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Pictures at a Revolution
Mark Harris
Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
Penguin Press
February 2008
On Sale: February 14, 2008
496 pages
ISBN: 1594201528
EAN: 9781594201523
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
An epic account of how the revolution hit Hollywood, told
through the stories of the five films nominated for the
1967 Academy Awards The year is 1963. The studios are churning out westerns,
war movies, prudish sex comedies and overblown historical
epics, but audiences whose interests have been piqued by an
influx of innovative films from abroad are hungering for
something more, something new. At Esquire, two young
writers hatch a plan to create a movie treatment that they
hope will attract the director Franois Truffaut: the story
of the gangsters Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Mike
Nichols, an improvisatory comedian turned neophyte theater
director, gets his hands on an obscure first novel called
The Graduate and wonders if he's ready to make the jump to
Hollywood. Warren Beatty, just 26 years old and struggling
through a series of flops after the success of Splendor in
the Grass, decides to take his career into his own hands,
but can't seem to settle on his next move. Dustin Hoffman,
sleeping on friends' floors and scrounging for temp work in
New York, struggles just to get an off-Broadway audition.
Sidney Poitier, after two dozen movies, still yearns for
something that seems completely unattainable: a good role.
And 20th Century Fox, on the brink of financial
catastrophe, puts all its hopes in a genre-the family
musical-that will revitalize the company and then nearly
destroy it again. Pictures at a Revolution tracks five movies-the milestones
Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, the popular hits Guess
Who's Coming To Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, and
the big-budget disaster Doctor Dolittle-on their five-year
journey to Oscar night in the spring of 1968. It follows
their fortunes through the last days of the studio system
and the first sparks of a cultural upheaval that would
launch maverick new stars and directors, topple more than
one industry titan from his pedestal, and redefine what
American movies could be. In 1967, moviegoers witnessed the
arrival of taboo-shattering sex and violence on screen, the
debuts of Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway, the return of
Katharine Hepburn and the poignant farewell of Spencer
Tracy, the audacious risks taken by Warren Beatty, Arthur
Penn, Mike Nichols and Norman Jewison, and Hollywood's
agonized attempt to grapple with an incendiary moment in
American race relations, with results that would change
Sidney Poitier's career forever. By tracing the gambles, the stumbles, the clashes and the
creative partnerships that produced these films, Mark
Harris captures both the twilight of old Hollywood and the
dawn of a new golden age in studio filmmaking. Based on
unprecedented access to the actors, directors,
screenwriters, producers and executives whose movies
defined the era, as well a wealth of previously unexplored
archival material, Pictures at a Revolution is an utterly
original, revealing, and entertaining history of a true
cultural watershed.
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