Entertainment Weekly columnist Mark Harris deserves all of the praise he is about to receive for “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood,” which will be published by The Penguin Press on Feb. 18.
The book merits a place on the very short shelf of great movie journalism that includes “The Devil’s Candy” by Julie Salamon, “The Studio” by John Gregory Dunne and “Picture” by Lillian Ross.
Harris has gone back to mid-1960s Hollywood to examine the cultural and financial shifts that brought Old Hollywood to its knees and opened the door to the maverick filmmakers and actors who would produce the golden age of iconoclastic 1970s Hollywood.
The writer came up with a simple but very effective premise for his study — a look at the five films that were nominated in the best picture Oscar race for 1967, “Bonnie & Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Doctor Dolittle.”
Harris shows how each of the five pictures was made and how two of them reflected values that were fading out (“Dolittle” and “Dinner”), two of them exemplified revolutionary change (“The Graduate” and “Bonnie & Clyde”) and the fifth (and prize-winning) title (“Heat”) represented a canny compromise of old and new movie elements.
Rather than rely on earlier people’s work, Harris went back and interviewed most of the surviving artists. As a result, we get completely fresh accounts of the production of “The Graduate” and “Bonnie & Clyde” — two of the most written-about films of the 1960s.
Harris also does a good job of analyzing the brief superstardom of Sidney Poitier, who was in two of the best picture nominees and starred in a third 1967 release (“To Sir, With Love”) that also was one of the year’s top grossers. The book shows how Poitier’s fall was to be as swift as his rise because he represented a conservative Hollywood notion of black-ness that was about to be banished from popular culture.
Harris takes us through the long and dizzyingly complex gestation of “Bonnie & Clyde” which took a half-decade to go from the minds of Esquire magazine writers Robert Benton and David Newman to a finished film. The book shows how the picture was inspired by late 1950s and early 1960s French New Wave films — especially “Breathless” and “Jules and Jim” — and was almost made as the English language debut film of Francois Truffaut. After Truffaut decided to do “Fahrenheit 451″ instead, the project was passed to Godard (who proved to be a bit too radical for Benton and Newman).
American director Arthur Penn only became involved after Truffaut and Godard urged him to look at the script.
“The Graduate” took many years to reach the screen, too, and proved in some ways to be even more influential than “Bonnie & Clyde,” particularly in the casting of then-New York stage actor Dustin Hoffman in the starring role. Many other people involved with the movie thought director Mike Nichols had taken leave of his senses when he decided to use a short and Jewish 29-year-old performer in a part that was written to be a 20-year-old WASP jock.
Nichols saw something few other people did in Hoffman and as a result opened the doors to such subsequent off-center late 1960s and ’70s stars as Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand and Gene Hackman.
