Roll 'em

Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood

Mark Harris

Penguin Press: 496 pp., $27.95

READING from left to right on the hipness meter, the five Academy Award nominees for best picture of 1967 were "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Graduate," "In the Heat of the Night," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and (God help us) "Doctor Dolittle." It was extremely intelligent of Mark Harris, a longtime writer for Entertainment Weekly, to notice that these movies provide a sharply focused portrait of Hollywood, if not quite on the brink of his title's "revolution," then at the beginnings of a transition that would radically alter the way it had been doing business -- with ever less profitable results -- since the dawn of sound some 40 years earlier.

Maybe "portrait" is not quite the word we want to describe his deeply researched, well-written book. Maybe it's more of a seascape, portraying the tidal wave of change breaking dramatically against the sea wall of Hollywood tradition. Let's briefly consider the context in which Harris' picture was drawn. Weekly attendance at the movies had been steadily, alarmingly sliding since its modern high of 90 million achieved in 1948, the last year before network television was established. In 1966, it was less than half that (38 million). In 1967, that figure, without warning, had been cut in half again: Only 17 million Americans were going to the movies each week. Moreover, the country was in what many at the time judged to be a pre-revolutionary condition. The streets were in frequent turmoil over civil rights; almost every night network news programs showed sickening images of American soldiers dying in Vietnam. And everywhere angry youths were challenging the bland status quo prevailing since the Eisenhower '50s and uneasily maintained into the '60s. Hollywood had not fully recognized that the kids were becoming its only reliable audience, but it was also dimly sensing that it needed to speak more directly to them.