Anne Rapp spent years as a script supervisor ensuring continuity on such films as “Tender Mercies.” One day on screen may be shot over weeks in real time, so Rapp would make sure characters and sets looked the same. While making a documentary about Horton Foote — the famed playwright and screenwriter — Rapp noticed he showed up for a second drive around his hometown of Wharton to talk about the people and places that informed his award-winning work in a different colored sweater than the first day they’d filmed him.
“But, look,” Rapp says, “I realized what was important is Horton and the stories, not what he was wearing. And people would be drawn to is his memories. Being in the car triggered his memories. He was such an observer. He’s not looking at the camera. He’s looking out the window, reflecting. He’d shut his eyes and remember.”
Foote died in 2009 at age 92. But Rapp’s “Horton Foote: The Road to Home,” screening online Nov. 20 as part this year’s Houston Cinema Arts Festival, briefly and beautifully brings the writer back to life, with loving shots of him, eyes closed, returning to the little town 60 miles southwest of Houston, where he grew up in the 1920s and 1930s.
Rapp, who lives in Austin, opens with Foote recounting a story from when he was about six years old, telling his mother about how he ran across a field being pursued by an angry dog, only to be swept up by the town sheriff upon his horse. His father went to thank the sheriff only to find the story resided in his son’s imagination.
When: 4 p.m. Nov. 20, available for 48 hours
Details: $10; cinemahtx.org
“When Horton tells it, he describes his father going to Pitt and saying, ‘I knew I’d been rooked’,” Rapp says. “Who says that? ‘Rooked’? He said, he got home and his mother asked where he’d been and he said, ‘Mother, you’ll never know…’ What six year old says that? Horton. That’s the one. He had a unique language. And I love his language.”
When Foote tells the story, Rapp’s voice can be heard for the first and only time in the film, as she points out, it was his first story.
Hiding Wharton
More often than not, Foote drew from real-life tales from Wharton. He used actual names and places in his first one-act play as a teenager and received blowback, so going forward he created Harrison, a fictional town to stand in for Wharton. Foote also changed the names of those whose stories he told.
Before setting up the tall tale with the sheriff and the dog, Rapp deftly sets up “Horton Foote: The Road to Home” with testimonials in the introduction. Such actors as Matthew Broderick and Robert Duvall offer their assessments of his work, as do other writers like Edward Albee. Among the most fervent admirers is Houston native and filmmaker Richard Linklater, who refers to Foote as the “American Chekhov” and suggests any young writer wanting to understand writing would do well to study Foote’s work.
Rapp takes time to double back for Foote’s youth, the tall tales and the familial connections that birthed the storyteller. He digs up his initial disappointment that early reviews suggested he wasn’t much of an actor. But Foote’s ear for dialog was singular, and he had a way of creating great emotional resonance out of stories that on the surface appeared very subtle.
“People have misinterpreted his plays as being sweet and sentimental,” Rapp says, “but he told a lot of dark stories, too.”
Rapp hired Austin actors to do monologues in a black box theater setting that are interspersed throughout the film. And for “One Armed Man,” she secured footage from a short film by actor and director Tim Guinee, a Houston native and Foote’s son-in-law.
Foote tellingly admits to Rapp in the film, “I am on the side of those who struggle in the world.”
The film serves as a fine reminder that Foote’s plays weren’t filled with sentimentality as much as they were informed by empathy.
Screenplays to documentaries
Rapp first met Foote in the early 1980s, when she was script supervisor on “Tender Mercies,” a Foote story about an alcoholic country music singer (Duvall) making an attempt at changing his life. The film earned Foote his second Academy Award, following his adapted screenplay for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Prior to “Mockingbird,” Foote had more than a dozen plays produced and presented, including the “The Trip to Bountiful,” one of his best known works.
Rapp points out that her Panhandle hometown of Estelline and Foote’s Wharton were about as far as two points in Texas could be. They shared the anxieties of their regions: Foote’s Wharton feared too much rain would ruin its cotton, whereas Rapp’s hometown feared its crop would be decimated by drought.
After “Tender Mercies,” Rapp and Foote corresponded regularly. She would tell him stories, and he’d insist she write them down. When filmmaker Robert Altman shot “Cookie’s Fortune,” a 1999 film based on Rapp’s screenplay, Foote sent a note of admiration.
Around 2007, Rapp approached the playwright about filming him and his life . He was initially reticent, but eventually yielded. She filmed him at home, in a regal wing-backed chair. But some of her favorite moments captured Foote in the car when they replicated drives they’d previously taken around Wharton. Foote would recount characters and tales from his past.
“He was just a keen observer,” she says. “He wrote about this little world for more than 70 years. Almost all his work was based in that one little town.”
Some of Rapp’s favorite talking heads aren’t the actors, writers or directors describing the merit of Foote’s work, but rather other Wharton natives and friends, who testify to the way he captured the tone of the town. As she did test screenings of the film, viewers wanted less footage with talking heads and more of Foote. Rapp had cut all sorts of footage she loved, in which Foote would tell stories from Wharton. She started restoring some of it.
“Every time he talked,” she says, “I got gold from him.”
The film screened at the Austin Film Festival recently . Well, it did virtually.
“Some part of me wants to do this right, with the red carpet and everything,” Rapp says. “But Horton’s work was so universal, I like the idea of people around the world getting to see it.”
Rapp’s film won an audience award for Texas Independent Feature at the festival.
“Horton Foote: The Road to Home” enjoys a second Texas film festival screening this month thanks to the Houston Cinema Arts Festival.
Rapp says the Houston Endowment was an early supporter of the film, that helped it grow from informal interviews into a full-length documentary feature.
“Without them, it’s hard to imagine getting to where we got with this film,” she says. “So showing it in Houston is my small ‘thank you.’ And Houston is also a great place to tell this story about a great artist whose work all took place not too far away.”
andrew.dansby@chron.com
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