Times Are A-Changin’ Edition

Pictures At A Revolution
by Mark Harris

In 1967, five movies were released and nominated for Best Picture–Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Doctor Dolittle, In The Heat Of The Night, and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. Pictures At A Revolution, the first book from Entertainment Weekly‘s Mark Harris, gives you the back story of all five movies and how they dovetailed at a time when Hollywood and American society was about to be turned fully upside-down. This is one of the best nonfiction books I have read and it almost rivals Malcolm Gladwell’s books and The Orchid Thief for top spot.

The book begins in 1963 with David Newman and Robert Benton and their love for all things French New Wave and what would begin to take form as the “New Sentimentality”–an article they would later write while at Esquire. Though Bonnie and Clyde would ultimately take on a life of its own within the counterculture and New Hollywood mythology, Newman and Benton’s ultimate desire for the story was to show something new, something now. They saw Bonnie and Clyde as being the archetypes in the coming war between the Establishment and Youth.

From here, Harris weaves in the initial ideas behind the other movies, their pre-production, production, critical and audience response, and ultimate destinations to the Oscar ceremony. Harris draws from a seemingly unending well of quotes, interviews, anecdotes, and notes from revised and finalized scripts, as well as his own fantastic and fully-developed narrative. Pictures At A Revolution is so great, constructed so clearly, and so informative that it negates the need for a documentary (and a documentary on this would be amazing).

No secondary or tertiary stone seems to be left unturned either as the side stories about the film critics, race, Sidney Poitier, the producers, Old Hollywood vs. New Hollywood, New York vs. Los Angeles, the directors, and the wives of some of the main players are all equally interesting as the movies themselves. It is an all-around terrific book and your opinion of it will only be heightened if you already love or have a desire to see any of these movies.

It is funny how we all have such a built-in knowledge of how music was an integral part in how the American fabric was changed but seem to forget just how revolutionary Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate were at the time of their release (and how polarizing they were with critics and audiences). When you combine all of these elements at play then factor in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and In The Heat Of The Night you have got yourself a convergence of unbelievable timing in a country at a time where many different pots were reaching their boiling points.

Regardless of when you were born, Pictures At A Revolution conveys what the mid ’60′s were like through the lens of Hollywood cameras and the people behind them. It is absorbing and multi-faceted and I can only hope that this is the first in a long line of books from Harris.