3 Books on Filmmakers
You may have heard some recent buzz about Mark Harris’s book, Mike Nichols: A Life. It’s a great read, and it also serves as a gateway to two other books on filmmakers authored by Harris: Five Came Back and Pictures at a Revolution. I wish there were more, as over the past six weeks I’ve immersed myself in film history and wish I could stay a little longer. Harris’s gift for writing accessible yet meticulously researched prose, while providing historical context and contemporary criticism, makes for quick and enjoyable reading; it’s not often that I devour 1600 pages over three books so willfully.
Pictures at a Revolution tells the tale of the five Best Picture nominees for 1967 and how they represented a shift in Hollywood from the old system of strong studio moguls to an auteur-led revolution influenced by European filmmakers, a movement that was enabled by the unravelling of the production code of self-censorship that had entrenched itself in Hollywood for thirty-five years. The book is also a lens into how films are made. How? Almost always painstakingly. Threads of a film are woven, untangled and woven again, screenwriters are hired and fired, studios and directors are wooed and wooed again, budgets are slashed, insecure and egotistical actors are mollified – it’s a wonder that films get made at all. Bonnie and Clyde took five years from its inception to its completion, and even then it required Warren Beatty’s indefatigable drive, charm and the threat of a lawsuit to overcome dismissive reviews and lackluster studio support to get the film widely distributed.
Most interesting to me was Harris’s portrayal of actor Sydney Poitier, who appeared in two of the five nominated films that year – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and winner In the Heat of the Night – and who was the biggest box office star in America in 1968, the year I was born. His success and exposure came at a price, as Poitier struggled to toe the line of pushing for more three-dimensional roles that would still play well with white audiences, while simultaneously taking heat from a black populous who was tired of being patient with racial progress. Poitier was quoted at the time, “Wait till there are six of us – then one of us can play villains all the time. First, we’ve got to live down the kind of parts we’ve had all these years.” Namely, maids and butlers. I can not imagine what Poitier must have gone through, and I may have to read his memoir next.
If the stakes seem high in Pictures at a Revolution, they are off the charts in Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, a book that documents how five Hollywood film directors offered their services to capture war footage and produce films for U.S. soldiers and citizens during World War II. Once again, Harris provides the social context of the time, when there were strong forces opposing any effort to promote the war – especially by Jewish studio heads – and he also illustrates how the challenges of filmmaking were no less arduous within the bureaucracy of the military than within dictatorial Hollywood studios. Budgetary and supply constraints, inept leadership and egos make the art of movie making difficult in any situation, and certainly more so when the state of the world is at stake.
Five Came Back helped to humanize directors who were only names to me: I feel like I have a better understanding of who John Huston, George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler were, and I also have profound respect for their sacrifices and heroism. Wyler shot footage from bombers flying over Germany (and suffered major hearing loss as a result). Stevens and Ford were on the beaches of Normandy. Huston made an important film about returning soldiers suffering from mental ailments. (Unfortunately, the film wasn’t released when it could have done some good.)
But here’s the added bonus: not only is Five Came Back a stellar book; it’s also a three-part documentary, currently streaming on Netflix. But wait…there’s more! You can also view the films that the book references, from John Ford’s Battle of Midway to George Stevens’s important footage of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, an experience that forever shaped the director’s life. Between the book, the documentary and the original films, it’s an abundance of riches for film buffs and historians alike.
I’m looking forward to Mark Harris’s output in the coming years. If there’s one minor quibble I have, it’s Harris’s penchant for offering attributions deep into a long quote, so that the reader doesn’t initially know who’s doing the speaking. I wish he’d rectify this habit. But hey, he writes better than I do!
I highly recommend all three of Harris’s books to date.