Latest in Harper Lee

EXCLUSIVE: In its first full week of performances, producer Scott Rudin’s new production of To Kill A Mockingbird has broken the all-time weekly box office record for any Broadway play in the 118-year history of the Shubert Organization. The record gross of $1,586,946.02 came during the first entire week of shows…

Three weeks before its scheduled trial date, the lawsuit over the Aaron Sorkin-penned Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird has been settled. The estate of book author Harper Lee and producer Scott Rudin’s Rudinplay announced the deal today (read the settlement filing here). A New York judge had set a June 4…

Producer Scott Rudin has fired back at the estate of author Harper Lee, charging in a lawsuit filed yesterday that a lawsuit filed last month by estate executor Tonja B. Carter could shoot down a much anticipated Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Yesterday’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in…

A lawyer representing the estate of late To Kill A Mockingbird author Harper Lee has filed suit against the producers of Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming Broadway production based on the iconic novel. The New York Times, which first reported on the lawsuit filed this week in Alabama, asserts that Sorkin’s version in not…

UPDATE with President Obama’s reaction: Harper Lee, an unknown writer from Alabama whose story about racial injustice in the American South would become one of the most acclaimed novels and then movies of all time, has died. The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill A Mockingbird was 89. Her death was confirmed…

As the July 14 release date of Go Set A Watchman approaches, documentary film producer Mary McDonagh Murphy released a new photograph of To Kill A Mockingbird author Harper Lee, taken in her hometown of Monroeville, AL at the end of June. The photograph, shot at The Prop & Gavel restaurant on the town square, shows…

Peter Bart and Mike Fleming Jr. worked together for two decades at Daily Variety. In this weekly column, two old friends get together and grind their axes, mostly on the movie business. BART: No comedy director has ever worked harder to hustle his movie than Judd Apatow with Trainwreck and his frenetic efforts are…

UPDATE, 1 PM: A small cache of intimate letters from Harper Lee to New York architect Harold Caufield failed to sell at auction at Christie's on Friday. The six letters, from the late 1950s and early ’60s, had a pre-sale estimate of $150,000 to $250,000. But when the bidding stalled at $90,000, they were withdrawn by…

FINAL UPDATE,12:30 PM: Adds industry comment below: It’s likely to be the sequel to end all sequels: Fifty-five years after the publication of To Kill A Mockingbird, reclusive novelist Harper Lee will publish her second book, Go Set A Watchman this summer. The central character is a grown-up Scout, the young heroine…