Letting powerful meaning come through

Allison W. Phinney, Jr. with contributions from Horton Foote

Movie advertising is never short on reasons we should see a particular film. But many of us go to the movies for reasons that never make it into an ad campaign. For instance, a friend may tell us that he felt renewed, even changed, by a scene in a movie. Looking at connections between spiritual values and film, this last of three interviews explores the possibility that unstereotyped, spiritual truth may underlie some of the most powerful and important moments in a film. In future issues of the Sentinel, other interviews will examine the evidence of spirituality freshly at work in fields such as business ethics, health care, and human rights.

Here Allison W. Phinney, Jr., Editor of the Sentinel, talks with screenwriter and playwright Horton Foote. In 1983 Mr. Foote received an Academy Award for a best original screenplay for the movie script for Tender Mercies, and he won a best screenplay Oscar in 1962 for To Kill a Mockingbird. He was nominated for a third Academy Award in 1985 for the adaptation to the screen of his own play The Trip to Bountiful and has authored more than thirty other plays and screenplays. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Monitor Television, Inc., a board which helps oversee and review programming for The Monitor Channel, The Christian Science Monitor's twenty-four-hour cable television network.

Phinney: I hope you don't mind the term storyteller, but in a sense you've been a storyteller.

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