the stage, television and film. He was born in 1916 in Wharton, Texas-the town he would subsequently use as the setting for many of his plays, under the pseudonym "Harrison." His first play, Wharton Dance, was produced in New York in 1941 and was followed by Texas Town (1942), Only the Heart (1944), Celebration (1948), The Chase (1952) and The Traveling Lady (1954). He wrote The Trip to Bountiful for NBC television in 1953 and adapted it for Broadway later that year. He achieved prominence writing for television and film during the 1950s and 1960s for such works as The Dancers (1954), A Young Lady of Property (1956), Flight (1957), Storm Fear (1955) and Baby, The Rain Must Fall (1964).

Foote has won two Academy Awards, the first for his screen adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and the second for his original screenplay, Tender Mercies (1983). Other film work includes Tomorrow (1972), the movie version of The Trip to Bountiful, nominated for an Academy Award (1985), Convicts (1989) and Lily Dale (1996).

In recent years, Foote has returned to concentrating on theater; among the many plays which have earned him acclaim have been The Roads to Home (1982), 1918 (1987), Lily Dale (1988), The Widow Claire (1988), Dividing the Estate (1989), The Last of the Thorntons (2001), The Carpetbagger's Children and Getting Frankie Married…and Afterward (both 2002). The Young Man From Atlanta won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize, following its premiere at Signature Theatre Company off-Broadway, as part of a season devoted entirely to Foote works. In December 2000, President Clinton awarded Foote the National Medal of Arts.

For more information call Goodman Theatre's Publicity Office: 312.443.5151.

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