Pictures at a Revolution

Serious film buffs should run, not walk, to their local bookstore or library to get their mitts on a copy of Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris' fascinating examination the five films that were nominated for Best Picture at the 1967 Academy Awards (Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night). The book is almost impossible to put down, and offers more information than you could have thought you would have wanted.
Harris is such a good writer and researcher that I think he could have picked the nominees from any year, but 1967 is chosen because it was a tipping point between the Hollywood's Golden Era and the influx of young, iconoclastic filmmakers into the forefront. As he puts it in the introduction, "The Best Picture lineup was more than diverse; it was almost self-contradictory. Half of the nominees seemed to be sneering at the other half: The father-knows-best values of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was wittily trashed by The Graduate;the hands-joined-in-brotherhoood hopes expressed by In the Heat of the Night had little in common with the middle finger of insurrection extended by Bonnie and Clyde."

Harris starts with the conception of each film, and takes us by the hand through development, casting, production, post-production, and then ends at the Oscar ceremony, all the while giving us the bigger picture of the status of American films during the sixties (this was the time when Jack Valenti became president of the MPAA and set about dismantling the Production Code) and the country in general (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated just before the awards were set to be held, and were ultimately postponed a few days). There's much to savor, for instance in the discussion of Bonnie and Clyde, we learn that the film was written by two Esquire staffers, Robert Benton and David Newman, as an homage to the French New Wave, and hoped to have Francois Truffaut direct. He almost did, and so did Jean-Luc Godard, who wanted to shoot it in New Jersey in the winter, but was told that the weather wouldn't cooperate. He replied, "I'm talking cinema and you're talking meteorology," and left the project.

Of course Warren Beatty would end up producing and starring, and he is one of the major characters who loom over the book. Early on we get the fascinating nugget that on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated Beatty was in the apartment of Stanley Kubrick, trying to talk the director into helming Beatty's project What's New, Pussycat? Kubrick declined, and of course Beatty would also end up leaving the project, which became the film debut of Woody Allen. Beatty's idea, of a Lothario as a sympathetic character, would end up gestating for another decade and become Shampoo.

Another major character is Mike Nichols, who begins the book as a celebrated improvisational comedian, becomes a wunderkind on Broadway (he wins three Tony Awards for Best Director in a row and has as many as four shows on Broadway at once) and then moves on to film. The Graduate was for a time to be his first film, but he ended up making Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? first, and we learn all about how he tamed Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Much of The Graduate is familiar, such as how Nichols plucked Dustin Hoffman from obscurity to play the lead role (he turned down Robert Redford, who matched the description of Benjamin Braddock in the book, but Nichols told Redford he couldn't play a loser). The film also got a lot of bad reviews, but was an incredible box-office hit, and usually the line of demarcation of those who liked and didn't was their age.

The third major character is Sidney Poitier, who at the beginning of the book is the first black actor to win a Best Actor Oscar, and by the time the book ends is the biggest movie star in America, no easy feat considering that many Southern theaters wouldn't play some of his films. Poitier was in two of the profiled films, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and was almost in Doctor Dolittle (his part was eventually written out). Poitier was a lightning rod for almost everyone's attitude about race--he invariably played characters who were exemplary figures, as it wasn't felt that movies about fully dimensional black people, warts and all, could sell. Poitier realized the bind he was in--he was criticized by many liberals and more radical blacks for being a "negro in white-face" but there was little he could do about it, especially when Stanley Kramer, the director of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, purposely made sure that Poitier's character had no flaws. Of course, Poitier's turn as Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night had more bite, particularly the scene in which Tibbs is slapped by a white bigot and slaps the man right back. The scene was a pivotal turning point in the history of Hollywood and race.

The most fun, schadenfreude-wise, is the discussion of Doctor Dolittle, which was a critical and box-office flop, but nonetheless got a Best Picture nod. Through this film Harris discusses the insular thinking of Hollywood studios that unfortunately still exists today, namely, that originality is shunned in favor of trying to duplicate the success of what has already come. After the phenomenal success of My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music (which became the hightest grossing film ever at the time) studios fell in line, all generating huge, lumbering road-show musicals. Dolittle, based on a series of children's books, was a nightmare from start to finish. Alan Lerner, lyricist for My Fair Lady, was supposed to write the script, but dithered for several years before he was fired. There were huge cost overruns, problems with the menagerie of animals (memorably, a giraffe is sidelined because "he stepped on his cock") and the star, Rex Harrison, is a holy terror of difficult behavior. The film is released to complete indifference by the public and brickbats from the critics, but it's the only film from Fox had that could conceivably get Oscar nominations, so they mounted a campaign. Amazingly, it pays off. The explanation is that this was still the era of studio fidelity by voters. It was natural for those who worked for Fox to vote for a Fox film, as it helped their company earn money.

The segment on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner ties in old Hollywood, as it starred Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, in what would turn out to be his last film (he died just a few days after completion of photography). Tracy scoffed at method acting (he was attributed as saying the key to good acting was to "remember your lines and don't bump into the furniture") and dominated Hepburn, who was famous for being a flinty, independent woman ahead of her time, but allowed Tracy to walk all over her.

I could go on and on with juicy details, (there's a long interesting discussion of how Bosley Crowther, the lead critic for the New York Times, wrote himself out of a job because of his vituperative hatred of Bonnie and Clyde) but you're better off reading the book yourself. Oh, and the winner of the Oscar? It was In the Heat of the Night (Nichols would win Best Director). Harris summarizes the reason for this thusly: "In the Heat of the Night'sfive Oscars represented a temporary compromise between the generationally divisive Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate and the dug-in fustiness that young moviegoers were mocking in their response to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." Interestingly, it's those two more irreverent films that are remembered today as classics. Part of that is due to the undeniable fact that Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduatewere the two best of those five, but perhaps also because the young people of 1967 are the people who set the tone for the next few decades of Hollywood product.