Pass the Envelope, Please

What have Around the World in Eighty Days, Gandhi, Terms of Endearment, Out of Bloody Africa (not its real title) and Driving Miss Daisy in common? Answer: They all won the Oscar for best film. So, I think we can agree that the Academy Awards are basically silly. 

So, I resisted reading Mark Harris's Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood. But my brother, Karl, said it was really good. I read it and he's right; it is really good. It tells in rivetting detail the story of making and reception of the five films nominated for the 1967 best film award: Bonnie and Clyde, Dr Doolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night. 

The ostensible subject is the transition from the stuffy old traditional Hollywood (represented by the disastrous Dr Doolittle) to the groovy new Hollywood of the future (represented by Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate). The other two were trapped in the middle. 

But of course (as Harris shows), it's much more complicated than that. The producer of Dr Doolittle, Dick Zanuck, went on to produced that ultimate new Hollywood movie, Jaws. Warren Beatty and Mike Nichols were arguably products more of the fifties than the sixties. There's a wonderful moment where Dustin Hoffman tells a group of adoring student fans that he's not one of them. He's too old. (He was thirty when he played Benjamin in the The Graduate.)

A few thoughts:

In the forty-five years since Bonnie and Clyde, Warren Beatty has made only fourteen films, of which I really like only two: McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Parallax View.(In the same period, both Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen have made over fifty films. Of course, that has brought its own problems.)

Success is a tricky concept: 

Rod Steiger won Best Actor for In the Heat of the Night (which also won best film) and then didn't get a job for a whole year.

Sidney Poitier starred in two of the nominated films, as well as one of the year's most profitable films, To Sir With Love. Yet this triumph marked the end of his career as a leading man. He was the first black leading man, the first black actor to win an Oscar, but in complicated (and sometimes in simple) ways, this symbolic role ruined him as an actor. Yet he was a true hero. (Kevin Sessums has just written a beautiful tribute to him.)

Similarly, the career of Stanley Kramer, director of the mocked but highly profitable, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, suffered much more than that of Richard Fleischer, director of the utterly disastrous Dr Doolittle. It's one of the great puzzles of the movie business. At a time when nobody would give Orson Welles the money to make a picture, Fleischer went on to make the farcical Che! and the catastrophic Tora! Tora! Tora! Question: is an exclamation mark the sign of a lousy movie?

Finally, we have a winner in the Parties-We-Are-Grateful-We-Didn't-Go-To category. Rex Harrison, star of Dr Doolittle, was difficult enough on his own, but even worse in the company of his alcoholic wife, Rachel Roberts. In Harris's words: 

'The couple's problems were becoming dangerously public: They showed up disheveled and disoriented at a tribute to George Cukor one night, Harrison with his toupee stuffed in his jacket pocket; on another occasion, Harrison appalled a room fulll of the Hollywood establishment - among them William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Jimmy Stewart, and their wives - at a party at the Los Angeles restaurant the Bistro, singing obscene lyrics about his penis to the tune of "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" while Roberts, who was not wearing underwear, did handstands.'

Hooray for Hollywood!