Skip to content

Horton Foote: The Road to Home

Co-presented with the Alley Theatre

with Director Anne Rapp and Subject Hallie Foote

Nov 20, 2020, 04:00 PM Eventive Virtual Platform $10.00 Get Tickets

Presented in partnership with the Alley Theatre. Followed by a pre-recorded Q&A with Film Director Anne Rapp, Film Subject Hallie Foote, Stage Director Michael Wilson, and Actress Annalee Jeffries, moderated by Alley Theatre's Director of New Work Elizabeth Frankel.

Horton Foote: The Road To Home is a documentary that chronicles the creative journey of acclaimed Texas writer Horton Foote through his own eyes and voice at the end of his life. Foote, who was born and raised in Wharton, Texas, went on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, the winner of two Academy Awards for screenwriting, an Emmy Award for television writing, and was recipient of the National Medal of Arts among numerous other theatrical and literary prizes. His long and successful 70-year career of writing consisted primarily of stories set in the small town of Harrison, Texas, a fictitious version of Wharton. Horton was known for his subtle yet deeply-layered and profound storytelling -- about family, human connections, struggles, resilience and redemption.

The filmmakers followed Foote around with a camera for the last three years of his life. At the time Foote was in his early 90s but still very active and working on two different theater projects. One was a play called “Dividing the Estate” destined for Broadway, the other an epic nine-play cycle called “The Orphan’s Home Cycle” based on his father’s life. It was also headed for the New York stage. Anne Rapp, producer/director of the film, had been friends with Horton and the Foote family since 1981, after she worked as a script supervisor on his award-winning film Tender Mercies. Joe Dishner, one of Rapp’s producing partners, had known him as well since 1984 when he worked as a location manager on the film 1918, and later The Trip to Bountiful. Those relationships with Foote allowed the filmmakers to capture a much more personal and inside view of his life and work, and also capture the connection between his hometown and that successful body of work in more intimate detail.

Country, Year United States, 2020
DirectorAnne Rapp
CastHorton Foote, Hallie Foote, Robert Duvall, Richard Linklater, Matthew Broderick
ProducerAnne Rapp, Joe Dishner, Don Strokes, Mark Birnbaum, Miguel Alvarez, Jason Wehling
LanguageEnglish
Runtime78 MINS, SECS
GenreDocumentary
SubjectTheater
Event TypeFilm
Special Guests

Anne Rapp

Anne Rapp is a writer and a script supervisor in the movie industry who worked on more than 60 feature films, beginning with Tender Mercies in 1981 and ending with the HBO TV series Westworld. She has worked with many acclaimed directors including Jake Kasdan, Billy Bob Thornton, Judd Apatow, Harold Ramis, Ken Kwapis, Jonathan Nolan, Lawrence Kasdan, Sydney Pollack, Robert Benton, Bruce Beresford, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemekis, David Mamet, Rob Reiner, Bill Forsythe, Ivan Reitman and Tom Hanks. She began writing short stories which led to a job writing for Robert Altman who directed two of her original screenplays, Cookie’s Fortune and Dr. T and the Women and a television episode written for the ABC series Gun entitled All the President’s Women. The screenplay for Cookie’s Fortune earned Anne an Independent Spirit Award nomination as well as an Edgar Allen Poe nomination. She wrote a television special for CMT, a live Texas music variety show called Stars over Texas hosted by Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel and featuring Dolly Parton and Vince Gill, and she later teamed with Benson again and wrote the musical A Ride With Bob a stage performance about the life and legacy of the western swing great Bob Wills. It ran for eight years. Anne has also written scripts for Alison Eastwood, Whoopi Goldberg and Dana Kuznetkoff, and has a few of her own original scripts in development as well. She has published short stories and essays, and has twice served as visiting professor of screenwriting at the Michener Center for Writers, the graduate writing program at University of Texas. She currently lives in Austin, Texas.