How the Adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird Failed Scout Finch

When publishers first decided to print Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, they only ordered a conservative first printing of 5,000 copies. All of those sold so quickly after its release in the summer of 1960 that the novel climbed to The New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for six weeks before producer Alan Pakula and director Robert Mulligan acquired film rights for Universal. And the novel’s star was only then starting to rise. The very next year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

So Mulligan and Pakula knew they had to seize their chance, but they also had to be careful. With the novel so fresh in readers’ minds, they would have to adhere as closely to Lee’s original vision as possible, a goal by all accounts that they would have reached if they hadn’t left out one of the novel’s major themes: Scout’s reluctance to take on the burden of Southern femininity. No surprise, seeing as all of the filmmakers involved in the production were men.

But in the early stages, the role of gender in the story was far from the filmmakers’ minds. After securing film rights for the novel, Mulligan and Pakula seized on the momentum of the novel’s popularity to find a leading man. Atticus, the novel’s iconic father figure, treats his job as a lawyer as a higher calling, defending a black man wrongfully accused of raping a white woman, despite the ugliness the trial opens up in their little Alabama town. No average actor could fill his shoes. After considering Rock Hudson, the producer-director pair nabbed the inimitable Gregory Peck, whose face, of course, I’m sure, you conjured while reading To Kill a Mockingbird in school. Peck’s production company Brentwood Productions even bankrolled the film, giving him a bit more say than you’d expect, even as a leading man.

With Peck locked in, Mulligan and Pakula set their sights on a screenwriter. First, they asked Lee herself, but she said no, claiming she wouldn’t know how to go about writing a script. And besides, she was writing another novel, one that would never see the light of day.

After some hunting, Mulligan and Pakula landed on Horton Foote, a big-talking Texan who Lee would later say “looked like God, except clean-shaven.” At first, Foote didn’t even want to read To Kill a Mockingbird. “Well, I don’t like to adapt, to begin with,” Foote said in an interview with Patrick McGilligan for his book Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s. “It’s a very painful process—a big responsibility—particularly if you like something, which I usually have to do. In the case of Mockingbird, it was sent to me, and I said, ‘I’m not going to read it because I don’t want to do it.’ My wife read it—she’s passed on now—but she had enormous influence on me. She said to me, ‘You’d better stop and read this book.’ So I read it and felt I could really do something with it.”

Mulligan and Pakula brought Foote together with Lee, and a lifelong friendship took root between them. Even so, Lee couldn’t offer much help with the screenplay. The biggest boost came from Pakula, who advised Foote while he was still unsure how to proceed with boiling down the beloved novel for the screen.

“Now look, just stop worrying about the time frame of the novel,” Pakula said, “and try to bring it into focus in one year of seasons: fall, winter, spring, summer.”

That little bit of what Foote called “architecture” was the boost he needed, and from there, he felt like he could add and subtract to create a script that was as faithful to the real thing as he could make it.

While Foote labored over the script, production designer Henry Bumstead ventured southeast to Monroeville, Alabama, Lee’s hometown and the influence for her novel’s fictional setting of Maycomb. Lee showed him around so he could take in the atmosphere. He needed all the details he could muster to get the sets just right. Lee even furnished him with photos of the town from the 1930s, so when Bumstead returned to Universal City, he could guide the set-builders in recreating Monroeville and its courthouse down to the nail.

“Most of the houses are of wood, one story, and set up on brick piles,” Bumstead wrote to Pakula while he was researching on location. “Almost every house has a porch and a swing hanging from the porch rafters. Believe me, it’s a much more relaxed life than we live in Hollywood.”

Peck, too, took pains to become Atticus Finch. He also visited Monroeville to meet Amasa Coleman Lee, Harper Lee’s father and her inspiration for the character. Peck told The Guardian becoming Atticus was “like putting on an old suit of clothes—just comfortable.” Harper Lee thought it was the right fit, too. But she wouldn’t know how much until she saw him again in Hollywood.

On the street set Bumstead had designed, Peck left his dressing room in Atticus’s white suit. “He looked bigger,” Lee recalled in an interview. “He looked thicker through the middle. He didn’t have an ounce of makeup, just a 1933-type suit with a collar and a vest and a watch and chain.”

“My God, he’s got a little pot belly just like my Daddy,” Lee exclaimed then.

“That’s no pot belly, Harper,” Peck said. “That’s great acting.”

Today, Peck’s performance is the one we remember. But there’s a reason for that: Peck had a little too much say in the production.

After principal shooting wrapped in the summer of 1962, Peck viewed a rough cut of the picture, and he wasn’t happy with what he saw.

“Atticus had no chance to emerge as courageous or strong,” Peck wrote in a memo to his agent and to a Universal executive, according to I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields. “Cutting generally seems completely antiheroic where Atticus is concerned, to the point where he is made to be wishy-washy. Don’t understand this approach.” Overall, Peck’s memo listed 44 objections. The younger characters (you know, the main characters) appeared too often in the film for his liking. He believed Atticus deserved more focus.

Peck’s position put Mulligan and Pakula in a bind. Peck’s production company was footing the bill for a great deal of the film’s expenses. From the beginning, they had stipulated that they, not Peck’s company, would have the final say regarding such monumental production choices. But in the end, they caved, and who could blame them?

They re-edited the film, but Peck still wasn’t satisfied. In yet another memo, Peck wrote:

“I believe we have a good character in Atticus, with some humor and warmth in the early stages, and some good emotion and conflict in the trial and later on. . . In my opinion, the picture will begin to look better as Atticus’ story line emerges, and the children’s scenes are cut down to proportion.”

Some of the cuts Pakula made “just tore [his] heart out,” according to Shields.

What surfaced by the end of editing was a film that centered Atticus, with more than 30 percent of its run time devoted to the trial alone.

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Some critics have called the film one of the best literary adaptations to date. Truly, it is an excellent movie, despite issues with its subject matter. But is it faithful to its source? Not so much.

Though some reviews claim that the film made every effort to be—Foote left most of the dialogue intact, for example—anyone who has written more than a page of fiction knows much more goes into its composition than what the characters say.

The novel itself focuses on Scout’s experience of the male-dominated South as a young woman. She is at the time in her life when gender roles are becoming more enforced, which she describes in this passage:

Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn’t supposed to be doing anything that required pants. Aunt Alexandra’s vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born; furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father’s lonely life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year. She hurt my feelings and set my teeth permanently on edge, but when I asked Atticus about it, he said there were already enough sunbeams in the family and to go about my business, he didn’t mind me much the way I was.

The role society has prescribed for Scout to play is at odds with the person she believes herself to be. She is a person of action, as we see from the story, not an ornament or an object, and yet, the women in her life insist that she clean up, mind her manners and sit still.

This is a commentary on gender : Scout does not see a place for herself in the strictly gendered options of adulthood laid out before her. She feels she does not belong, so she identifies with those characters who are under the thumb of the majority.

Scout, too, is a mockingbird.

Without that identity, the story becomes that of an observer instead of an actor. It becomes about them rather than us. That the film shifts its focus from Scout to a male authority figure, no matter how holy he seems, is a critical error. Even though Foote attempted to correct this shift by including occasional first-person narration in the voice of an older Southern woman, this addition does not refocus the rest of the movie’s gaze, which remains worshipfully on Atticus.

In one of the book’s iconic lines, Atticus says, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. . . .until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

As the movie stands, Scout no longer gets that chance.