But, oh, that leading man: Harris' portrait of Sidney Poitier is a compelling and rich one, detailing the difficult course he had to navigate as wanting to be a good role model on screen but weary of playing the Magical Negro, wanting his films to better reflect the society in which he lived but recognizing such progress might only be made inch-by-inch. Poitier appeared in two of the five nominated films of that year -- Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, both of which inched the ball forward on racial issues on screen, and was briefly cast in a third, the old-school big-budget Doctor Doolittle, for which Harris' descriptions of the fiasco-ridden production are worth the price of the book alone. (There's an injury to a giraffe in particular worth noting, and Rex Harrison does not come off well at all.)
And then there's the other two films: The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, both which utterly changed the way Hollywood viewed its audience as well as the kind of content that films could present -- thematically, visually and sonically. Warren Beatty's personal role in the revolution is something that I don't think my generation will ever quite fully comprehend (myself included) -- because to us, he's that now-married-ladies'-man who did Dick Tracy, Bugsy and Bulworth, and the idea of the notorious playboy traveling from town to town to make sure the projectionists have the right bulb and volume settings for a film he produced ... well, that's hard to square.
Here's an excerpt (from a longer excerpt):
When he had decided to make The Graduate three and a half years earlier, [Mike] Nichols thought he knew exactly what his satirical targets were. ''I said some fairly pretentious things about capitalism and material objects, about the boy drowning in material things and saving himself in the only possible way, which was through madness,'' he recalls. But the deeper he got into the shoot and the more intensely he pushed [Dustin] Hoffman past what the actor thought he could withstand, the more Nichols realized that something painful and personal was at stake, and always had been, in his attraction to the story. ''My unconscious was making this movie,'' he says. ''It took me years before I got what I had been doing all along — that I had been turning Benjamin into a Jew. I didn't get it until I saw this hilarious issue of MAD magazine after the movie came out, in which the caricature of Dustin says to the caricature of Elizabeth Wilson, 'Mom, how come I'm Jewish and you and Dad aren't?' And I asked myself the same question, and the answer was fairly embarrassing and fairly obvious.''So, which of those five films have you seen, and which is your favorite? And, of course, tell us what you're reading these days.
Nichols — the immigrant, the observer, the displaced boy — finally understood why it had taken him years to settle on an actor to play Benjamin. ''Without any knowledge of what I was doing,'' he said, ''I had found myself in this story.'' And in Hoffman, he had found an on-screen alter ego — someone he could admonish for his failings, challenge to dig deeper, punish for his weaknesses, praise to bolster his confidence, and exhort to prove every day that he was the right man for the role.
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