The Changing Of The Reels
The Age
Saturday June 7, 2008
Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood
By Mark Harris Canongate, $45 In the late 1960s, the sort of films emerging from Hollywood started to change. Mark Harris brilliantly brings into focus the year that encapsulated the shift, writes Tom Ryan.WHEN HISTORIES OF Hollywood misspell Warner Bros. as "Warner Brothers", the pedant in me goes on to red alert. If writers can't nail the basic stuff, how can one be expected to trust the rest of what they've got to say? It is and has always been Warner Bros., the film studio founded in 1918 by the Warner brothers, Polish emigres Jack, Harry, Albert and Sam, and now an entertainment conglomerate operating under the Time-Warner banner. Mark Harris' study of Hollywood in the 1960s gets it wrong, over and over again. However, the error turns out to be a minor blemish in what is an otherwise exemplary account of the era and the changing face of the American film business, both viewed through the prism of the Oscar-nominated films for 1967. Immensely readable, compelling in its detail and rich in its insights, Harris' Scenes from a Revolution is a real page-turner with a great cast of characters.Three of the nominated films represent Harris' definition of Old Hollywood: Richard Fleischer's Doctor Dolittle, a terribly misjudged musical with Rex Harrison; Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a right-minded but wrong-headed family comedy about racial integration starring Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier and Spencer Tracy (who died soon after production was completed); and Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night, an attention-grabbing crime thriller set in Mississippi, dealing with racial prejudice and starring Rod Steiger and the in-demand Poitier. The other two open the door on Harris' New Hollywood: Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, with Warren Beatty (also the producer) and Faye Dunaway in the title roles, a film that created controversy everywhere it went; and Mike Nichols' The Graduate, an edgy comedy about the American way that saw Dustin Hoffman launching his career opposite Anne Bancroft's Mrs Robinson.Harris' approach is reminiscent of the one deployed by Short Cuts (1993) and Crash (2004). Criss-crossing between the nominated films' production histories, Scenes from a Revolution paints a colourful portrait of '60s Hollywood. Of egos on the march. Of old men clinging to outdated ways while young men and women challenge their authority. Of stars using their positions to impose their wills: for better in Beatty's case, for much worse in Harrison's. Of others struggling to find a foothold, such as Hoffman and Dunaway, both newcomers to the business, lacking in confidence and repeatedly unsettled by the demands made of them.At every turn, Harris reminds us that film production and consumption don't occur in a vacuum. He situates the films' intersecting and overlapping back stories within the wider movement of film history. While most of his characters remain oblivious to its currents, a chosen few are swept along by them (especially by the French New Wave). At the same time, he cannily draws out some of the ways in which they've been touched, or not, by social change in the US. The impact of the Civil Rights Movement is critical here. Swirling around the filmmakers was a turbulence they couldn't escape: the emergence of black power, the imposition of desegregation laws, the interracial wedding of secretary of state Dean Rusk's daughter (which made the subject of "mixed couples" a front-page issue shortly before the release of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), the death of Martin Luther King (just a few days before the scheduled Oscar ceremony).The Graduate becomes important for other reasons, Harris presenting it, with good reason, as a cold-blooded ambush of Tinsel Town sensibilities. Drawing on an interview with Buck Henry, one of the film's officially credited writers, he describes it as "a poisoned arrow aimed from New York towards the heart of Los Angeles", a satire of West Coast culture that Hollywood folks didn't understand because they were simply "too close to that culture to recognise anything funny about it".The villains of Harris' story, even if most of them are depicted more or less sympathetically, are the representatives of Old Hollywood: Tracy and Hepburn, directors Kramer and Jewison, studio head Jack Warner, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, and many others. They're the ones standing in the way of the new guard that is made up of people such as Robert Benton and David Newman, writers of Bonnie and Clyde, directors Penn and Nichols and actor-producer Beatty.It's those who don't fit in (such as Kramer) or who find themselves caught between the old and the new (most notably Poitier) that you end up feeling sorry for. Mr Nice Black Guy on screen, Poitier was the first African-American to become a big star until his success laid the foundations for his downfall. For many in the black power movement, he was simply "a symbol of accommodation to white America", his achievements a betrayal of their basic goals. "Even George Wallace would like that nigger," sneered Black Panther H. Rap Brown. If Scenes from a Revolution has a tragic figure, it's Poitier. Beautifully written, impressively researched and reliably footnoted, and drawing on extensive author interviews with many of the key players, the book leaves you wanting to hear a lot more from Harris. A former editor of Entertainment Weekly magazine and now one of its more perceptive columnists, he takes a very filmic moment as his starting point - a scene from the 1967 Oscar ceremony at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium where the "old and the new existed in uneasy proximity, eyeing each other across a red-carpeted aisle that was becoming easy to mistake for a battle line" - and builds from it a gripping behind-the-scenes story about the kings and queens of Hollywood in the '60s and the rats in the ranks. To that he adds an epilogue briefly outlining what happened to the key players after 1967.However, the "New Hollywood" of the book's title is a misnomer. From the vantage point of 2008, the Hollywood in the process of being born is very much an Old Hollywood. As Harris notes with characteristic precision in that epilogue, whatever the excitement of the time, this is a revolution that soon receded. "The success of the pictures in the class of 1967 focused Hollywood's attention on a new generation of moviemakers and moviegoers and heralded what is now seen as a second golden age of studio moviemaking that lasted roughly until the late 1970s, when audience tastes and demographics changed once again and the dawn of the summer blockbuster era generated a durable new economic model for the movie business."Or, in other words, then came Jaws.Tom Ryan is the Sunday Age film reviewer.
© 2008 The Age
