The 1970s is generally considered to be one golden eras of American filmmaking. During this decade a new generation of filmmakers, who would later be dubbed “The New Hollywood,” broke from tradition and created films that confronted the changing nature of America with brutal honesty and a love of cinema. However, filmmaking revolutions do not happen in a day, and author Mark Harris believes the late 1960s was the breeding ground for this filmic schism. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood uses the five Academy Award Best Picture nominees from 1967 to paint a picture of the Hollywood studio system in its decline and to show us how it gave birth to the New Hollywood.
An Overview of the Book
Pictures at a Revolution centers around the five Best Picture nominees of 1967: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, and Doctor Doolittle. Harris tells the story of each film's creation in a narrative fashion, beginning in 1963 with a look at the state of Hollywood at the time. As the decade wears on, the book intersects between each film, documenting their production and eventual critical and audience reactions. Harris ends the book at the 1967 Academy Awards, held on April 10th, 1968, and briefly mentions the future for many of the films’ participants.
The Book Contains a Terrific Mixture of Information and Analysis
Mark Harris’s greatest strength is his skill as a historian. The amount of information in this book is truly staggering, as the author has interviewed many of the key figures from the five films and uncovered an endless supply of archival interviews and news articles. Simply publishing a book of facts would still make Pictures at a Revolution a worthy purchase for any film buff.
Thankfully Harris is no slouch at analysis as the book is fascinating portrait of the Hollywood studio system at the end of the 1960s, and he convincing argues that the five films discussed are indicative of both the Old Hollywood studio system and the emerging New Hollywood style. According to Harris, Doctor Doolittle and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner are representative of old-fashioned filmmaking techniques and dated cultural attitudes, while Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and, to a lesser extent, In the Heat of the Night, embody the counter-cultural attitudes of a new generation of filmmakers. Harris sees the 1967 Oscars as the ultimate clash between the establishment and the rebels, and doesn't seem surprised that the least extreme of the New Hollywood’s films, In the Heat of the Night, was the ultimate Best Picture winner.
Part of Harris’s strength is his ability to sympathize with and understand filmmakers he ultimately disagrees with. For example, Harris is no fan of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner but he sees it as a legitimately important film and thoroughly analyzes the attitudes of the film’s producer and director, Stanley Kramer. The book depicts Kramer as a man who saw himself as a political progressive but was hobbled by his compromising instincts, resulting in films that tackled difficult subject matter but never wanted to offend anyone. Not surprisingly, Kramer had trouble appealing to the counter-culture, and the book’s anecdotes of him holding college campus screenings of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner are heartbreaking. Kramer longs to fit in with the New Hollywood, but he can’t. He’s part of the Old Hollywood.
The Book Only Falters Towards the End
If there’s one complaint to be had with Pictures at a Revolution it is that Harris skimps a bit towards the end, and only provides mini-biographies for the book’s main participants that briefly discuss their careers post-1967. Unfortunately this does not cover the influence of the five films, particularly Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, particularly well. Much time is spent near the end of the book examining those two films’ incredible impact on audiences and critics alike and Harris does an excellent job explaining how exciting and fresh the films were at the time. However, a discussion of the films' impact on other movies and the New Hollywood of the 1970s in general would hammer Harris’s point home that they helped birth a filmmaking revolution.
That concern aside, Pictures at a Revolution is still an essential book, not only for film enthusiasts, but for anyone interested the changing landscape of Hollywood itself. Harris convincingly argues for the importance of the five films and how some reflected the attitudes of old-fashioned Hollywood values and others protested for counter-cultural change. By the book’s end the reader will have a deeper appreciation for not only the New Hollywood, but the late 1960s as well. Hollywood was undergoing a massive number of growing pains at time, but it matured into something wonderful. Maybe it will happen again.
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
- Mark Harris
- Penguin Press
- February 14th, 2008
- ISBN: 1594201528
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