A naked woman paces the
floor of her bedroom, desperate for something just outside her window. A young
man comes home after finishing college, terrified but too polite to tell
anyone. A black detective waits at a train station in the deep South, soon to
be a murder suspect because of the color of his skin. An aging couple gets
unexpected news from their daughter, forcing them to confront prejudices they
built their lives on not having. And a man in a top hat sings a love song to a
seal before tossing it over a cliff.
From such beginnings came
the Best Picture nominees of the 1967 Academy Awards: Bonnie And Clyde, The Graduate, In The
Heat Of The Night, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, and the ill-fated Dr.
Dolittle. In Pictures At A Revolution: Five Movies And The Birth Of The New Hollywood, Entertainment Weekly writer-editor Mark Harris
details the history of each film, and through them explores a Hollywood in
transition. From directors inspired by French New Wave auteurs like François
Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard to studio moguls desperate to ape the success of
big-budget musicals like My Fair Lady, it was a period of contradiction, when Bob
Hope could crack bad jokes about race relations while the country's biggest
box-office draw, Sidney Poitier, squirmed in the audience. Change was
inevitable; the only question was whose back would hit the wall first.
Books about the movies
generally fall into two camps: Either filmmaking is the most fun a person can
have without bubblegum, or else it's such a debilitating process that it's amazing
anything worth watching ever gets made. Harris has it both ways. Instead of
focusing on the movies individually, he wisely chooses to document all five at
once, mixing the inspirations for Bonnie's screenplay with Rex Harrison's drunken
antics on the set of Dolittle, and the final shooting days of Spencer Tracy. The
result is a seamless history of an industry caught between the conservatism of
the old and the jittery frustration of the new. It's a terrific read that
provides context without settling for easy answers; like the best movies, it
tells the truth, and leaves interpretation to the audience.