Pictures at a Revolution: a personal book review

Of all the books about film I have read, or more precisely listened to in audiobook, there is one that I keep returning to, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Films and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris

This book is an endlessly fascinating history about one of the most tumultuous periods of Hollywood in the mid 1960s.  In that time, the American film industry underwent a dramatic transition as the old guard of Hollywood found its hegemony challenged by a new generation of filmmakers with a new sensibility to the art even as the veterans tried and true ways proved to be neither anymore. In that time, the 1967 Picture Oscar Nominees proved to be a microcosm of this conflict like the roguish French influenced Bonnie and Clyde, the youth oriented iconoclastic satire of The Graduate faced off against the stogy Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and the mainstream artistic and box office fiasco Doctor Dolittle while the searing detective drama, In the Heat of the Night found itself as much in the middle of this divide as its Black star, Sidney Poitier.

Along the way, you will enjoy bracing sidestories like the fall of Hollywood's production code as its censors found themselves out of touch and out of time in a world and how television finally changed from a simple threat to the film medium into a valuable tool that helped make new cinematic visions possible. On a larger scale, there is the competing influences of film as the French New Wave influenced the young turks like Warren Beatty, Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols to take a more personal and less inhibited approach to film.  Meanwhile, the mainstream studio establishment misread the brief fad for big budget musicals like My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins to set themselves up for a disastrous box office reckoning that would break the back of their power even while United Artists showed the way forward with a new looser business model that made the new media mainstays like the James Bond series possible.

Finally, there are the lives of the actors of this time they had to ride this storm with their own ways in enthralling stories.  There is Rex Harrison, a veteran actor who tried to take advantage of his mainstream break-out and squandered it as a drunken hateful prima donna on Doctor Dolittle, a film whose botched creation is more comically entertaining than the movie itself.. Against that, you have the struggles of Dustin Hoffman, a Jewish actor of the highest artistic ideals who found himself hitting the big time in the way he least expected, and opened up what was possible for actors of various ethnicities.  However, you will also see the slightly sad story of Sidney Poitier, a breakthrough Black film star who paid the price of too many of his employer's prejudices and the strictures of his own ideals and frustrations as the burden of being both a pioneer and a token began to sink his career.

Finally, this book is a enticing callback to an entirely different time of being a film fan decades before home video when filmgoing could be a enriching social occasion of ideas for the discriminating fan while seeing vintage stuff was a rare treat that required connections and the determination to make that possible.

In short, this film will give you a new appreciation of mainstream film in a time when Hollywood began to realize its old ways were self-destructing, but saw a future where newcomers could make it so much more.