Kevin Howell

MY Galley Talk: Pictures at a Revolution
January 18, 2008

Every week I work with booksellers across the country who are singing the praises of a recently read ARC for Publishers Weekly’s “Galley Talk.” This is my turn to shine a spotlight on a favorite galley. Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of New Hollywood (Penguin Press, $27.95; unabridged Tantor Media audiobook, $39.99; release date: Feb. 14) looks at the five films that competed for the Oscar for Best Picture of 1967, the year the Old Hollywood studio system went head-to-head with the young Turks of New Hollywood.

This outstanding page-turner is a beautifully written and carefully researched film history lesson. There’s not a dull page thanks to Harris’s shrewdly persuasive insights and fresh interviews with most of the creative talent behind those five motion pictures. This book is a rarity for film buffs—it offers juicy, surprising and unfamiliar tales and (like William Mann’s superb Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn) it also refutes inaccuracies that have been passed down as truth.

The five films that competed for Hollywood’s top prize at the spring 1968 Oscar ceremonies were:

Mike Nichols’s The Graduate starring a virtually unknown Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft as the older woman (who, at 36 was actually only six years older than Hoffman). It’s nearly 100-day production was as dark as the film is light.

Bonnie and Clyde was the first film Warren Beatty produced and the first film the studio didn’t take away from director Arthur Penn. It was reviled by Warner Brothers for its (then) extreme violence and divided critics like no film before it. 

Stanley Kramer’s racial tolerance comedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which reunited Katharine Hepburn and a dying Spencer Tracy. Despite being critically dismissed as quaint and timid, audiences made it the biggest success in Columbia Picture’s history.

The mystery In the Heat of the Night, where northern police detective Sidney Poitier dealt with a murder and southern bigotry while director Norman Jewison and screenwriter Sterling Silliphant tried to update the attitudes in John Ball’s novel (written in 1960 but not published until 1964).

Arthur P. Jacobs’s elephantine musical Doctor Doolittle, made at the height of the success of mega-musicals (Sound of Music, My Fair Lady and Oliver! all ran over two-and-a-half hours and each won the Best Picture Oscar in the 1960s). It’s endless production and temperamental star (Rex Harrison) and skyrocketing cost ($29 million, which in 2007 terms would be $190 million) nearly crippled 20th Century Fox.

Fans of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, that profiled young maverick filmmakers in the mid-1970s, will find Pictures at a Revolution a perfect companion for the years leading up to his volume.

Each film’s gestation, production and release fits together like a fascinating, gossip-strewn jigsaw puzzle. Harris expertly sets the stage for the creation of each film, backtracking to set up the careers of most participants and also takes care to illuminate how the politics of the times affected each film. It’s shocking to realize how solitary Sidney Poitier’s position was as a black leading man in the 1960s. If he turned down a role offered him, the producers would just change the role into a Caucasian character rather than cast any other black actor. In 1967, Poitier starred in three of the year’s most successful films (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night and To Sir With Love) but wasn’t nominated for an Oscar; Hollywood had already patted itself on the back by giving him an Oscar for 1963’s Lilies of the Field.

With the perspective of forty years, Harris coaxes honest (and sometimes contradictory) testimonies out of the surviving cast and crew of the five films including Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Norman Jewison, Robert Towne, Robert Benton, Buck Henry, Samantha Eggar, Katharine Houghton, David Zanuck and others.

Pictures at a Revolution is a treasure trove of delights for film buffs and it would be a shame if Penguin Press wasn’t able to promote it in conjunction with the 40th anniversary DVD re-releases of four of those five films: Bonnie and Clyde (coming March 25), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (coming Feb. 12), The Graduate and In the Heat of the Night (both, just released).

Posted by Kevin Howell on January 18, 2008 | Comments (0)