User Reviews

A much better, much-abbreviated version of this documentary appears as "The Song of the Mockingbird" on the "special 35th Anniversary commemorative edition" VHS tape I have. Interestingly, this appears on the tape AFTER the movie itself, which, before the advent of DVDs, was an idea I liked.

I have to agree with other "complainers" that the full-treatment documentary on the DVD, "Fearful Symmetry," is just too long and rambling, and really doesn't "capture" anything about the making of TKAM that wasn't captured in the VHS version. One thing of note I learned from the DVD version (SPOILER ALERT!!!): Philip Alford and Mary Badham evidently did not get along during filming, and so -- sure, just what you'd expect from a 13-year-old boy -- Phillip tried to kill 9-year-old Mary in the rolling-tire scene.

But my chief complaint, not mentioned in the other comments: The female narrator, evidently attempting the Kim Stanley style of TKAM's narration, is pretty darn annoying. The shorter VHS documentary doesn't include this bit of pretentiousness.

All in all, however, what can we do? Since the abbreviated "Song of the Mockingbird" from the VHS is not going to be available, we have to settle for "Fearful Symmetry" (questionable title). I'm just glad I can forego purchasing the two-disk special-edition DVD (where the commentary track has its problems as well), being happy with the VHS.

This documentary about the making of To Kill A Mockingbird is -- in a word -- TERRIBLE.

It's available on the 2-Disc DVD, and you'd think that at 90 minutes in length, it'd be a pretty comprehensive account of the film's production.

But it's a rambling, unfocused doc in which half of the time is spent interviewing random people from the South who have no connection to the book nor the film.

And even though Robert Mulligan, Alan J. Pakula, Gregory Peck and some cast/crew members are interviewed, it's always in bits and pieces. No exploration whatsoever into how Harper Lee first wrote the book (of course, she wasn't one of the interviewees), and we aren't even told how Mulligan and Pakula first became aware of the book, why they wanted to make it into a movie, etc.

The documentary could have used a narrator to more carefully guide us into understanding how the movie was made. Instead, the entire doc is badly narrated by someone attempting to mimic Scout's narration from the book.

I also have a big problem with that part towards the end where a lawyer is interviewed (again, somebody with no connection to the book or film), and he chimes in on Tom Robinson's murder by blaming Tom for his own death, solely because Tom -- he argues -- was mistaken for losing hope. What this lawyer disregards is that while the film kept the circumstances behind Tom's death ambiguous (the police claim to have accidentally killed Tom with one warning shot - and Atticus, incredibly, seems to believe the police's story), the book was much blunter, with Atticus learning that Tom had been shot by the police seventeen times (a clear act of murderous racism). So, I would argue that the moral of the story is *not* that Tom was mistaken to run, but that the events escalated into something which was tragically beyond both Tom and Atticus' control.

The filmmakers who made this mess of a doc could've done well to study a Ken Burns doc, to better understand how these things are supposed to be put together.

Spoilers herein.

Here is a textbook case of the different forces that shape books, films and TeeVee shows.

This was a wonderful book because of the way observation was managed and the language was rooted in place. There were lots and lots of literary tricks pulled, most of which enrich the experience. It still is worth reading. It expands the mind.

From that, Hollywood extracted a film. All of the literary devices are lost as a matter of necessity. In their place are a few strong performances and some artsy salon photography of the kids. The focus of the film is now not in its texture, but in the story itself. Instead of the racial injustice being a device to move the narrative, we have it at the only focus.

Well, that was good enough in its day because of the role film plays in shaping the national consciousness. This film went a very long way toward defining a national morality concerning at least Southern-style racism. But the context has changed, and Peck's style of acting in particular is now unpopular -- and somewhat annnoying -- in films of substance. It is now a simple morality play, with some skill but little art, not entirely unlike `Gentleman's Agreement.'

Now along comes this TeeVee show which is the third abstraction in the series (real life, the book, the film, now this). The point of this is pretty diffuse, with lots of elements that don't make sense together. For instance, we have a wholly incongruous and inapt title and epigram, several remembrances of place (with films of the location, interviews of old-timers and voiceovers from the book), interviews with all the key participants in the film, some footage of the civil rights struggle with rambling observations by an articulate black lawyer, and a few other talking heads on various elements of the book or film.

The whole thing is hopelessly unfocused and it is a scandal that it is carried in the same basket as the book or even the film. The film, if overly blunt, was at least coherently focused. But you see, with TeeVee stuff it doesn't matter, a rude and disturbing fact that places the viewers of this mush in precisely the space as the trailer trash originally targeted. That's because the viewers are not prompted to think at all, we are told what the message is. What the lesson is. What the moral is. What every normal person would think.

Naturally, racism is bad. But look at what this TeeVee thing does. The real problem is how societies become whole and live by mechanisms that seem to demand stereotypes, something the book takes headon. Stereotyping is the problem, which in the South settled on race, or rather racially-defined class. Now look what this show does: it substitutes one evil stereotype for another. The blacks are noble, the (roughly) equally impoverished white trash are given all the traits originally assigned to the blacks -- they are dirty, inarticulate, liars, sexual deviants, violent, chummily conspiratorial.

So while giving us the standard sixth grade civics lesson, it reinforces the basic problem of parading stereotypes and reinforcing the mechanism of stereotyping. That's the evil of TeeVee: the medium demands it. A worse example is the `Paradise Lost' TeeVee `documentary.' It similarly discusses a purported legal injustice that it says happened because of the stereotyping of the stupid white folks involved. It similarly exploits its own stereotypes by pounding home the stereotype of the people they accuse of stereotyping. It similarly takes its title from a classical text with no connection whatsoever, but which gives the illusion of an Olympian vision and moral neutrality.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 4: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

A commentary on "To Kill A Mockingbird."

I'll get the annoying things out of the way first. They begin with that portentous title -- "Fearful Symmetry" -- along with a reading of the whole verse from Blake by a narrator who seems to be imitating Kim Stanley's voice in the original movie. Where's the fearful symmetry? And the narrative itself is a little pompous. Someone is described as having "Promethean intoxication." I have an idea who Prometheus was and I am on a first-name basis with intoxication, but this is overreach.

Third, a surprising number of cast, crew, and players are (or were) still alive and were tracked down. None of them claims that "it changed my life forever," thank Bog, but the local folks from Macomb, Alabama, seem to have a rosier view of their lives than an outside ethnographer might. "Oh, I guess a couple of folks kept guns" -- that sort of thing.

Finally, one of the principals, Phillip Alford, who was Scout's older brother, Jem, in the movie, seems stuck forever in a binary world that would have fitted nicely into the more reactionary neighborhoods of Macomb. He hated Mary Badham and tried to kill her. And, "how many wise-ass kids do you see on TV today? All of 'em." I wonder how many guns he keeps. Mary Badham, on the other hand, is a pretty evolved lady now. Collin Paxton, the lady who played the faux rape victim, manages to drag in an anachronistic sexual abuse explanation for her character's distress. Mayella Ewell would be on afternoon talk shows today and promoting her ghost-written book: "Abuse, And How To Recover From It."

Okay. All that aside -- the pomposity and the self deception and the sentimentality -- this is really pretty well done. It's in black and white, it alternates talking heads with video clips of Monroeville, Alabama, today with still shots of rural Southern towns from the 30s and 40s. The town today is indistinguishable from any smallish town anywhere in the United States. The Mom and Pop stores have disappeared. Gossip and the omnipresence of curious kids act as effective forces of social control. They keep people in line. Now they're gone and you have cops. Neighbors don't help neighbors so much because they have no neighbors. The porches are gone and everyone sits inside, air-cooled and TV-watching.

It's enough to make you nostalgic for The Old Days, even though, in those old days, "all disputes were definitely settled on a personal basis." The inference from that quote can be tested by checking the homicide rates by state -- or by county, if you like. You're polite because you'd BETTER be polite. But that culture of honor may be on its way out too. Today, Atticus Finch would be a busy man living in a big white house on a hill overlooking Macomb. There would have to be at least two lawyers in town for that to happen, though. If he were the only lawyer he'd still be entangled in entailments and entrapments. That's an old joke, two lawyers getting richer than just one, but sometimes, Goldurn it, the old ones are the best ones.

What's surprising about the film is its balanced approach. Monroeville was a slow, gentle, tolerant little town in which everyone knew his place. And yet the documentary puts racial animosity in a prominent position. And the talking heads aren't there simply to pimp the movie -- that was 36 years ago, after all. Nothing is lost if someone speaks his mind. If Gregory Peck, the noble attorney, and James Anderson, the angry redneck, loathed one another, Peck admits it, just as Jem is honest about hating Scout. And many of the commentators, whether from Hollywood or just locals in Monroeville, have surprisingly perceptive things to say about the movie and the society is reflects.

I suppose, as one reviewer has observed, the movie is a bit old fashioned, a morality play. Atticus Finch is saintly. Tom Robinson has never had an impure thought in his life. James Anderson is the incarnation of Beelzebub, The Lord of the Flies. There's never much question of who's right and who's wrong. Yet the documentary, like the movie it examines, tells us something about the rural South in the 1930s that sounds like the truth, if not the whole truth.

As a "making-of" companion, it's really superior to most.