Summer Reading #4: Mark Harris, PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION

Entertainment Weekly writer Mark Harris posits in PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION that the 1968 Best Picture race was emblematic of the war of ideals that was going on in Hollywood at the time, between auteurs working on location forging new forms and the grinding gears of big-budget lot-shot features. There is a valid debate that that war is still going on, but mostly, I agree! Of course, if you are the type who is interested in this book already, you probably agree with him too.

Harris follows the five pictures -- "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Graduate," "In the Heat of the Night," "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" and "Doctor Doolittle" -- roughly from conception to Oscar night, starting with Robert Benton and David Newman, who were best friends working at Esquire when they started writing the "Bonnie and Clyde" screenplay. They're great characters, but the first 150 pages otherwise are pretty thick with meetings; I believe Hollywood is like that but Harris could have fast-forwarded a little, because when the book gets really good is in the trivia-dense stories of casting, making and promoting these very different films. The one I'm most looking forward to re-watching after reading Harris' take on it is "The Graduate" and it's probably worth mentioning, the book spoils all of them to some extent ("In the Heat of the Night" least, but still substantially), but you should have seen four of them anyway.

Which brings me to the one I hadn't seen, and in some ways the most fun to read about: Conceived as an heir to the big-budget musical successes of "My Fair Lady" and "The Sound of Music," "Doctor Doolittle" is set up as an emblem of the movie industry's waste and talent vacuum, but even so it was plagued with problems from the beginning. Rex Harrison was a giant asshole (albeit a funny one), locals attacked the set with rocks while they were filming in St. Lucia, and directly quoting page 200, "the rhinocerous got pneumonia." I think the next time something in my life goes massively, expensively wrong, I will throw up my hands and say "Looks like the rhinocerous got pneumonia."

Readers who like movies will probably bring some information about the movies besides "Doolittle," from film classes or otherwise, because they are acknowledged to be great -- it's not a spoiler to point out that all of them made it onto the AFI's top 100 movies list. But no one learns anything about "Doctor Doolittle" because it sucked so much, yet probably went through the least labor pain in getting studio support because it was going to make boatloads of money for the Zanucks at Fox. Details of the publicity campaign could inspire a cold shiver, so similar are they to the tricks employed today on our big-budget blockbusters.

PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION starts slowly but it's worth it, even if you already know that year's Best Picture winner. (I couldn't remember, so I didn't look it up. Suspense!) Despite the early muddiness, it's quite readable -- never falls into the EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS trap of mentioning so many movies per paragraph that one comes away exhausted with a long list, but allows you to walk away with an entertaining take on '60s cinema and some great anecdotes.

Bonus feature:
It was both delightful and scary to discover "Doctor Doolittle" is currently available in Netflix's Watch Instantly catalog. Would it be "Southland Tales" bad, so bad it needs to be watched all the way through, or "Gigli" bad, incapable of being watched in longer than 10-minute segments? I made it through about 30 minutes before I was so bored I turned it off. It's not terrible -- it reminded me of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" in parts, a childhood favorite despite the creepiest villain this side of Darth Vader -- and I laughed at the song about how Doolittle feels the need to be a vegetarian. But even doing household chores at the same time, I found it unbearably slow. (In other words, it was "The Majestic" bad.) I would say read the book, don't watch this movie.