Gather Scenes From A Revolution: The Birth Of The New Hollywood Developed By Mark Harris Shown As Textbook

tried, I really did, I dont want to belabor what others have said in the two star range but I found my experience to be similar, Im not a student of film and I think that wouldve helped, I think I also should have seen all five of these movies before attempting to read this book,

There were some interesting parts but ultimately I found myself skimming pages at a time and after I got to the halfway point I was skipping a lot.


It reminds me of the time I went on a Beatles guided tour in London, led by their Biggest Fan, At the halfway point of this tour I hid behind a tree so that I could let them get ahead of me and then I escaped.
So many mundane details.

Its clear that Harris is well immersed and versed in this genre, Its not you, its me, Mark, to come. Its one thing to get a brilliant idea for a book Im sure weve all had one or two but its a whole other thing to transform your brilliant idea into an unceasingly gripping factcrammed anecdoterammed endlessly entertainingpage book which everybody that has ever loved a movie will find gobsmacking, eyeopening and maybe the best book on movies they will ever read.


The brilliant idea was that the fiveOscar best picture nominees captured perfectly a moment of cultural shift, when Old Hollywood gave way to New Hollywood, when the oppressive morality imposed on movies since thes was abandoned, when everything changed.


The five movies were
Dr Dolittle
Guess Whos Coming to Dinner
In the Heat of the Night
The Graduate
Bonnie and Clyde

At one extreme, representing the oldest of Old Hollywood, is Dr Dolittle.
This was a bloated unloved failure created in the wake of the ridiculous success of The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins.
Because of those two, the studios thought Ah! Giant two and a half hour musicals! That will save us! and they all rolled into production big ones like Thoroughly Modern Millie, Sweet Charity, Hello Dolly and so on.
This craze became a waking nightmare because it turned out that Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were the last big fat musicals anyone wanted to see for a very long time.




At the other end of the spectrum was Bonnie and Clyde you remember the tag line : “Theyre young.
Theyre in love. And they kill people. ” This was low level low budget scuffling and hustling movie making, The two scriptwriters had been fixated on getting one of their French heroes to direct maybe Godard! Maybe Truffaut! But they finally found Warren Beatty and he got hooked.
But he wasnt then the big name he became, because it was Bonnie and Clyde that made him into what he became, so he was just a pretty boy with a spotty resume, no real big hits, Time magazine : “an onagain offagain actor who moonlighted as a global escort” so when he became the producerstar he still had to rush around and keep the plates spinning and fielding phone calls and even when the damn picture was made the studio was so lukewarm about it they didnt release it properly and he then had to run around like a clockwork mouse to prove that whenever it was shown audiences young ones loved it, so that finally the studio rereleased it and THEN it was a monster hit.





In between these two extremes was Sidney Poitier what a strange an uneasy story that is, This

is what Sidney had been doing up to then, Mark Harris is describing his character in a movie called No Way Out:

The character was a young professional surrounded by white bigots, a socalled credit to his race who achieved what white America was comfortable labelling “dignity” by at once demonstrating that he could feel anger and proving he was evolved enough to restrain himself from expressing it.


One further comment :

He had no competition, since in thes the movie industry had room for exactly one black actor.


We see from the list ofbest picture nominee that Sidney was the star of two of them, And hed also had a monster hit inin To Sir with Love, So he was a very big star,

Mark Harris :

His drawing power was a shock to an industry that had, until recently, treated his employment in movies as something akin to an act of charity, and Hollywood greeted his new popularity with an orgy of selfcongratulation.


The burden on Sidney Poitier shoulders was immense, He was horribly aware that as Mark Harris puts it his career, his status was as an exception to the rule,



This book describes in fabulous detail the beginnings, the assembling, the production, the reception and the ultimate fate of these five movies.
The research Mark Harris did must have been something else, How each movie got made, how the shape of a movie changes, how the script is really just the right kind of clay that the director, actors and cinematographer then mould and remould sometimes on a day by day basis, and how even after the thing is done even the star of the said movie say Dustin Hoffman could be quite unaware of whether the picture is any good.
all this and more, much more is laid out before our feasting eyes,

SOME HILARIOUS STUFF ABOUT DR DOLITTLE

Mark Harris on Rex Harrison :

Harrison could be explosive, impatient, capricious, and vain, but also charming, apologetic, and compliant, sometimes within the same conversation or at different points during the same stiff drink.


Mark Harrison on some production difficulties :

The smell, both of animal waste and the gallons of ammonia used to clean the sets, was unbearable, as was the nonstop noise.


The shoot in St Lucia turned out to be even more of a horror than the crew had anticipated, and not just because of the swarms of stinging insects, or the tropical storms that seemed to shut down production every second day, or the fleas that lived in the sand that the Dolittle crew had found on a remote part of the island and trucked to the set by the ton because they liked its pinkish colour.


Mark Harris on Rex and his wife Rachel Roberts who both had alcohol issues

The caretakers of the seals would come running out thinking the animals were making a noise but it was Rex and Rachel

WARNING FOR PAUL SIMON

The music fan in me cannot let one error in this great book pass by without comment.
Mike Nicholls is talking Simon and Garfunkel into doing the score for The Graduate, Unfortunately our author refers to them as “the two singersongwriters”, I hope Paul Simon is warned about this before he reads it! I could imagine that remark might spoil his morning,

.