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.

The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker, a quick review

For all my gloom I have about the world, I find my spirits lifted by a magnificent book that says that there is a larger and much brighter reality that is there; we are living in one of the most peaceful times in human history with humane values having made more progress for civilization than you'd ever hoped.

That book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined by Prof. Steven Pinker. In this book, Pinker makes a powerfully compelling case about the advancement of civilization with a comprehensive study of human history through archaeology, anthropology, psychology and the statistical and anecdotal analysis of history.

At 700+ pages, the book can obviously explain the case far better than I can, but I can give a few examples. The most revealing is that World War II may the deadliest war in history in absolute numbers, but when you compare it to other "deadly quarrels" in history in proportion to the total world human population of their times, it barely makes the top ten compared to earlier conflicts with its far low population.

Also, you can look the psychology of violence in the past.  With cultures of honour that value the idea of automatically striking out at insults and finding horrific tortures like public execution and cat burning (It was exactly what it sounds; seeing an animal being burned alive) popular forms of entertainment, then you can see there is some real human progress by some definitions. Furthermore, you read some good examples that civilization is not as overrated as you might think when you read the news when you compare it to the nasty warfare raiding nomadic hunter-gatherer societies can indulge in.

While the clinical details of Pinker's argument in later chapters really gets into jargon, it still can be fascinating, especially when he explains the true nature of randomness and probabilities, which are more complex than you might think.

In case you're wondering, Pinker is not some starry eyed dreamer; he is the first to admit that this human progress could stop or reverse itself, but he has his evidence and the book is available at most libraries so you can read it for yourself, or you can do what I did and read the audiobook from Audible.com. In short, he simply saying, "So far, so good."


Anyways, don't take my word for it; check what Steve Paikin of TVO's The Agenda found out in this interview:

Regardless, he's great to listen to, either directly, or through a audiobook narrator and a source of considerable hope.

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.