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

At the callow age of forty-three, Entertainment Weekly columnist Mark Harris may not be old enough to remember the Sixties, but he conjures the jerky, jump-cut decade with the lucidity of a baby boomer whose memory is unclouded by recreational drug use. No freaked-out happenings or summer of love-ins, no incense and peppermints, just a multicolored flashback swirling with hard-nosed studio executives, young Turks on the make, and untrustworthy over-thirty-year-olds who know something is happening, but they don’t know what it is—do you, Mr. Crowther?

Harris’s irresistible hook is to sift through the five Best Picture nominees from the tipping point year of 1967 and paste together “a five snapshot collage of the American psyche as reflected in its popular culture.” He sets his way-back machine on a fashion-plated gangster film knitted from Warner Bros., Godard, and the Zapruder film (Bonnie and Clyde); a deadpan comedy of manners about an alienated brat submerged in the plasticity of suburban Southern California (The Graduate); a homoerotic interracial love story disguised as a Southern Gothic thriller (In the Heat of the Night); a superstar death watch disguised as a social problem film (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner); and a lumbering, lagging indicator set to music (Doctor Dolittle). Wry, production-wise, and hot-wired to the A-list artists, Harris is a beguiling tour guide to a sputtering industry forced to retool and recast by a-changing times. “The rule book had been tossed out,” he writes. “Warren Beatty, who looked like a movie star, had become a producer. Dustin Hoffman, who looked like a producer, had become a movie star.”

Faye Dunaway embodies sex and violence in Bonnie and Clyde

More classical Hollywood than nouvelle vague in editing style, Harris cross cuts smoothly between his five story arcs, tracking the pre-, in medias res, and postproduction travails, the box office and critical reception, and the final black-tie smackdown at the Academy Awards. The celluloid ranges in quality from prime to rancid, but Harris gives each nominee its due measure of line readings and screen space. His own performance is no less award worthy: Best Film Book Adapted from a Best Film List. Pictures at a Revolution will take its place alongside a select library of four-star case studies of the sausage factory that is Hollywood, a worthy shelf companion to Lillian Ross’s Picture, John Gregory Dunne’s The Studio, Steven Bach’s Final Cut, and Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy.

Of all the tectonic plates shifting beneath the studio soundstages—economic, industrial, demographic, and moral—the crack-up of the Production Code, the in-house censorship regime that had placated the bluenoses and protected the studio system oligopoly since 1934, may have marked the most dramatic upheaval. MPAA President Jack Valenti would officially put the quietus on the racket in 1968, but the class of 1967 was already tolling its death knell—radiating transgressive energy and thrilling audiences with the shock of seeing, right before their eyes, barriers busted, in language, image, and third act moral closure. The fusillades of splattered blood in Bonnie and Clyde, Sidney Poitier’s defiant slap upside the face of a white racist in In the Heat of the Night, even the discreet interracial kiss in Guess Who’s Coming ton Dinner—in 1967, and throughout the second Golden Age of Hollywood that peaked sometime around Jaws (1975), filmmakers thrived on the esthetic jolt of projecting what had never been glimpsed before on a Hollywood screen. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1968), screenwriter William Goldman knew he could bushwhack spectators simply by having the hero kick his opponent in the balls.

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger break racial taboos in the south in In the Heat of the Night

Harris detects the early rumblings of a wall tumbling down in the spec script for Bonnie and Clyde by wannabe players David Newman and Robert Benton, soul mates working at the trendsetting Esquire magazine when not swooning before the gods of French art-house cinema. (In a charming vignette, Newman and Benton get to spent eighty-six minutes in fanboy heaven with Truffaut and Godard at a private screening of Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy [1949]—talk about l’amour fou.) After the usual false starts and dashed hopes, the project takes off when a pretty boy actor seizes the means of production and makes his own screeching getaway from the ranks of male ingénues. The smoothest of operators, Warren Beatty emerges less as a svelte Casanova than a slick Sammy Glick. After hearing Truffaut praise the Bonnie and Clyde script, he phones Benton and shows up at his doorstep twenty minutes later. (“My wife was so angry—she hadn’t even had a chance to put on makeup,” recalls Benton.) Under the steady hand of director Arthur Penn—he and Beatty pledged to have one argument per day during production and always met their quota—Bonnie and Clyde didn’t just demolish the conventions of the gangster genre, it crashed through the road blocks between Hollywood genres, careening from uproarious slapstick played to jaunty banjo-picking into grim, blood-red violence. “They’re young. They’re in love. And they kill people,” gushed a tagline that hit the target audience right between the eyes—youth, romance, and rebellion. Perhaps because its setting is the mythic rather than the historical past, Bonnie and Clyde has dated well—the 1960s frozen in the amber of the 1930s.

A 1960s film about the 1960s, The Graduate has aged less gracefully, in part because so much of what was once innovative now seems conventional—the wall-to-wall folk rock soundtrack by Simon and Garfunkel, the frank and frankly unpunished adultery, and the casting of the offbeat (that is, physiognomically Jewish) Dustin Hoffman; in part because a profound zeitgeist turnabout has made the matriculated Benjamin Braddock look whiney, sullen, privileged, and narcissistic. Nichols claims the ethnic textures of a Jewish outcast among the sun-tanned goyim of California didn’t dawn on him until he spotted a Mad magazine parody of The Graduate in which Ben asks, “Mom, how come I’m Jewish and you and Dad aren’t?” More than any other film, The Graduate provided the treasure map to the gold mine that was the baby-booming youth market, Hollywood’s demographic salvation: screw the family trade and suck up to the Pepsi generation. (Unfortunately, Harris fails to quotes Sukarno’s great line about the difference in First and Third World perspectives on the film: “In America, The Graduate is about alienated youth. In Indonesia, The Graduate is about how American families have swimming pools.”)

Of course, pampered young white kids were not the only demo rushing the ticket window. Emblematically, and damn conveniently for Harris, 1967 was Sidney Poitier’s breakout year. Poitier had played his part in Hollywood since No Way Out (1950)—it was basically one part and it earned him an Oscar in Lilies of the Field (1963) but in addition to anchoring In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, he lured a huge multiracial audience all on his lonesome with To Sir, With Love (1967). (Fortunately, Harris fails to quote Lulu’s treacly theme song.) Condescended to as a credit to his race in the 1950s, denigrated as a white man’s fantasy of a good Negro by the mid-1960s, the first black star in Hollywood history shouldered a heavy burden of Role Model baggage as America’s color codes lines crossed over from integrationist civil rights to fist-in-the-air black power.

In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft as Ben and Mrs. Robinson suffer from middle class angst in bed

Producer-director Stanley Kramer, who never met a social problem a social-problem film couldn’t solve, figured Poitier’s golden persona might pass the acid test for a practice that was still illegal in sixteen states. As the ludicrously overqualified suitor in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, he would be welcomed at any table not presided over by a Grand Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan. No matter: the real stars were the dying Spencer Tracy and the radiant Katharine Hepburn, whose legendary love affair was just entering extratextual consciousness, and the real question mark was whether Tracy would survive the production. (He did, barely, dying just weeks after shooting wrapped.) Off screen, Poitier endured the delicate minuet of racial manners with his usual good grace. “Poitier knew that Hepburn and Tracey were on unfamiliar terrain just trying to get through a dinner with a black man who wasn’t serving them,” comments Harris. Wearing his bleeding heart on his sleeve, the well-meaning Kramer was bewildered when his box-office hit was hammered as timid and trite, and he a liberal relic worn reactionary by time.

Moving from uppercrust Northern liberalism to an antebellum Jim Crow backwater, In the Heat of the Night turned up the racial temperature, politically if not erotically. To save money on location in southern Illinois, director Norman Jewison kept the local street signs and the name of the place was perfect: Sparta. When the cast and crew ventured into the unreconstructed territory of Dyersburg, Tennessee, the local color got a mite too color-sensitive for comfort. Poitier slept with a gun under his pillow. Playing a portly redneck sheriff, then not a cliché, Rod Steiger walked away with the film and the Oscar, but it was Poitier’s retaliatory slap that ricocheted in theaters across America. Whites gasped; blacks gasped, then cheered.

Though far and away the most expensive and logistically complex project on Harris’s docket, Doctor Dolittle is the runt of the litter. A surefire high concept—had not My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965) proven that family friendly musical extravaganzas were profitable no matter how bloated the negative costs?—the adaptation of the never produced and not especially presold children’s books by Hugh Lofting must have made the suits at Twentieth Century-Fox long for the stable, cost-efficient days of Cleopatra (1963). How bad was it? The animals refused to emote on cue, bit their costars, and soiled the set, a constant flow of effluvia that necessitated regular hosings down and gallons of ammonia. “The smell,” writes Harris, resisting the obvious metaphor, “was unbearable, as was the non-stop noise.” Also impossible to housebreak was the irascible star Rex Harrison, who with his pathetically nutjob wife Rachel Roberts, devoted his down time to nightmarish rows and epic binges. (At L.A.’s Bistro, a drunken Rex crooned a paean to his penis to the tune of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” while Roberts, sans knickers, did handstands). In the end, the zoo story was extinct on arrival: even the moppets yawned. When the film garnered nine Academy Award nominations due to block voting from nervous Fox employees and generous helpings of swag, the news was “greeted with shock and, from several quarters, outright disgust.”

Sidney Poitier, Katharine Houghton, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy break racial taboos in the north in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

The Production Code, Stanley Kramer, and the bloated musical weren’t the only casualties of the quake of ’67. New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was also mowed down by Bonnie and Clyde when the aging raja of middlebrow cinephilia, a long time champion of the art film and a fierce opponent of censorship, suddenly found himself on the wrong side of film history. “A cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie,” he harrumphed. Deeming so retrograde a sensibility no longer fit to print in a newspaper straining to be hip, the Gray Lady put the old man out to pasture.

More coda than climax, Harris’s final set piece pivots on a tragic twist whose symbolism would be overwrought were it not true. Four days before the scheduled telecast of the Academy Awards ceremony, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis; his funeral in Atlanta would be the next day. For a time, in this pre-PC Hollywood, the old guard felt the show must go on, but when Poitier and Sammy Davis, Jr. threatened to be no-shows, saner heads prevailed. On April 10th, 1968, as waxworks MC Bob Hope cracked jokes that were flat even by the standards of the occasion (“I can’t imagine nominating a kid like Dustin Hoffman—he starred in a picture he can’t get in to see!”), the ceremony minted in 1928 caught up to its own generation gap. In the Heat of the Night grabbed the big prize, but it was Rod Steiger’s surprise win for Best Actor and his cri de coeur at the podium (“Thank you, and we shall overcome.”) that electrified the room. The conspicuous absence from the Oscar roster that night, and hence Harris’s post-mortem, is Richard Brooks’s chilling adaptation of Truman Capote’s true crime classic, In Cold Blood (1967). The Academy’s bad taste was Harris’s good luck: to monitor the death rattles of geriatric old Hollywood, it would be hard to improve on Dr. Doolittle.

Presumably exploiting the perks of his day job, Harris draws on up front and personal interviews with almost all the surviving big-name participants—notably directors Nichols and Penn, and stars Beatty, Dunaway, and Hoffman—plus a battalion of above and below the line eyewitnesses. (On location in Texas, a sixteen-year-old stunner named Morgan Fairchild broke into the biz as a driving double for Faye Dunaway.) By and large, the gauzy filter of misty-eyed nostalgia is wiped clean by rueful retrospection and blunt self-examinations. Describing his film-side manner, Mike Nichols admits, “I was a prick.” The laconic Dustin Hoffman shares a bracing memory: after catching a sneak preview of The Graduate, he is confronted by Radie Harris, venerable columnist for The Hollywood Reporter who, like an oracle from a Greek tragedy, points her walking cane at his chest and says, “Your life is never going to be the same.”

Rex Harrison, in the title role of Dr. Doolittle, questions Rufus about his master's dinner.

Though happy to dish the dirt, Harris has a sharp eye for cinematic detail and nice way with pithy character descriptions: editor Hal Ashby is “a day in day out pothead who was also a workaholic,” Spencer Tracy exudes a contract player disdain for “the better-acting-through neurosis style,” and cigar-chomping producer Joseph E. Levine talks tough (“Mention the name Antonioni and most filmgoers would think it was some kind of cheese”). Harris is especially illuminating about the role of cinematography and editing in the revolution—how cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s desaturated color scheme for In the Heat of the Night violated “the shadowless, picturesque esthetics that had ruled Hollywood color movies for decades” or how editor Dede Allen’s pacing drove the rhythms of Bonnie and Clyde. Ironically, while chronicling the year that put the director’s name above the title and brought the word auteur into the American vernacular, Harris’s play-by-play production history underscores the collaborative nature and dumb-luck serendipity of the filmmaking process. Tallying up the input of script doctor Robert Towne, star-producer Beatty, director Penn, and Newman and himself, Robert Benton confesses, “I honestly don’t know who the auteur of Bonnie and Clyde was.”

A carping critic—well, me—might mark down a couple of quibbles. To pump up his Annus mirabilis, Harris tends to sneer at pre-1967 Hollywood as a dust bin of cornpone clichés and puritan shibboleths: having seen Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), he knows better. Also, the revolution pictured here did not lead to a utopian dawn for women, who saw their status and star power diminished by a gendered vision that was at least as blinkered as that of the moguls. The predatory Mrs. Robinson, not the poetic Bonnie, became the dominant face of the female in the not-so-new Hollywood, when she came in for a close-up at all.

Finally, a sure test of a great film book is that it makes the reader want to revisit even those classics he thinks he knows frame by frame. After devouring Pictures at a Revolution you’ll want to reshuffle your Netflix queue or cough up for the Blu-ray editions—though, no doubt, skipping over Doctor Dolittle.

Thomas Doherty is Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University and the author of numerous books.

To buy Pictures at a Revolution click here .

Cineaste, Vol. 33 No.4 (Fall 2008).