Author Archive
Released the week before this past Sunday’s 80th Academy Awards ceremony, Mark Harris’ “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” (Penguin Press, $27.95) chronicles the conception, production and reception of the five films that competed for the Best Picture Oscar in 1967.
Through this narrative device, Harris examines what he calls a “paroxysmal point” in American movie history, when the Hollywood old guard began to be succeeded by voices that were fresh, young, iconoclastic (Dustin Hoffman wields a church cross like a club in “The Graduate”), European-influenced (the new filmmakers loved Truffaut and Godard) and hip.
