9780143115038

The New York Timesbestseller that follows the making of five films at a pivotal time in Hollywood history In the mid-1960s, westerns, war movies, and blockbuster musicals like Mary Poppinsswept the box office. The Hollywood studio system was astonishingly lucrative for the few who dominated the business. That is, until the tastes of American moviegoers radically- and unexpectedly-changed. By the Oscar ceremonies of 1968, a cultural revolution had hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami, and films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and box-office bomb Doctor Doolittlesignaled a change in Hollywood-and America. And as an entire industry changed and struggled, careers were suddenly made and ruined, studios grew and crumbled, and the landscape of filmmaking was altered beyond all recognition.

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Mark Harris has written about pop culture for several publications, including Entertainment Weekly, Slate, and The New York Times. He is a graduate of Yale University.

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One afternoon in the spring of 1963, Robert Benton went to the New Yorker Theater to see François Truffaut’sJules and Jim.It was not his first time; it may have been his tenth or twelfth. Benton, then thirty years old and the art director ofEsquiremagazine, was using the movie both to nurse a romantic injury—the painful end of his relationship with his girlfriend, Gloria Steinem—and to indulge a passion for European films, particularly those of the French New Wave, which was becoming something like a common language among young, smart, city-dwelling moviegoers.

Jules and Jim,with its delicate love triangle, its studied disregard for the moral and narrative strictures of Hollywood filmmaking (Truffaut himself called it “deliberately boring”), and its equal doses of hopelessness and romanticism, was a perfect choice for Benton—and it’s unlikely that he was the only one to travel that May afternoon up from midtown Manhattan to Dan Talbot’s theater on Broadway and 88th Street so he could luxuriate in one more encounter with it. The movie, Truffaut’s third, had opened in New York more than a year earlier to initial business that was only modest, but its cult was devoted, and the film was still holding on, playing one week on the Upper West Side, then a few days in the East Village on Avenue B, then a week on Bleecker Street. The deep chord of longing the picture sounded in many moviegoers was understandable—emotional ambiguity and grown-up sexuality were virtually black market items in American movies of the time. AndJules and Jim’s calculatedly casual visual aesthetic, its diffused light and gentle nods to flickering silent film imagery, held particular interest for Benton as a magazine designer who always had his eye on the next new thing, particularly when it was an unexpected synthesis of old things.

But even if Benton hadn’t happened to be so personally taken with Truffaut’s style, he would have had plenty of other places to go that day. The last couple of years had brought an almost unimaginable wealth of world cinema to the United States, starting, always, in New York City and then moving west. Federico Fellini’sLa Dolce Vita—an immense exploding flashbulb of a movie—and Michelangelo Antonioni’sL’Avventura—stone-faced, elliptical, unsolvable—had arrived within weeks of each other; Antonioni’sLa NotteandL’Eclissefollowed quickly, and that spring, Fellini’s8 1/2was just weeks from opening. The success ofThe Magnificent Seven,the American remake of Akira Kurosawa’sSeven Samurai,had spurred the release of five more of the director’s movies—Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, The Lower Depths, Yojimbo,andSanjuro—in the previous eighteen months, and despite mostly condescending dismissals from Bosley Crowther inThe New York Times,some of them were finding audiences. People were still talking about Jean-Luc Godard’sBreathless—and going to see it repeatedly—two years after its U.S. debut. The options were so rich and varied: The mysteries of Alain Resnais’sLast Year at Marienbad,the almost punitive austerity of Ingmar Bergman’sThrough a Glass DarklyandWinter Light,the begrimed, rough- hewn carnality thrown onto the screen from England inThe Loneliness of the Long Distance RunnerandSaturday Night and Sunday Morning.If Benton hadn’t had to get back toEsquire’s offices that afternoon, where his colleague and comrade David Newman, a staff writer and editor, was waiting for him, he could have stayed at the New Yorker for the second feature, Luis Bunuel’sViridiana,a portrait of a novice in the Catholic Church that was a long way from Audrey Hepburn inThe Nun’s Story.