"Just one word: Plastics."

Back from the beach; and the blog resumes. Amid the sand and surf, I devoured the wonderful Pictures at a Revolution, written by Mark Harris, and published last year by Penguin. After my undergraduate thesis on The Graduate and sixties wanderlust, it's hard to resist the tsunami of New Hollywood talent and their French New Wave aspirations.


Harris doesn't judge the players of the 1967 upheaval of traditional studio filmmaking. But their political and racial attitudes sure don't weather the years as their great films do:

"I think that when the bulk of them get out of the rut they've been kept in, they're going to snag all the public relations jobs because they're brilliant about remembering people... This quality is straight out of the jungle; they had it in the jungle when I made The African Queen." -Katharine Hepburn, 1967

Harris also leads us through the excruciating production of Doctor Dolittle because, well, it bought its way to an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. If you see it, you'll wonder why. Everything went wrong. They wanted Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, and Alan Jay Lerner; they only acquired Rex, and he was an anti-Semitic terror on set. Animals aren't easy to work with: "The script just says, 'Swans do something,' and we have to see what they do," said a producer. An unattentive squirrel was sedated with gin from a fountain pen; after they got the desired shot, it blacked out. Oh, and the rhino came down with pneumonia. Perfect.

But looking back, it's apparent that many other studio films have wined and dined their way to Oscar nominations:

• 1956, the year of Three-Hour Spectacles! Around the World in 80 Days bested Giant, The Ten Commandments, and (the comparatively modest) The King and I.
• 1963: Cleopatra nearly bankrupted Fox. Naturally all Fox employees voted to save their jobs.
  
• 1969 gave us Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and... a wildly miscast Hello, Dolly.
• 1970: Patton. Five Easy Pieces. That subversive Altman flick MASH. And then the disaster movie Airport? Congratulations; theme park rides are now eligible for awards.
• 2003: With The Lord of the Rings ending (and ending and ending...), Lost in Translation picking up critical juice, and Clint Eastwood delving into noir with Mystic River, how much champagne did Master and Commander and Seabiscuit dole out?

All this is to say that filmmakers are both perceptive and practical. Everyone working on Dolittle knew it was a dud, but they had to pay rent somehow. The crew of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner recognized that its sting was too muted, its racial politics too strident to be anything more than didactic; but when you've got Hepburn, Tracy, and box-office star Sidney Poitier, what'll happen? Huge financial success. Meanwhile, Dustin Hoffman thought he was a mistake from Day One of The Graduate, preferring to whither away off-Broadway--and look at how well that turned out.