The epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated
for Best Picture in 1967-Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate,
In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Doolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde-and
through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that
transformed Hollywood, and America, forever It's the mid-1960s, and
westerns, war movies and blockbuster musicals-Mary Poppins, The Sound
of Music-dominate the box office. The Hollywood studio system, with
its cartels of talent and its production code, is hanging strong, or
so it would seem. Meanwhile, Warren Beatty wonders why his career
isn't blooming after the success of his debut in Splendor in the
Grass; Mike Nichols wonders if he still has a career after breaking up
with Elaine May; and even though Sidney Poitier has just made history
by becoming the first black Best Actor winner, he's still feeling
completely cut off from opportunities other than the same "noble black
man" role. And a young actor named Dustin Hoffman struggles to find
any work at all. By the Oscar ceremonies of the spring of 1968, when
In the Heat of the Night wins the 1967 Academy Award for Best Picture,
a cultural revolution has hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami.
The unprecedented violence and nihilism of fellow nominee Bonnie and
Clyde has shocked old-guard reviewers but helped catapult Warren
Beatty and Faye Dunaway into counterculture stardom and made the movie
one of the year's biggest box-office successes. Just as unprecedented
has been the run of nominee The Graduate, which launched first-time
director Mike Nichols into a long and brilliant career in filmmaking,
to say nothing of what it did for Dustin Hoffman, Simon and Garfunkel,
and a generation of young people who knew that whatever their future
was, it wasn't in plastics. Sidney Poitier has reprised the
noble-black-man role, brilliantly, not once but twice, in Guess Who's
Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, movies that showed in
different ways both how far America had come on the subject of race in
1967 and how far it still had to go. What City of Nets did for
Hollywood in the 1940s and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for the 1970s,
Pictures at a Revolution does for Hollywood and the cultural
revolution of the 1960s. As we follow the progress of these five
movies, we see an entire industry change and struggle and collapse and
grow-we see careers made and ruined, studios born and destroyed, and
the landscape of possibility altered beyond all recognition. We see
some outsized personalities staking the bets of their lives on a few
films that became iconic works that defined the generation-and other
outsized personalities making equally large wagers that didn't pan out
at all. The product of extraordinary and unprecedented access to the
principals of all five films, married to twenty years' worth of
insight covering the film industry and a bewitching storyteller's
gift, Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution is a bravura
accomplishment, and a work that feels iconic itself.
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Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781101202852
Publisert
2017
Utgiver
Penguin US
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter