Harper Lee: Hey, Boo illuminates the phenomenon behind Lee’s first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the 1962 film version, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Offering an unprecedented look into Lee’s mysterious life, Emmy®-winning filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy (author of Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of To Kill a Mockingbird) interviews Lee’s friends and family, including her centenarian sister Alice, who share intimate recollections, anecdotes and biographical details for the first time: her rise from small-town Alabama girl to famous author, her tumultuous friendship with Truman Capote, and the origin of her most memorable characters: Atticus Finch, his daughter Scout, her friend Dill, and Boo Radley. The documentary also explores the context and history of the novel’s Deep South setting and the social changes it inspired after publication and through the film starring Gregory Peck. Tom Brokaw, Rosanne Cash, Anna Quindlen, Scott Turow, Oprah Winfrey, and others reflect on the novel’s power, influence, popularity, and the ways it has shaped their lives. Lee gave her last interview in 1964 and receded from the limelight.

Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel engages leading historians, biographers and personal friends to reveal a complex woman who experienced profound identity shifts during her life and struggled with the two great issues of her day: the changing role of women and the liberation of African Americans. A charismatic force until a tragic accident lead to her death at age 48, Mitchell rebelled against the stifling social restrictions placed on women: as an unconventional tomboy, a defiant debutante, a brazen flapper, one of Georgia’s first female newspaper reporters, and, later, as a philanthropist who risked her life to fund African American education. Emmy®-winning executive producer/writer Pamela Roberts uses reenactments based on Mitchell’s personal letters and journals to show how her upbringing and romantic relationships influenced the creation of Gone With the Wind. The film also explores Scarlett and Rhett’s place as two of the world’s greatest lovers and the public’s initial reception to the book and David O. Selznick’s 1939 epic film – from racial lightning rod to model for survival. 2012 marks the 75th anniversary of Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize win for the only book published during her lifetime and Gone With the Wind’s lasting popularity seems permanently etched in the American cultural landscape.

Mark Childress: Yeah I always have. I mean, every time I go back I’m impressed more by the simplicity of the prose. And, we think of it as being…classic, and I think the reason that we think it’s so classic is that there’s, it’s not, the prose is not very adorned, it’s very plain. And although it’s plainly written from the point of view of an adult, looking back through a child’s eyes, there’s something childlike…I don’t want to say that. There’s something beautifully innocent about the point of view, and yet it’s very wise. So it’s a combination of either a wise child or an innocent adult, the point of view.

And the fact that Scout is surprised by people’s racism is what’s so, what was revolutionary about the book. Because most little kids in little towns like that, they weren’t surprised, because racism was all around them, it was the fabric of life. I mean, when I was three years old, my grandmother and I would walk down the main street of Greeneville, which was the little town where she lived, and black men would get off the sidewalk as a sign of respect. And if I walked down the sidewalk, at five years old, by myself, they would get off the sidewalk as a sign of respect to me. And this was in the mid-60s, after the book came out,

There’s something so…it’s just a child trying to understand, trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make any sense, trying to organize it into, you know…And I guess I’ve spent my whole writing career kind of trying to do the same thing, laboring in the shadow of…making sense of what race meant in the South and, how to you grow up having come from that system. It’s a lot of interesting problems.

I don’t think that they, the kids today have, read it with the same edge that we did as children though because the segregation was still very real when I was reading that book, you know. When I went to the swimming pool, there was a ‘no colored children allowed,’ as the sign said, “white” and “colored.” You know, we went to the Dairy Queen there were two lines, there was a white window, and there was a black window. So, it was a radical book at the time in the South. It might not have that way in the rest of the country, but it said radical things.

James McBride: Well, I mean, as a professional writer, the character…the whole business of character description and character construction in To Kill a Mockingbird is really the ceiling against which great character writing will forever bump in a lot of ways, because the characters are so strong and so definitive, yet they have a great deal of ambiguity, and they have a great deal of innocence and then soiled innocence, and they have a great deal of obvious death and they are swept by the events of their time.

She certainly set the standard in terms of how some of these issues need to be discussed but in many ways I feel the bar’s been lowered…I think the moral bar’s been in terms of that. And that, that is really distressing. I mean, we need a thousand Atticus Finchs.

And also as an adult, you know, it occurs to me that the black characters in the book, heroic as they are, they don’t survive. The violence that…the societal violence that takes place to, I think his name is Tom…Tom Robinson. You know, the violence, the abject societal behavior towards Tom Robinson affects his family for generations, at least fictionally. And in real life, you know, my wife’s great-grandfather was shot while he was standing in line to get feed because a white guy just told him to move and he wouldn’t move. And that murder just goes on and on, it’s told to generations of people in my wife’s family. And similarly in Harper Lee’s book, that part of the story was something that for me has never been quite resolved in the manner that I would liked to have seen it resolved, partially because that wasn’t her purpose to tell Tom Robinson’s story, but that’s partially my purpose, as a writer.

I think the challenge that she laid out for us, for us the writers who follow in her wake, is to make sure that the various dimensions of these stories are told properly, and that we stand up in own time to talk about issues that count now. It’s easy to poke fun and say, ‘I would of done this and what a brave women she was,’ and so on and so forth, but when it counted, Harper Lee did what was necessary. And how many of us now are doing what’s necessary…in terms of standing up for the good and for the just?

I mean, look, I wish I’d written the book so, let that be said. I’m not criticizing her work, she’s a great writer, she’s an American treasure there’s no question about it. But just like anything else, when the imprint of racism lays its hand on you, you have to be conscious as to how that affects you and your work. I think she did the best she could given how she was raised. That still doesn’t absolve the book or this country of the whole business of racism.