Great American playwright and Academy-Award winning screenwriter Horton Foote has died.<\/p>\n
Ben Brantley writes, in his lovely appreciation of Foote’s work<\/a>, that<\/p>\n “[Foote] achieves his deepest effects by indirection and accretion of details, but the words are characteristic of his harsh sentimentality. He infused his characters with warm blood from his own, empathetic heart. But he also looked upon these same people with a cold and ruthless eye.<\/p>\n I think he loved all his characters \u00e2\u0080\u0094 even the silly, mean and mercenary ones (of which there are many) \u00e2\u0080\u0094 but he was too honest to let any of them off the hook. That means that each, on some level, was born to realize that to be alive is to be alone in the dark.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Brantley’s article brought me to tears. Don’t miss it.<\/p>\n Here are two posts I wrote about Foote:<\/p>\n One about his one-act play “The Old Beginning”<\/a>.<\/p>\n One about “The Blind Date”<\/a>, one of my favorites of his many one-acts.<\/p>\n Ted has two tributes up:<\/p>\n