Movie Book Heaven

While half the blogs in the known universe are posting reactions to the 2008 Oscars telecast (Javier Bardem actually won for No Country?!  OhmyGod!!!  But seriously, best speech: Tilda Swinton), Living RomCom would like to talk about the Oscars show from 1968 -- as relived in one absolutely scrumptious book. 

By this time in 2009, you'll prob'ly have a hard time even remembering who won what this year (this oft-experienced Oscar amnesia is a clear indicator of how fundamentally trivial our modern era's Academy Awards can be), but I'll wager that the movie book-reading public won't forget Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.  It's the best book written about the movies and what they mean to us to come down the pike in a long while, and its subject matter is particularly intriguing in terms of its contrast to the times we live in.

Harris's basic story concept is brilliant.  Pictures uses the Best Picture nominations of 1967 to explore that seminal moment in film history when the old guard of Hollywood was pushed, wheezing and whelping, into confrontation with the New.  On the left was Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate; on the right was Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Dr. Doolittle (yes, really); occupying the conflicted middle-ground was In the Heat of the Night.

Night won the night, but the ultimate champion was a new breed of filmmakers that was to nearly destroy the old studio system, dragging it under protest across a just-solidified generational dividing line, and therein lies the fascinating core of Harris's tale.  The book is at its shrewdest and most revealing when it explicates the particulars of a rather Oedipal story, showing how a motley crew of European-inspired sons (among them, Warren Beatty and Mike Nichols) slew the already staggering Hollywood dragon-dads (e.g. Jack Warner), creating a passel of more modern myths even as they enacted an ancient one.

Harris's cinematic narrative strategy is to cross-cut the creation stories of all five future Best Pic noms; we follow each movie from conception, through production, to release, spanning a four year period.  It's an involving and suspenseful gambit, due to the cliff-hanging nature of its subplots (a crash course in how miraculous a feat it is to actually get a movie made), and the colorfully diverse cast of characters involved.  Being a fly on the wall in a legend-filled room is one of the great pleasures in movie-book reading, and Pictures puts you in many such stellar suites.

I loved, for example, discovering that screenwriting team David Newman and Robert Benton, while trying to sell Francois Truffaut on helming Bonnie and Clyde, sat through a screening of Gun Crazy he'd set up for them along with Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.  Godard briefly considered directing Bonnie himself -- and as Picture reports, after it later lost Best Picture, sent a telegram to Newman saying "Now, let's make it all over again!"

The book cuts from Gene Hackman agonizing over having been fired from Bonnie, to Stanley Kramer wondering if Spencer Tracy will live long enough to finish Dinner.  You get first-timer Dustin Hoffman's totally traumatic experience of working on The Graduate while everyone else in show biz considers him miscast, juxtaposed with Sidney Poitier's refusal to film in the deep South for Night because there was no guarantee he'd get out of there alive.

The era's portrait snapshots are priceless.  Here's Sidney Lumet remembering vulgarian producer Joseph E. Levine "sitting in the Polo Lounge, so happy, a hooker on each arm, each hand on a different tit."  There's young Peter Fonda (with then-unknown chums Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper) cheering on the Byrds while they play his mom and Roger Vadim's Malibu beach party -- with "Daryl Zanuck and George Cukor both staring dumbstruck as a barefoot young hippie began to nurse her baby in front of them." 

Next to the passionately innovative serious-ities of Arthur Penn and Nichols, the disastrous saga of Dr. Doolittle serves as black comedic counterpoint.  That it was clearly a movie that didn't want to have been made is borne out by a telegram sent, after typhoons and animal seizures jeopardized its bloated, ill-advised production, from a crew member on location in St. Lucia to Anthony Newley and wife Joan Collins: "Insect terrible from very wet summer STOP everyone covered in welts and sores two people bad infections from bites STOP six people ill last week from dysentery."

Meanwhile, it's the life-and-death issues of that era -- when the Civil Rights movement was peaking and the Vietnam War was beginning to divide the country -- that give this movie race its gravitas.  The book explores how The Graduate came to embody youth culture before the term existed, how Bonnie seemed to react to the war and the violence in the heart of America, how Night's success (and Dinner's datedness) were informed by events that culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- a tragedy that caused the Academy to postpone its show for the first time in nearly 40 years.

Harris's well-written and prodigiously researched work (even the footnotes are intriguing) has an aptly-timed resonance.  As I devoured the book, I couldn't help occasionally humming Dylan's Things Have Changed.  This year's picture race?  There Will Be Blood does speak to the tyranny of oil-lust that underlies our current administration's downfall, No Country can be seen as an indictment of the nihilistic violence we live with now, and Juno certainly has its finger on the pulse of kids-these-days.  But no one could sanely make a claim that this crop of pictures signifies a revolution of any kind -- or that they've even connected with America with anything like the force that 1967's wildly popular bunch did (many critics have pointed out that prior to the Awards, Juno has been the only major moneymaking hit among this year's nominees).

In its tacitly elegiac way, Pictures takes a picture of a now long-gone moment when movies were still at the uncontested epicenter of popular culture, and a clear embodiment of what "we" were all thinking and feeling.  Micro-trended into a vast collection of disparate cultural tribes, we (or, all the many "we"s) simply don't live in that world anymore.  But Harris's book delivers its bygone era to us in an indelibly vivid way.   All I can say is: hie thee with this tome to a comfy chair, 'cause boy, is it ever a damn good read.

Comments

[Tavis]

I just picked up an advance readers copy from work the other day-- and I'm thoroughly enjoying it!

[Ernest]

The book is fantastic, filled with wonderful stories (all the time wasted trying to teach a Dr. Doolittle chimp to make breakfast). The parallels with 2008 are strongest, though, at the beginning of the story in 1963 and 1964 when Hollywood realizes -- and begins to acknowledge -- that it's broken -- pumping out cookie-cutter Westerns, war flicks and bloated Biblical epics (comic book extravaganzas?), groping about to find out what's next. The Truffaut and Bergman movies playing all over New York, hinting at what's to come, feel an awful lot like YouTube or other new media vanguards. Reading this book, I felt very hopeful about Hollywood's ability to reinvent itself.

[E.C. Henry]

Mark Harris's "Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood" sounds like a winner. Will look for it the next time I'm at Borders.

LOVED this years Oscars. The Academy's presentation was top notch. Sid Ganis and crew were really on their game this year. Thought they honored the movies history real well, and window dressed this year's nominiees in a very classy, artsy way. This was the best Oscars presentation program I can ever remember watching. Kudos to all who were part of putting this moving Oscars presentation together.

Biggest shock of the night, in my opinion, was the Coen brothers reaction, or should I say lack there of, to winning Best Adapted Screenplay AND Best Picture of the Year. All they did was bascially smile -- what's up with that?!

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

[Will Keightley]

E.C. That's the Coen style. I just wish that Roderick Jaynes had won the editing prize for No Country. I wonder who the codger was that they used as a photo in presenting the award?

Billy, the book's in my queue. Sounds like my kind of tale.

[binnie]

SECOND best speech - Marketa Irglova, after being brought back to the stage by Jon Stewart, for best song (YAY!!!).

[Christina]

I think the late 60s were a different time, not just for movies but people were more engaged and aware of what was going on, so culture was more connected. I've talked to a lot of old hippies and beatniks (up here in SF) about that time period - people who left the United States in 1970-71 because they were so mad - and they all relate the same experience, of a feeling sometimes in the mid-70's when they felt the wind go out of their sails and they knew that the revolution wasn't going to happen this time around. The intense energy dissipated and only fumes were left for inspiration. That's what allowed disco - and movies like Grease and Saturday Night Fever - to become popular.

I think think over half our population (or more) is still checked out. Don't you?

[Joanna Farnsworth]

In 19 years of top marks at school and university, the only exam I ever failed was high school chemistry the morning after the 1968 Academy Awards.

I'll never forget it. At 15, I put my academic future on the line - for the movies. And never regretted a moment. Thanks Billy, and Mark, for reminding us of the details of that eventful year.

All I remember is, I couldn't NOT watch every minute. That's how important movies should be, for everyone. Let's get it back ...

[Diana Celesky]

Thanks for telling us about this book. I'm going to check it out. It sounds fascinating. Wish more pictures were made now with that kind of staying power.

[Diana Celesky]

Oh, and Happy Leap Day, Billy!

[mernitman]

Tavis: Makes it hard to do anything other than read, doesn't it?

True, Ernest, and the Oscars echoed this theme by giving so much of the gold to foreign filmmakers and stars... much like the shift from "the center" that happened in the '60s.

As Will points out: They be the Coens, E.C. Watch 'em and weep.

...speaking of getting teary, wasn't that great?

Don't have an actual figure to project, Christina, but some portion thereof? Definitely.

Joanna, I'd love to. But my favorite movie of the year is called The Race For the White House.

Diana: Happy to be leaping.

[J]

I recently saw The Graduate (figured some day some movie bigwig would ask if I ever saw it and then if I said no I'd get fired on the spot)...and I liked a LOT.

Except the ending was kind of...ambiguous? I'm no movie nerd, so I'm sure I'm either A) wrong or B) the only one who doesn't know the story behind it...but I felt like the ending was incredibly REAL and therefore...uncertain.

...I don't think you could do that nowadays.

[Frank Conniff]

Hey, maybe I'm a square, but I think the songs from Dr. Doolittle were great.

[mernitman]

J: One funny/interesting thing about that very last shot (Hoffman and Ross on the bus) -- Nichols had the cameraman keep running, looooooong after the take was supposedly over (i.e. past what the two actors had rehearsed) specifically so he could get the "real moment" of them looking like, WTF are we supposed to do now?! It worked well, didn't it?

Frank: My girlfriend's been plaguing me by singing "Talk to the Animals" around the house.