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This is How Movies Should Be Made

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

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.

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 is in response to a few of the comments posted below. (See comments below for more information.) I do believe, as at least one other person commented, that this is a very informative documentary. If it rambles a bit, so what? Let's give those rambling on a little bit of license to do so. After all, they were there and these were their experiences and, to be frank, they know more about their experiences than we do. (And if we don't want to know any more about their experiences, we can simply do the smart thing and TURN OFF THE MOVIE.) And if it makes them feel better to ramble on and reminisce, what's the harm? One day, we will all be old and someone will wish WE would quit rambling on and on about our experiences.As for those "random Southern people" mentioned in an earlier post, if memory serves, those people were the people actually from the town where Harper Lee grew up. They knew her and her father. They went to school with her. They played with her as children. They shared some very personal experiences with the author which, when shared, lend a lot of personal and emotional depth to both the movie and the book which would not have been gained simply by viewing or reading. They offer a view of Harper Lee, and of the world in which they all grew up, in a very different perspective, a sort of "third person" perspective. And, as we all know, a third person perspective often helps us to see things about ourselves and our world, things which we would not have noticed otherwise--things which help us become well-rounded people. Similarly, these people--rambling and with their seemingly "pointless" third person points of view--actually help to make both the book and the film more well-rounded.If the documentary had simply been about behind the scenes technicalities and about the stars of the film itself, I would have been very turned off. As we all know, the film which wishes to make a statement, as this one does, is not about the actors themselves. It is not intended to be a star vehicle, although that sometimes happens. It is much bigger than that. It is also not about the technicalities. Amusing and entertaining as they may be to learn of later, technicalities are what the finished film tries not to present. Instead, a film of this caliber tries to bring to life a human story and to make a statement about the human condition, whether to criticize it or to praise it. And it tries to make us better than we were before. Adding the Southern people from Harper's past, with their ramblings and anecdotes, only serves to reinforce that statement.

I wish this self-conscious doc was more about the making of the wonderful To Kill a Mockingbird film. Instead, I felt it was a self-conscious waste of time. I believe the guy hired to do it was trying too hard to make 'art,' instead of a providing information on the production. The combination of the real actors, writer, and producer with random folks from 'the south' made no sense to me & was really confusing at times -- they'd start talking and I'd have to stop and think "who is this? Are they talking about the movie I want to know more about or are they sharing some personal memory." I think this really didn't work & wish there were something more informative on the collector's DVD.