It's amazing how one book can enflame an interest and put things in a magical perspective, I finally have to write about a film history book which is simply the best book of its kind I have ever read, actually listened to as an audiobook, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris.

I have listened to this book over and over again and I have never experienced an art history tale with such entrancing details in every possible way. 

For instance, reading about Robert Benton and David Newman's obsession with French new wave movies and the lengths they went to experience them puts a whole new perspective on there was a whole different feel of being a moviegoer then, decades before home video.  Seeing movies for them, in the big urban centers at least, was like a treasure hunt that was opening up a new whole way of appreciating films with other intellectuals face to face in discussions about their message and artistry where arguments had to be carefully thought out ahead of time to avoid looking ridiculous.

That was certainly would have been better that what I got going to the Huron County Museum's Chaplin film series in 1989 where every attempt at a discussion about the films after screenings was brushed off by everyone while they nattered on irrelevancies. Back then, serious filmgoing sounded more precious if only because you had so little opportunity to see them at your convenience.  However, their story gives the whole cinematic experience of a whole different level of enjoyment for me, just trying to imagine something doing that for myself, and having a job relaxed enough that could allow for such pursuits.  Just their entry into movies as screenwriters was inspiring enough to see them struggle, learn about the screenwriting craft the hard way and ultimately succeed against such long odds.

However, the book has so much more than that with a wealth of concurrent stories such as the struggles of Sidney Poitier to be more than the token black actor in Hollywood even while he was so conscious of wanting to be a good example to change White America's mind about black actors.  At the same time, there is Dustin Hoffman's story of a struggling actor who couldn't get work at all until a series of chance encounters led to his big break in The Graduate that would blow the doors off that were shutting out actors who didn't resemble WASP paragons.

There is the sad story of Stanley Kramer, a man with lofty ideals of cinema as social commentary, only to have his greatest commercial success with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner being undermined by the fact that it was a creaky production with condescending assumptions and embarrassing stereotypes and inhuman ciphers for characters. Just hearing him trying to lecture college student and finding that they had no common interest with him is a powerful moment of a changing time that would make Kramer irrelevant.

On the lighter side, there is Doctor Dolittle, a literary true life farce of a cinematic debacle with an obnoxious lead with Rex Harrison in a troubled production of rife with ridiculous procrastination by a deadbeat writer being just the first stumble in the string of incompetence by the whole crew with the most idiotic mistakes until their preview screening finally drove the whole blunder home.  Furthermore, that was capped off by even more stupid errors that led to a multi-million dollar lawsuit because of a error the screenwriter should have avoided in beginning and the racism of the original books that should have been a red flag for the studio to stay away from the property in the first place.

Yet, there also stories of triumph such as film artists finally standing up to the tyrannical production code, 14 years after the US Supreme Court's Miracle Decision finally gave film the Freedom of Speech after so long.  First there was The Pawnbroker and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf successfully forcing the code to bend until MGM outright defied it to release Blowup that gave it the final deathblow as a credible Hollywood institution. For all the current complaints about the MPAA's rating system and the notorious failure of Paul Verhouven's Showgirls to loosen it up, it still is heartening to learn of a time when a tyrannical censorship was defied after so long.

Even explorations of the technical sides of the films is fascinating such as in In the Heat of the Night when the lighting head created welcome innovations such realizing that Black actors needed differently arranged lighting to be photographed well, or the blistering montages and other cinematic elements of Bonnie and Clyde which took French ideas and gave them a uniquely American style.

However, the most exciting part of the book is seeing how the North American film audience, at least for a while, became at least partially more sophisticated and there was an eagerness to see challenging films beyond the Oscar season. 

I have listened to this book at least 5 times in its entirety and I can't get enough about this book about a time when American film was invaded by people who wanted to stretch the medium and eventually won for their time.  It would be great if it could happen again, even if feature animation has that experience to some degree now.