skygiants | (no subject)

I liked Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War enough that I decided to investigate Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, Mark Harris' other film history book in which he talks about the 1968 Oscars. (Note: not to mislead anyone, there is no actual revolution in this book except a metaphorical and artistic one.)

So for the record, the five movies up for Oscars in 1968 were Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Doctor Dolittle. I have seen about one and a half of these movies, and the whole one was ... Doctor Dolittle.

NONETHELESS, I enjoyed this book a really enormous amount. It does exactly the kind of examination of film (and theater and literature and so on, but film in this case) that I like best, by a.) examining how the culture of the time period shaped the thing as it was being made, and b.) then examining how the thing turned around and shaped the culture, and c.) soldering the whole thing together with detailed, fascinating, and frequently hilarious anecdotes. Oh my God, Doctor Dolittle, what a cursed production, SO MUCH HORRIFIED LAUGHTER! An incomplete list of things that went horribly wrong during the filming of Doctor Dolittle:

- the producers decided to film on location in a tiny English village. They forgot that if they brought all their arduously, painstakingly, expensively trained animals from Hollywood to a tiny English village, they would then have to quarantine them for six months
- they also forgot that in England it rains ALL THE TIME
- while they were there, the set was SABOTAGED with EXPLOSIVES by a British BARONET named Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes
- SIR RANULPH TWISLETON-WYKEHAM-FIENNES
- who wished to "stop mass entertainment from riding roughshod over the feelings of the people"
- (maybe I lied when I said there was no actual revolution)
- anyway after endless failure and disaster in the UK they then went off to shoot on the island of St. Lucia, where they were attacked by stinging insects and cheerfully brought flea-infested sand back to the set
- and then, when they tried to do the final scene -- which involved a giant pink fake snail -- it turned out that the island had recently had an infestation of gastrointestinal illness CAUSED BY FRESHWATER SNAILS
- so the locals took the construction of the giant pink fake snail as cruel mockery of their suffering and THREW ROCKS AT IT

Also, apparently there was a point in time at which Sidney Poitier was almost going to star in Dr. Dolittle?! First they were on the verge of hiring Sammy Davis Jr., then Rex Harrison, threw an enormous hissy fit and decided he would only work with a SERIOUS actor, he REFUSED to share the stage with Sammy Davis Jr., he DEMANDED Sidney Poitier, so they fired poor Sammy Davis Jr. and were on the verge of hiring Sidney Poitier when they realized that they were already too over budget to pay him and instead wrote the role out of the script. DODGED THAT BULLET, SIDNEY POITIER.

Speaking of Sidney Poitier, by the way (and taking a break from hilarity) there is quite a lot of fascinating stuff in here about Sidney Poitier, and his absolutely impossible position throughout the 1960s as The Only Serious Black Actor In Hollywood; and also about Dustin Hoffman, Mr. "What, Why Did You Cast This Jewish-Looking Dude Though, Can We Maybe Do Something About His Nose;" and about a whole slew of other people whom I want to read dedicated biographies of now; and about how Hollywood does and doesn't reflect the world around it, what movies say, and what the Oscars say, and what people think they say or want them to say.

(By the way, and for the record, I am always in the market for recs of other nonfiction books like this. I LOVE in-depth examinations of how fictional stuff gets written or created or produced, and why, and who was involved, and all the fights they got into along the way, and all the fights people got into about it afterwards, and and! Masterpieces or hilarious trainwrecks, I don't care. I should probably listen to 'How Did This Get Made,' except I still have not figured out how to listen to podcasts.)