Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
2 October 2008
By Doherty, Thomas
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New
Hollywood by Mark Harris. New York: The Penguin Press, 2008. 490 pp.,
illus. Hardcover: $27.95.
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 (Bannie 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, productionwise, and hot-wired to the A-list
artists, Harris is a beguiling tour guide to a sputtering industry
forced to retool and recast by achanging 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."
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 crackup
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 to 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.
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 ingenues. The smoothest of operators, Warren Beatty emerges less
as a svelte Casanova than a slick Sammy Click. 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-Bannie
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
suntanned 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 colorcodes lines crossed over from
integrationist civil rights to fist-in-the-air black power.
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.) Offscreen, Poitier endured the delicate minuet of
racial manners with his usual good grace. "Poitier knew that Hepburn
and Tracy 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. Pokier
slept with a gun under his pillow. Playing a portly redneck sheriff,
then not a cliche, 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, costefficient 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."
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 Bannie 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."
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
Bannie 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 Perm, and Newman and himself,
Robert Benton confesses, "1 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 pre1967
Hollywood as a dust bin of cornpone cliches 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
Thomas Doherty is Professor of American Studies at Brandeis
University and the author of numerous books.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment