Scenes from a Revolution

At the Academy Awards Ceremony of 1967, “In the Heat of the Night” took the Best Picture Oscar. It won out of a list of five nominees that also included “Bonnie & Clyde”, “Doctor Doolittle”, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “The Graduate”. It marked a pivotal moment in Hollywood’s history: the shift from the studio-generated epics, musicals and westerns – as represented by “Doctor Doolittle” – to a director-centred, self-consciously European aesthetic of style over content, as demonstrated by the anti-hero worshipping of “Bonnie & Clyde” and the subversive sexual politics of “The Graduate”. It represented the birth of the New Hollywood.In “Scenes from a Revolution”, Mark Harris has written the story of these five films, from the first drafts of the scripts to their impact on release. He has interviewed many of the key players at the time, including Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffmann, Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols, to fashion a superb book about Hollywood and the USA at a critical juncture in its history.At the heart of the book is the star of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “In the Heat of the Night”, Sidney Poitier, who struggled to appease the emergent militant wing of the civil rights movement just as he literally struck out for the black community in his seminal performance as Mister Tibbs.Lucid, masterfully constructed and persuasively argued, “Scenes from a Revolution” is the key text of a vital period in the development of Hollywood, and the films that came to reflect the countercultural thirst for change at the end of a decade.