All pop culture is a window into a society’s psyche. Film noir was a response to the horrors of World War II and the emergence of women in the workplace. Punk rock countered the rampant commercialism and over-production in music during the mid-late 1970s. The cultural revolution of the mid- late 1960s is, almost definitely, the most drastic societal shift of the past century, when the baby boom generation came of age and almost everything changed. This shift was evident in the music of the time (the rise of rock and roll), the literature (Ken Kesey, Kurt Vonnegut, Allen Ginsburg, etc.), and the films of the moment. Mark Harris’ book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood studies this sea change by looking at the whole of film, and the general culture, through a narrowly focused lens – the movies competing for the Oscar for Best Picture at the 1968 Academy Awards.
Those five films run the gamut of what Hollywood had been and what it was about to become. Dr. Dolittle was a throwback to the epic musicals that had been the studios’ bread and butter for the preceding decade, enormous productions that would cost the wealth of a small nation, but would make up half of the studio’s yearly revenue. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was literally “old Hollywood” (Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy) welcoming in “new Hollywood” (Sidney Poitier), dealing with the hot-button issue of race with a simple farcical comedy that was nowhere near as forward thinking as it thought it was. Like Dinner, the winner of the big award that year, In the Heat of the Night, dealt with racial issues, but with a more enlightened and serious view, with echoes of the philosophies of Malcolm X and black pride, with a protagonist that doesn’t simply turn the other cheek to racism, but fights back. The two watershed films from the year, though, were Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, both dividing the culture mostly along generational lines – you either “got it” or didn’t. They were intensely personal and idiosyncratic films, not easily pigeonholed, and that was off-putting to much of the culture.
Harris tells the story of these films from their inception up through Oscar night, and it’s as rife with human drama as it is with cultural and film analysis. The productions of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate are true underdog tales, almost failing to be made or released multiple times, and Dr. Dolittle is a rampant comedy of errors, with a disastrous production plagued by bad weather, uncooperative animals and an insane, drunken Rex Harrison. The intricately drawn profiles of Mike Nichols as a Hollywood outsider turned golden boy, Dustin Hoffman as a long-suffering theater actor, and Poitier as a reluctant representative of his whole race, are fascinating and insightful, and there are countless more like them. There are also revealing you-are-there style anecdotes, most noteworthy being a Hollywood party thrown by Jane Fonda, where Poitier and Bob Hope taught a little girl to tap-dance, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson smoked pot, and Henry Fonda asked the band to keep it down. The band just happened to be The Byrds.
A true appreciation of the craft of film-making is also evident, with incredible passages about the groundbreaking editing of Bonnie and Clyde, the pioneering cinematography of In the Heat of the Night, or the effective direction by Nichols in The Graduate, not to mention a lesson in the influence of other artistic movements, such as the movies of the French New-Wave or British Free Cinema, or the music of the British Invasion. Harris has written for Entertainment Weekly, so his prose is incessantly readable, yet his research and knowledge are still scholarly and thorough. If you have an interest in film, society, and how the changes in each can be reflected in the other, add this to your list of books to read.
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Evan Mather lives just outside of Chicago and is a full-time student with hopes to eventually earn his Masters in Library Science. He spends his limited free time with his wife and cats, subjecting them to his cinematic, musical, literary and culinary interests. Sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes it is not.
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