The Barnes & Noble Review
It is the early 1960s, and two hip young Esquire staffers decide to write a screenplay about a pair of minor 1930s outlaws. A fast-talking, chain-smoking producer convinces a star of the stage to sign on to a big-budget movie musical. A wunderkind theater director hoping to make the leap into film reads a new novel about a disaffected young man seduced by an older woman. A middle-aged, socially conscious director embarks on a movie about interracial marriage and struggles to secure a legendary screen duo and the country's only bankable black star for the principal roles. And a studio weighs whether a mystery featuring that same black actor can be made cheaply enough to turn a profit even if it never plays in the South.
Thus the stage is set for the films that, within a few years, will compete for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. In Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, Mark Harris argues that the 1967 Best Picture lineup -- Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night -- captures the industry on the cusp of a cultural revolution, with old Hollywood in decline and a new crowd gunning to change the game. "Half of the nominees seemed to be sneering at the other half," writes Harris in the introduction to this intelligent, engrossing book.
Doctor Dolittle was on the receiving end of the most sneers. The bloated, lumbering studio musical, starring Rex Harrison and a zoo's worth of animals, was panned by critics and seen as having bought its way into the Oscar race. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner -- which starred Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as parents struggling to accept their daughter's black fiancé, played by Sidney Poitier -- was made with the best of intentions by the liberal Hollywood veteran Stanley Kramer, but the parlor comedy looked hopelessly out-of-date by the time it was released into a world being transformed by the civil rights movement.
Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, on the other hand, were anything but out-of-date; Harris calls them "game changers." The former was a rollicking, sexed-up gangster flick whose neophyte screenwriters looked to French directors like Truffaut and Godard for inspiration. The latter, rejected by every studio, was independently financed and became an unexpected blockbuster. The story of Dustin Hoffman's alienated college graduate, who enters into an affair with the wife of his father's business partner, was the first hit movie to mine the so-called generation gap.
Somewhere in the middle was In the Heat of the Night, which starred Poitier and Rod Steiger. The taut whodunit conformed to genre conventions but had a progressive theme of racial reconciliation (Poitier's detective famously slaps Steiger's racist sheriff, which induced gasps in audiences throughout its theatrical release). Harris calls In the Heat of the Night's five Oscars -- Best Picture among them -- "a temporary compromise" between the other factions.
The author structures the book by alternating between the films, tracking each from conception to production to release (the endless false starts and dashed hopes make one marvel that movies ever manage to get made in the first place). He succeeding in gaining access to most of the living principals involved with the five films, and those interviews are key to his project. (Poitier is the notable exception, but Harris draws liberally from the actor's two memoirs to create a poignant portrait of America's first black leading man, forced to play the righteous and sexually neutered Negro again and again.) Four decades on, the memories shared by Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Graduate director Mike Nichols, Heat of the Night director Norman Jewison, and Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn, not to mention many lesser-known cast and crew members, are fresh, funny, and insightful.
Nichols had achieved fame on Broadway in An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May and had directed a number of hit shows before venturing into film (his successful adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was his first film; The Graduate was his second). He comes off as particularly candid here.
"You would think that as a director, slowly, as you got to be a geezer, you would become more and more irascible," he tells Harris. "But with me, it was the other way around. I started out as a prick on the set..., and I got nicer as time went by." He speaks movingly of his shame upon overhearing Robert Surtees, the veteran cinematographer who filmed The Graduate, reassuring the rest of the crew, "It's okay. It's not going to be much longer," after one of the arrogant young director's outbursts during the long and trying shoot.
The production was excruciating for Hoffman, who had been struggling to make it as an actor for years before the film made him famous beyond his wildest dreams. "[Nichols would] throw out a cookie occasionally, but I always felt like a disappointment," he says. "He'd walk around the entire time saying, 'Well, we'll never work together again, that's for sure.' " After the shoot, Hoffman returned to New York and survived on unemployment. He first saw The Graduate in a packed Manhattan movie theater. "The picture starts, and the first shot is a close-up of me. I literally shook through the entire movie," he recalls.
While Harris's scrupulous reporting yields countless gems, his deft hand in pulling all the information together is just as significant a factor in the book's success. The author spent more than 15 years covering pop culture for Entertainment Weekly, where he is now a columnist, and in this, his debut book, he writes with authority, precision, and wit. He regularly dispenses shrewd, insider-savvy pronouncements ("Historically, the only thing more disruptive to the [film] industry's ecosystem than an unexpected flop is an unexpected smash") and vivid descriptions, calling Rex Harrison "explosive, impatient, capricious, and vain, but also charming, apologetic, and compliant, sometimes within the same conversation or at different points during the same stiff drink." He can be enjoyably gossipy, but he is evenhanded and never mean-spirited, quite an accomplishment given the demanding personalities who populate the book.
What Peter Biskind did for the cinema of the 1970s in his Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Harris has done for that of the 1960s. Edifying for serious students of film and pleasurable for casual fans, Pictures at a Revolution is sure to become a landmark.
--Barbara Spindel
Barbara Spindel has covered books for Time Out New York, Newsweek.com, Details, and Spin. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies.
From the Publisher
An epic account of how the revolution hit Hollywood, told through the stories of the five films nominated for the 1967 Academy Awards
The year is 1963. The studios are churning out westerns, war movies, prudish sex comedies and overblown historical epics, but audiences whose interests have been piqued by an influx of innovative films from abroad are hungering for something more, something new. At Esquire, two young writers hatch a plan to create a movie treatment that they hope will attract the director François Truffaut: the story of the gangsters Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Mike Nichols, an improvisatory comedian turned neophyte theater director, gets his hands on an obscure first novel called The Graduate and wonders if he's ready to make the jump to Hollywood. Warren Beatty, just 26 years old and struggling through a series of flops after the success of Splendor in the Grass, decides to take his career into his own hands, but can't seem to settle on his next move. Dustin Hoffman, sleeping on friends' floors and scrounging for temp work in New York, struggles just to get an off-Broadway audition. Sidney Poitier, after two dozen movies, still yearns for something that seems completely unattainable: a good role. And 20th Century Fox, on the brink of financial catastrophe, puts all its hopes in a genre-the family musical-that will revitalize the company and then nearly destroy it again.
Pictures at a Revolution tracks five movies-the milestones Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, the popular hits Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, and the big-budget disaster DoctorDolittle-on their five-year journey to Oscar night in the spring of 1968. It follows their fortunes through the last days of the studio system and the first sparks of a cultural upheaval that would launch maverick new stars and directors, topple more than one industry titan from his pedestal, and redefine what American movies could be. In 1967, moviegoers witnessed the arrival of taboo-shattering sex and violence on screen, the debuts of Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway, the return of Katharine Hepburn and the poignant farewell of Spencer Tracy, the audacious risks taken by Warren Beatty, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols and Norman Jewison, and Hollywood's agonized attempt to grapple with an incendiary moment in American race relations, with results that would change Sidney Poitier's career forever.
By tracing the gambles, the stumbles, the clashes and the creative partnerships that produced these films, Mark Harris captures both the twilight of old Hollywood and the dawn of a new golden age in studio filmmaking. Based on unprecedented access to the actors, directors, screenwriters, producers and executives whose movies defined the era, as well a wealth of previously unexplored archival material, Pictures at a Revolution is an utterly original, revealing, and entertaining history of a true cultural watershed.
The Washington Post -
Charles Matthews
Harris has created what seems likely to be one of the classics of popular film history, useful to dedicated students of film and cultural historians, and also to trivia buffs.…Harris writes with a wit that's sly, not show-offy. He can encapsulate the woes of shooting "Doctor Dolittle" in four words: "The rhinoceros got pneumonia." And he can slip in a bit of insider humor with a reference to Newley's then-wife, Joan Collins, who "reentered the Hollywood social scene she loved with the vigor of an Olympic athlete"—the syntax leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the prepositional phrase modifies "reentered" or "loved." Indeed, almost the only complaint about Pictures at a Revolution is that, except for an "Epilogue" that briefly sums up the later careers of the major figures, it ends at the Oscar ceremony. You want Harris to go on…
The New York Times -
Janet Maslin
Pictures at a Revolution can take its place alongside top-shelf film industry books like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Final Cut, The Studio and The Devil's Candy for qualities all of them share: the big-picture overview, the nuts-and-bolts understanding of exactly how films evolve from the drawing board to the screen, and gratifying antennae for all forms of Hollywood-related horror stories…With a restrained, level-headed wisdom not often found in stories of the movie world, Mr. Harris brings welcome sanity to heated subjects like the intellectual brawling among film critics that greeted "Bonnie and Clyde." He has a fine way of cutting through the conventional wisdom about such events so that real wisdom can emerge.
Publishers Weekly
With meticulous research and a masterful blending of information, Harris delivers a detailed and intriguing exploration into the significance of the five films nominated in 1968 as Best Picture for the Oscars (Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night). Harris illustrates how the nominated films represented a paradigm shift in Hollywood and the country. From the origins and finessing of the scripts to the selection (or rejection) of the principal actors along with all the typical Hollywood folklore, Harris weaves the narratives of each film into one cohesive story, clearly detailing how these films were interconnected and how each reflected the changing mood of the country. In a light, calm and reassuring voice, Lloyd James reads almost flawlessly. Despite the presence of numerous popular actors in the account, James resists the urge to do impersonations and instead lets the person's words speak for themselves. This outstanding audio is intriguing, lively, entertaining and educational. Simultaneous release with the Penguin Press hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 29). (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Peter Thornell
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Library Journal
American films have always been both a reflection of our times and an indicator of what we as a society could become. Harris, who writes Entertainment Weekly's "Final Cut" column, examines this dual nature through the nominees for Best Picture at the 1967 Academy Awards, thus encapsulating the sea change of Hollywood and America in that turbulent decade. The five nominees contained such disparate films as Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, and Dr. Doolittle. Harris follows these movies from their conception to Oscar night, showing not only how these films were made through exceptional access to their creators and stars but also what the films represented as statements of race, identity, and a new kind of violence (Bonnie and Clyde's would change film forever). Harris's experience covering film and television shows on every page, as this is the most engaging and, dare this reviewer say, entertaining book on the movies to be written in years. Highly recommended for all academic and public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ10/15/07.]
What People Are Saying
"A madly ambitious marriage of revelatory cultural history and great storytelling, Pictures at a Revolution is every bit as smart and radical and sexy as the movies it brings to life."
—David Hajdu, author of Lush Life and Positively 4th Street
"Mark Harris has pulled off brilliantly what many of us only attempt. He has used a narrowly focused subject—five movies competing for Best Picture in 1967—to tell the larger, richly textured story of that tumultuous time. He traces the making of each of the movies—among them, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate—with the kind of detailed, dramatic narrative that makes the book a page-turner, even for someone who is not a movie buff. And his profiles of the major characters (my favorites were Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, and Mike Nichols) are the most interesting I've seen."
—Connie Bruck, author of The Predator's Ball, Masters of the Game, and When Hollywood Was King
"Pictures at a Revolution is exactly what its title promises: an in-depth, up-close view of the films and filmmakers that transformed American cinema during an extraordinary period of innovation and insurrection. What we have here is a clash of the titans—Old Hollywood versus the New—with the entire enterprise of American filmmaking hanging in the balance. Like a skilled novelist, Mark Harris keeps us turning the pages, with heroes to root for, villains to hiss, and plenty of intrigue along the way—all set against the psychedelic backdrop of the turbulent 1960s. A remarkable reconstruction of perhaps the most significant artistic moment in the history of American film."
—William J. Mann, author of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger
"I've been waiting a long time for someone to explain to me exactly what happened to the movies during the 1960s—and someone finally has. Luckily he's witty, nervy, original, widely knowledgeable from the board room to the back room, and has no trouble putting Dr. Dolittle and Bonnie and Clyde in the same critical universe. That's the 1960s for you...all movie history books should be written by Mark Harris."
—Jeanine Basinger, author of The Star Machine
"An exhilarating read for anyone who cares about the myriad ways movies can shape popular and political culture. I loved it."
—Christine Vachon, producer, author of Shooting to Kill
(3 ratings)
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