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Read an excerpt from Pictures at a Revolution

In 1998, to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of American motion pictures, the American Film Institute announced its list of the top 100 films. The #1 film, as "determined by more than 1,500 leaders from the American film community," was Citizen Kane. What's particularly interesting about this recognition is the fact that, back in 1941, Citizen Kane's producers watched the Academy Award for Best Picture go to How Green Was My Valley, a film that didn't even crack the aforementioned AFI Top 100 list. How could that be? If the film is now widely regarded as the best picture of ALL TIME, how did it fail to even beat out nine (yes-they used to nominate ten movies in the category) other movies that happened to have been released in the same calendar year?

The easy answer is that, well, despite the grandeur of the award ceremony itself and the critical approval that the award seems to provide, the Academy gets things wrong. Citizen Kane seems like an obvious mistake in judgment, but there are other examples. In recent years, Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line in 1998, Forrest Gump beat Pulp Fiction (one of the most--if not THE most--influential films of the past 20 years!) in 1994, and Crash beat four much better movies: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Munich. I'm going to out on a limb and suggest that forty years from now, if the AFI creates another list commemorating 150 years of film, Crash will not be on that list, whereas Brokeback Mountain stands an excellent chance.

This brings me to Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, now available in paperback (read an excerpt here). It tells the behind-the-scenes stories about the five films that were nominated for Best Picture in 1967: The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, and Doctor Dolittle. That night in 1968, In the Heat of the Night went home with the statuette, but the AFI Top 100 list put The Graduate at #7, and Bonnie and Clyde at #27. (That year's winner was not on the list.) To me the tragedy was that Bonnie and Clyde didn't win; like Pulp Fiction many years later, it ushered in a new way of thinking about--and making--movies. This was not simply a new genre or a new look; this was a new approach, a permanent shift in the Hollywood landscape, and Harris recreates that impetus towards change masterfully.

Pictures at a Revolution

Mark Harris

Tom Roberge,

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