The latest featured contributor to
Writers Read: Mark Harris, a writer and editor covering movies, television and books for
Entertainment Weekly, and the author of
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.
His entry begins:
How do you write about a relationship you never witnessed between two people you never met when those two people seem to have left almost no written trace of their history together? Judith Freeman sets that steep challenge for herself in The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, in which she tries to explain -- to herself as much as to us -- the thirty-year marriage of the alcoholic, philandering, possibly bisexual Chandler to a woman eighteen years his senior. It's an act of biographical speculation in some ways, but it's speculation of a very thoughtful and responsible order, and Freeman goes about her task in a completely original way: The Chandlers, for reasons that remain as elusive as their relationship, never stopped moving, and Freeman retraces their path to and from the nearly three dozen houses and apartments in and around Los Angeles where they lived. [read on]
Read more about
Mark Harris and his work at the
Pictures at a Revolution website.
Among the praise for
Pictures at a Revolution:
"An exhilarating read for anyone who cares about the myriad ways movies can shape popular and political culture. I loved it."
—Christine Vachon, producer, author of Shooting to Kill
"While one might think that the films discussed in this book have been thoroughly plumbed (The Graduate; Bonnie and Clyde; In the Heat of the Night; Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?), Entertainment Weekly writer Harris offers his take in this thorough and engaging narrative. Instead of simply
retelling old war stories about the production of these five Best Picture nominees at the 1968 Oscars, Harris tells a much wider story. Hollywood was on the brink of obsolescence throughout the 1960s as it faced artistic competition from European art films and financial implosion due to an outdated production system and rising budgets. Harris doesn't shy away from complexity in favor of easy answers, and the personalities that he profiles — among them Sidney Poitier, Mike Nichols, Warren Beatty and Richard Zanuck — are certainly worthy of the three dimensional approach. Harris also peppers his narrative with moments that capture the rising cultural tide that broke in the late '60s: chipping away at the moralistic Production Code, and Hollywood's inconsistent engagement with the Civil Rights movement are continuous sources of interest throughout this fascinating book."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Pictures at a Revolution is exactly what its title promises: an in-depth, up-close view of the films and filmmakers that transformed American cinema during an extraordinary period of innovation and insurrection. What we have here is a clash of the titans — Old Hollywood versus the New — with the entire enterprise of American filmmaking hanging in the balance. Like a skilled novelist, Mark Harris keeps us turning the pages, with heroes to root for, villains to hiss, and plenty of intrigue along the way — all set against the psychedelic backdrop of the turbulent 1960s. A remarkable reconstruction of perhaps the most significant artistic moment in the history of American film."
—William J. Mann, author of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger
Writers Read: Mark Harris.
--Marshal Zeringue
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