KEY POINTS:
Is it a sign of the times, of how colonised popular culture has become by film-school pretensions, that a bunch of well-attested Hollywood folklore doesn't make a book any more? Harris, a columnist for Entertainment Weekly for two decades, has a pile of great stories to tell. And
almost 60 of his book's 490 pages are devoted to bibliography, sources, notes and an excellent index; this stuff is too good to have made up.
But for some reason - was it a marketer's idea or his own? - he has gone all high-concept. As if everything you wanted to know about a bunch of remarkable movies wasn't enough, he's had to come up with A Thesis. It's right there in the subtitle: to swallow his book whole, you have to swallow the idea that 1967 was the year that changed everything.
Anchoring the foundation for this rickety conceptual structure are the Academy Award Best Picture nominees: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
Harris argues that these films - at least the first three of them - represented such fundamental departures in conception, financing, development, writing and execution that 1967 can be conceived of as "the year that changed film". The success of these titles announced, he wants us to believe that the clammy, geriatric claw of the studio moguls had been prised free from Hollywood's tiller. "A fight that began as a contest for a few small patches of Hollywood turf ended as the first shot in a revolution."
Alert readers will have spotted the most obvious hole in this theory: the best-picture nominee list always comprises five titles. Harris doesn't ignore Doctor Dolittle, the multimillion-dollar embarrassment that managed to be that rare thing, a musical without a decent song (this didn't stop it winning Best Song for Talk to the Animals, which was, incredibly, adjudged better than still-famous compositions by Quincy Jones and Burt Bacharach): rather he wedges it into his theory by saying it represented the last gasp of the megabudget maniacs - rather than just being a bloody awful movie.
To that idea one might offer the single-word ripostes Titanic and Alien (one of the latter trilogy was the first film to which I heard the word "franchise" applied) or the two-word one, Peter Jackson.
Harris seems not to have noticed that a counter-revolution triumphed long ago and that independent film-making went and played in another sandpit.
But the silliness of the hypothesis is found much closer to its natural home: a scan of Best Picture nominees in the years preceding and following turns up a fistful of titles - Dr Strangelove, Darling, Alfie, Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? - which challenged at least part of the studio model. And, at least in hindsight, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner has to be adjudged a conservative, even reactionary, picture: the basis of Harris' idea is down to three films out of five.
Set all that aside, and the writer has turned in a cracking read for movie buffs, with a gem of information on every page. The best sequence for my money is about Bonnie and Clyde. The sheer audacity of the operation, and of Warren Beatty's unshakeable belief in it - which eventually made him a very rich man - is Hollywood legend. Harris tells it well.
Scenes From a Revolution: The birth of the new Hollywood
By Mark Harris (Canongate $50)
* Peter Calder is a film critic for TimeOut.
