Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood

The epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967 — Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Doolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde — and through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that transformed Hollywood, and America, forever.

It's the mid-1960s, and westerns, war movies and blockbuster musicals — Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music — dominate the box office. The Hollywood studio system, with its cartels of talent and its production code, is hanging strong, or so it would seem. Meanwhile, Warren Beatty wonders why his career isn't blooming after the success of his debut in Splendor in the Grass; Mike Nichols wonders if he still has a career after breaking up with Elaine May; and even though Sidney Poitier has just made history by becoming the first black Best Actor winner, he's still feeling completely cut off from opportunities other than the same "noble black man" role. And a young actor named Dustin Hoffman struggles to find any work at all.

By the Oscar ceremonies of the spring of 1968, when In the Heat of the Night wins the 1967 Academy Award for Best Picture, a cultural revolution has hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami. The unprecedented violence and nihilism of fellow nominee Bonnie and Clyde has shocked old-guard reviewers but helped catapult Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway into counterculture stardom and made the movie one of the year's biggest box-office successes. Just as unprecedented has been the run of nominee The Graduate, which launched first-time director Mike Nichols into a long and brilliant career in filmmaking, to say nothing of what it did for Dustin Hoffman, Simon and Garfunkel, and a generation of young people who knew that whatever their future was, it wasn't in plastics. Sidney Poitier has reprised the noble-black-man role, brilliantly, not once but twice, in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, movies that showed in different ways both how far America had come on the subject of race in 1967 and how far it still had to go.

What City of Nets did for Hollywood in the 1940s and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for the 1970s, Pictures at a Revolution does for Hollywood and the cultural revolution of the 1960s. As we follow the progress of these five movies, we see an entire industry change and struggle and collapse and grow — we see careers made and ruined, studios born and destroyed, and the landscape of possibility altered beyond all recognition. We see some outsized personalities staking the bets of their lives on a few films that became iconic works that defined the generation — and other outsized personalities making equally large wagers that didn't pan out at all.

The product of extraordinary and unprecedented access to the principals of all five films, married to twenty years' worth of insight covering the film industry and a bewitching storyteller's gift, Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution is a bravura accomplishment, and a work that feels iconic itself.

"Oscar plays it safe. You can trust the Academy to pick a 'Forrest Gump' over a 'Pulp Fiction,' an 'Ordinary People' over a 'Raging Bull,' a 'Kramer vs. Kramer' over an 'Apocalypse Now.'

Or a well made, socially conscious melodrama like 'In the Heat of the Night' over groundbreaking movies like 'Bonnie and Clyde' and 'The Graduate.' That's part of the story that Mark Harris tells... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) in his richly fascinating book, 'Pictures at a Revolution,' which focuses on the five nominees for best picture in 1968 — the other two were 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' and 'Doctor Dolittle.'

The conventional way of writing about five movies would be to devote a section of the book to each. But Harris does something more difficult and far more illuminating: He weaves together the stories of how each movie was conceived, crafted, released, critiqued and received. He writes about the five or six years in which the filmmakers, some of them old pros and some of them rank novices, struggled with a studio system in collapse, an audience whose tastes and enthusiasms seemed wildly unpredictable, and a culture being transformed by volatile social and political forces.

A few figures dominate Harris' narrative — writers Robert Benton, David Newman and Robert Towne; actor-producer Warren Beatty; producers Lawrence Turman, Stanley Kramer and Arthur P. Jacobs; studio heads Jack Warner and Richard Zanuck; directors Mike Nichols, Norman Jewison and Arthur Penn; actors Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Dustin Hoffman, Rod Steiger, Rex Harrison and Sidney Poitier. The book has what Hollywood publicists used to brag about: a cast of thousands.

Poitier figures in the stories of three of the movies — 'In the Heat of the Night' and 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,' in which he acted, and 'Doctor Dolittle,' in which he was cast in a featured role until its chaotic filming led to his being written out of the script. He had become an unexpected star: In 1967, Harris tells us, 'Box Office magazine ... rated Poitier as the fifth biggest star in Hollywood, ahead of Sean Connery and Steve McQueen. His drawing power was a shock to an industry that had, until recently, treated his employment in movies as something akin to an act of charity.' But at the same time, a 'rift ... had grown between Poitier and a younger, more militant black cultural intelligentsia' that mocked him as an Uncle Tom. The author of one of these denunciations, Clifford Mason, now admits that he 'jumped all over Sidney because I wanted him to be Humphrey Bogart when he was really Cary Grant,' but he persists in his criticism of the 'role that Sidney always played — the black person with dignity who worries about the white people's problems — you don't play that part over and over unless you're comfortable with that kind of suffering.'

Racial tensions and the protest against the war in Vietnam played a large role in shaping these movies. Harris, a writer and former editor for Entertainment Weekly, not only demonstrates how the filmmakers responded to social and political change, but he also has a working knowledge of the film industry that allows him to elaborate on how a colossal flop like 'Doctor Dolittle' came about (and how it could be nominated for a best picture Oscar over 'In Cold Blood,' 'Cool Hand Luke' and 'Two for the Road'). Its producers were inspired by the smash success of 'My Fair Lady,' 'Mary Poppins' and 'The Sound of Music.'

'Historically,' Harris comments, 'the only event more disruptive to the industry's ecosystem than an unexpected flop is an unexpected smash, and, caught off guard by the sudden arrival of more revenue than they thought their movies could ever bring in, the major studios resorted to three old habits: imitation, frenzied speculation, and panic.' Imitation was the first impetus behind 'Doctor Dolittle' — Alan Jay Lerner, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews were the talents the producers sought for the film, but they wound up with only one of them. The panic came later — a good deal, but not all, of it caused by the irascible and demanding Harrison, whom Harris presents as a man filled with 'anger and paranoia.' Among other things, Harrison was an anti-Semite, which led to confrontations with his co-star Anthony Newley, whom he disparaged 'sometimes to his face, as a "Jewish comic" or a "cockney Jew."'

Harris has created what seems likely to be one of the classics of popular film history, useful to dedicated students of film and cultural historians, and also to trivia buffs. (Did you know that Beatty's original choices to play Bonnie and Clyde were his sister, Shirley MacLaine, and Bob Dylan?) Harris writes with a wit that's sly, not show-offy. He can encapsulate the woes of shooting 'Doctor Dolittle' in four words: 'The rhinoceros got pneumonia.' And he can slip in a bit of insider humor with a reference to Newley's then-wife, Joan Collins, who 'reentered the Hollywood social scene she loved with the vigor of an Olympic athlete' — the syntax leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the prepositional phrase modifies 're-entered' or 'loved.' Indeed, almost the only complaint about 'Pictures at a Revolution' is that, except for an 'Epilogue' that briefly sums up the later careers of the major figures, it ends at the Oscar ceremony. You want Harris to go on, to talk about how the success of 'Bonnie and Clyde' and 'The Graduate' also caused the studios to resort to their old habits of 'imitation, frenzied speculation, and panic.'

And there were other consequences: 'Kramer vs. Kramer' now seems like little more than a well made domestic drama, while the film that it defeated for the best picture in 1979, Francis Ford Coppola's audacious mess of a movie, 'Apocalypse Now,' is regarded as a classic. 'Kramer vs. Kramer' also won Oscars for its writer and director, Robert Benton, one of the writers of 'Bonnie and Clyde,' and for Dustin Hoffman, who had become a movie star in 'The Graduate.' In 11 years, Benton and Hoffman had gone from being icons of a film revolution to pillars of the establishment. That's the way things work in Hollywood. If you can't beat "em, assimilate "em.

Charles Matthews, a former books editor for the San Jose Mercury News, blogs about books at http://charlesmatthews.blogspot.com and about movies at http://oscaratoz.blogspot.com."

Reviewed by Charles Matthews, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Through these mini-portraits of key players...and pivotal films, Harris provides an engaging and rich narrative of an extraordinary moment in Hollywood and...the world." Very Short List

"A madly ambitious marriage of revelatory cultural history and great storytelling, Pictures at a Revolution is every bit as smart and radical and sexy as the movies it brings to life." David Hajdu, author of Lush Life and Positively 4th Street

"Mark Harris has pulled off brilliantly what many of us only attempt. He has used a narrowly focused subject-five movies competing for Best Picture in 1967 — to tell the larger, richly textured story of that tumultuous time. He traces the making of each of the movies — among them, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate — with the kind of detailed, dramatic narrative that makes the book a page-turner, even for someone who is not a movie buff. And his profiles of the major characters (my favorites were Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, and Mike Nichols) are the most interesting I've seen." Connie Bruck, author of The Predator's Ball, Masters of the Game, and When Hollywood Was King

"Pictures at a Revolution is exactly what its title promises: an in-depth, up-close view of the films and filmmakers that transformed American cinema during an extraordinary period of innovation and insurrection. What we have here is a clash of the titans — Old Hollywood versus the New — with the entire enterprise of American filmmaking hanging in the balance. Like a skilled novelist, Mark Harris keeps us turning the pages, with heroes to root for, villains to hiss, and plenty of intrigue along the way — all set against the psychedelic backdrop of the turbulent 1960s. A remarkable reconstruction of perhaps the most significant artistic moment in the history of American film." William J. Mann, author of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger

"I've been waiting a long time for someone to explain to me exactly what happened to the movies during the 1960s — and someone finally has. Luckily he's witty, nervy, original, widely knowledgeable from the board room to the back room, and has no trouble putting Dr. Dolittle and Bonnie and Clyde in the same critical universe. That's the 1960s for you...all movie history books should be written by Mark Harris." Jeanine Basinger, author of The Star Machine

"An exhilarating read for anyone who cares about the myriad ways movies can shape popular and political culture. I loved it." Christine Vachon, producer, author of Shooting to Kill

"Harris's experience covering film and television shows on every page, as this is the most engaging and, dare this reviewer say, entertaining book on the movies to be written in years. Highly recommended." Library Journal

"No contest, this is one of the best film histories ever written. Don't miss it." Booklist

"[S]mart, savvy....[Harris] paints a colorful, comprehensive and nicely nuanced portrait of the movie industry in the throes of wrenching yet liberating change." Chicago Tribune

"American film in 1967 was heading into an unrivaled, if all too short, golden age, and Mark Harris's legwork and intelligence transport us gratefully back to that exhilarating moment when it was all still about to occur." Jim Shepard, New York Times

"Some of this material we vaguely know — but not in the detail that Harris reports it. I don't know of another book that is so rich a compendium of Hollywood moviemaking lore, so amusing, so appalling, so palpably true." Richard Schickel, Los Angeles Times

"With its huge cast, wealth of information and impressive gravitas, Pictures at a Revolution is a particularly accomplished debut book." Janet Maslin, New York Times

An epic account of how the revolution hit Hollywood, told through the stories of the five films nominated for the 1967 Academy Awards

The year is 1963. The studios are churning out westerns, war movies, prudish sex comedies and overblown historical epics, but audiences whose interests have been piqued by an influx of innovative films from abroad are hungering for something more, something new. At Esquire, two young writers hatch a plan to create a movie treatment that they hope will attract the director Franois Truffaut: the story of the gangsters Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Mike Nichols, an improvisatory comedian turned neophyte theater director, gets his hands on an obscure first novel called The Graduate and wonders if he's ready to make the jump to Hollywood. Warren Beatty, just 26 years old and struggling through a series of flops after the success of Splendor in the Grass, decides to take his career into his own hands, but can't seem to settle on his next move. Dustin Hoffman, sleeping on friends' floors and scrounging for temp work in New York, struggles just to get an off-Broadway audition. Sidney Poitier, after two dozen movies, still yearns for something that seems completely unattainable: a good role. And 20th Century Fox, on the brink of financial catastrophe, puts all its hopes in a genre-the family musical-that will revitalize the company and then nearly destroy it again.

Pictures at a Revolution tracks five movies-the milestones Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, the popular hits Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, and the big-budget disaster Doctor Dolittle-on their five-year journey to Oscar night in the spring of 1968. It follows their fortunes through the last days of the studio system and the first sparks of a cultural upheaval that would launch maverick new stars and directors, topple more than one industry titan from his pedestal, and redefine what American movies could be. In 1967, moviegoers witnessed the arrival of taboo-shattering sex and violence on screen, the debuts of Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway, the return of Katharine Hepburn and the poignant farewell of Spencer Tracy, the audacious risks taken by Warren Beatty, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols and Norman Jewison, and Hollywood's agonized attempt to grapple with an incendiary moment in American race relations, with results that would change Sidney Poitier's career forever.

By tracing the gambles, the stumbles, the clashes and the creative partnerships that produced these films, Mark Harris captures both the twilight of old Hollywood and the dawn of a new golden age in studio filmmaking. Based on unprecedented access to the actors, directors, screenwriters, producers and executives whose movies defined the era, as well a wealth of previously unexplored archival material, Pictures at a Revolution is an utterly original, revealing, and entertaining history of a true cultural watershed.

For fifteen years, Mark Harris worked as a writer and editor covering movies, television and books for Entertainment Weekly, where he now writes the "Final Cut" back-page column. He has written about pop culture for several other magazines as well. A graduate of Yale University, he lives in New York City with his husband, Tony Kushner.