Opinion

YEAR OF THE BRAT

Real life is never as neat or tidy as suggested by book titles, but Mark Harris’s examination of the Best Picture nominees from 1967 gets it mostly right: it was the birth of a new kind of Hollywood.

Two fresh-attitude movies nominated in the Oscar race that year – “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate” – seemed to signify that aging Hollywood aesthetics and attitudes were giving way to a younger generation. It was the springtime of Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Haskell Wexler, Mike Nichols, Sidney Poitier and Norman Jewison (among many others). They were fairly young and semi-fearless and brilliant in a winging-it sort of way.

To hear it from fabled screenwriter Robert Towne (“Chinatown,” “The Firm”), the Hollywood culture of four decades ago was teeming with the idea that “anything was possible.” “Michael Clayton” director-writer Tony Gilroy, whose screenwriter father Frank Gilroy (“The Subject Was Roses”) was very much in the thick of things back then, agrees but says nobody “knew” any kind of revolution was underway.

“All those films and filmmakers were jumping off the cliff,” Gilroy says. “They didn’t know what was happening next. I think in the last 40 years, it’s become hard to see where the cliff is anymore. There’s been a fundamental shift in what constitutes revolutionary. We’ve been through so much over the years [that] we’ve seen over the abyss. I think movies are less about astronomy today than quantum mechanics. They’re about going in rather than going out.”

The legacy of 1967 is not that Hollywood stopped making artistically bad, overproduced fluff (see: “Transformers”). It’s that it laid the groundwork for what we today call “independent” films – the ones the critics, and often the Academy Awards, love.

As “No Country for Old Men” producer and “There Will be Blood” exec producer Scott Rudin confirms, “The studios have ceded the making of this kind of movie to the specialty divisions, and the mandate for these divisions is to let filmmakers go make their own film.”

It seems to work. After all, both “Old Men” and “Blood” are up for Best Picture tonight.

“Bonnie and Clyde” and the “The Graduate” were the first time films that trafficked in metaphors of ’60s social unrest, showed the influence of French New Wave films, used popular songs instead of orchestra music on their soundtracks and went with faster cutting and hand-held photography that didn’t smack of sound-stage atmosphere were deemed Oscar worthy. Which amounted to a slap in the face for studio chiefs like Jack L. Warner and Daryl F. Zanuck who’d made their bones in the 1930s and ’40s and didn’t really get what was going on, and who certainly resisted the new sensibility.

Two other 1967 Best Picture nominees were race-relations dramas – half-traditional and half “new” – starring the oppressively dignified Sidney Poitier, the African-American standard-bearer of the times. One was the talky relationship drama about interracial marriage called “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” directed by Stanley Kramer. The other, “In the Heat of the Night,” was a first-rate whodunit, directed by Norman Jewison, about an African-American big-city detective pressured into solving a small-town murder in the Deep South.

The fifth nominee was a musical embarrassment and a big-budget, big-studio flop called “Dr. Doolittle.” It costarred Rex Harrison and a bunch of “talking” animals that defecated on sound-stage floors during filming. A 20th Century Fox film inspired by the massive success of 1965’s “The Sound of Music,” “Dr. Doolittle” was part of a string of what Los Angeles Times Oscar columnist Pete Hammond calls “disaster musicals” – i.e., “Paint Your Wagon,” “Darling Lili” and “Finian’s Rainbow.”

It wasn’t too surprising when “In the Heat of The Night” finally won the Best Picture Oscar, given the industry’s tendency to ratify middlebrow. It’s this very tendency, in fact, that’s leading some Oscar prognosticators to write that “Michael Clayton,” the most “Heat of the Night”-ish nominee among the current big five, may sneak in with a Best Picture win tonight.

Jewison feels that a key ingredient in the mid-’60s Hollywood revolution was “about the influence of young TV-trained directors pushing their way into the older Hollywood established community. [“Bonnie and Clyde” director] Arthur Penn, myself, Mike Nichols, John Frankenheimer, Franklin Schaffner. We all brought with us a new attitude, a new realism, a different movement of the camera. Before then the Hollywood camera was always kind of fixed and mounted. It wasn’t zooming, wasn’t moving as much.”

Today, multinational corporations have taken over many of the studios. But the difference between now and the ’60s – when most chiefs didn’t understand the counterculture at all – is that marketers know that money can be made by “indie” movies.

Jewison says, “When we were making films in ’67 we had tremendous freedom as long as we stayed within a budget. The only semblance of that is coming from the independent companies.” But really what he’s referring to, mostly, is the “dependents” – Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, Warner Independent, Picturehouse – as well as outfits like The Weinstein Company.

“The dominance of these divisions in the Oscar game for years to come is probably going to be a really good thing for movies,” Harris says.

“Every year at least three or four of the Best Picture nominees are made by the independent companies and divisions,” Jewison adds. “The Coen brothers, Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson . . . these are the directors doing the most exciting and sometimes great work today.”

Jeffrey Wells blogs at Hollywood Elsewhere.

Scenes from “Pictures”

“Sidney Poitier had pushed Norman Jewison to cut as many uses of the ‘n’ word [from the screenplay of “In The Heat of the Night”] as he could, but he knew it had to stay in the movie, and, helped by his costar, managed to draw on his own disgust and rage for his performance. ‘We were on this little jail set for a scene between [Poitier and Rod Steiger],’ says Terry Morse. ‘For Sidney’s close-up, Rod would feed him his lines off-camera with exactly the same intensity, and he would say “Nigger!” just to get his eyes popping out. And it worked. After they were done, they grabbed each other and just laughed.’ ”

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“A scene in the ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ screenplay, a menage a trois between Clyde (Warren Beatty), Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) and their male getaway driver (Michael J. Pollard), was eliminated. It happened at the urging of director Arthur Penn. Beatty said to him, ‘I would have think that’d be the last thing you’d want to change,’ and Penn said, ‘No, I think it dissipates the passion between Bonnie and Clyde.’ And Beatty agreed with him.”

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“When he saw the completed version of ‘The Graduate,’ producer Joseph E. Levine lost the scent of profitability as quickly as he had found it. Director Mike Nichols had trimmed it to a very lean 106 minutes, remaking several scenes in the editing room; he had dropped six minutes from Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft’s long, problematic bedroom conversation by cutting large passages of dialogue every time one of them turned the lights on or off. But Levine didn’t see the movie he expected to see. Where was all the sex?”

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“At the 12/28/68 meeting of the fifteen members of the New York Film Critics Circle, N.Y. Times critic Bosley Crowther argued passionately against awarding Best Picture to ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and prevailed, but only by a hair. Initially, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ led the voting but lacked the two-thirds majority then required for a first-round win; by the sixth ballot, the New York critics chose ‘In The Heat of the Night’ for Best Picture.”

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“‘You look back now and ask, “How could you have been so stupid [to make Doctor Doolittle]”?,’ says producer and former 20th Century Fox chief Richard Zanuck. ‘But it was conceived in a period of euphoria. We were all riding a musical wave that we didn’t realize was going to come crashing down on the beach all at once. Sure, there were probably signs and warnings out there, but you’re already so committed that it’s very hard to pull the plug.’ “

Pictures at a Revolution

Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood

by Mark Harris

Penguin