Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  Rod Steiger was so visibly nervous when he and Claire Bloom took the stage to announce the nominees in the two screenplay categories that their somewhat flat scripted banter got big laughs. He mumbled something about the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who, thanks in part to the Beatles, had become an international cult figure in the last year and was something of an obsession for him. “Are you ready?” Bloom asked him. “Your mind seems to be on something else.” “I can’t imagine what that could be,” Steiger replied. In the Heat of the Night’s screenwriter, Stirling Silliphant, had told his friends and family not to expect much; he’d encouraged them to watch the telecast, although he warned them, “I feel I will be defeated by either The Graduate or In Cold Blood.”38 He was shocked to win. “I really have no speech,” he said. “The Writers Guild doesn’t permit us to do any speculative writing. I’m deeply grateful and very touched. Thank you, Rod, Norman, Walter, Sidney, everybody.”

  As Steiger and Bloom read the nominees for Best Original Screenplay, Robert Benton prepared himself. “All of our friends kept saying, ‘You’re gonna win, you’re gonna win.’ And David and I were so naive, we thought, ‘They must know something!’ It never occurred to us that all of the nominees had friends who were saying to them that they were going to win…. I sat up, I buttoned my jacket, I fixed my cuffs. And then they said, ‘And the winner is…’ And I stood up. And they said, ‘William Rose for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner!’ And I sat down, fast!”39 Rose, still almost phobic about Hollywood, had not come to the ceremony; Stanley Kramer made a brief acceptance speech in his place.

  Steiger’s category was next; nominee Audrey Hepburn was the presenter. Publicly, Steiger had said that he expected the Best Actor award to go to Spencer Tracy and joked that if he won, his acceptance speech would be, “Ladies and gentlemen, please make your checks payable in cash.” But he also admitted, “I want to win it. It’s important. It gives you greater latitude in the business and a chance to get bigger and better parts. I just don’t think I’ll get it.”40

  “I remember he was wearing cowboy boots,” says Dustin Hoffman, who was sitting across the aisle from him. “And he was tapping his feet the whole night. I knew I wasn’t going to win, so I was pretty comfortable, but he wasn’t. And when she said his name, he came out of his seat about three feet.”41 For the first time that night, the whole room erupted in cheers. Claire Bloom, watching her husband take the stage, looked touched and oddly sad. Steiger praised the Maharishi again. “I find it unbelievable. I find it overwhelming,” he said. He thanked the Academy, Norman Jewison, and the public, then took a deep breath. “Fourthly and most importantly,” he said, “I would like to thank Mr. Sidney Poitier for the pleasure of his friendship, which gave me the knowledge and understanding of prejudice in order to enhance this performance. Thank you, and we shall overcome.” As he left the stage, the room was electrified. Steiger had broken form—bringing any political reference into an awards acceptance speech was still exceedingly rare in 1968—and had chosen the perfect moment to do it. As Bob Hope came out, the applause for Steiger continued. “It’s a little tense out there, isn’t it?” he remarked, waiting. Hope then introduced the next presenter: Sidney Poitier.

  Whatever the nature of the sentiment that had been building all evening in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Poitier’s appearance immediately after Steiger’s victory gave the night its emotional climax. Waves of applause, whistles, cheers, and bravos greeted him as he walked to the center of the stage. A point was being made—although whether the point was that Poitier should have gotten an Oscar nomination, or that the white attendees found the characteristics they believed Poitier embodied to be exemplary, or simply that Steiger’s words had given everybody license to use Poitier as a conduit through which they could pay tribute to Martin Luther King, was left to the imagination and understanding of each viewer.

  Poitier, with a steady gaze and a gentle smile, waited for the applause to subside, engaged in some scripted back-and-forth with Hope, and then read the nominees for Best Actress, announcing with a surprised grin that the winner was Katharine Hepburn. Trade papers the next morning called Hepburn’s win the biggest surprise of the evening, but it was in keeping with a kind of last-stand traditionalism that had emerged over the course of the broadcast. George Cukor accepted for Hepburn, who was privately furious that Tracy had lost; nonetheless, she quickly sent a telegram of thanks in which she said that she felt the award was “a great affectionate hug from my fellow workers” and fascinatingly chose to add that her character was “a good wife, our most unsung and important heroine. I’m glad she’s coming back in style.”42

  In the Heat of the Night had seemed to be a long shot for the Best Picture Oscar when the evening began, but by the time the last envelope was opened, nobody was particularly surprised. Walter Mirisch made a brief acceptance speech, and Bob Hope reappeared to push his way through some dreadful scripted equivocations to the effect that Adolph Zukor and Samuel Goldwyn “had at least one thing in common with the man from Atlanta—they had a dream,” followed by a series of pieties: “United we stand, divided we fall. Rioting and indifference are equal sins. Everyone must face up to their responsibilities.” After cryptically reminding the home audience that conquering prejudice is something “each of us must face…through our own way of life and our own station,” he sent the winners and losers on their way.

  “I think it had a lot to do with timing,” says Norman Jewison of In the Heat of the Night’s victory. “I really think that The Graduate is a brilliant film, and Bonnie and Clyde is a brilliant film. We happened to arrive at a moment when people felt strongly about race.”43

  Silliphant, who was never entirely comfortable with his own award for the movie, agreed. The script won, he said thirty years later, not “for its craftsmanship, or for its unique and polished style of holding back, holding back, but [for] its black-white content…. Getting plaudits for In the Heat of the Night was like waving the American flag or pushing Mom’s apple pie. It was just too damn easy to manipulate people with issues which for the moment [had] flagged their attention.”44

  “It was a surprise,” says Nichols, laughing. “I was living with Penelope Gilliatt, and we loved Bonnie and Clyde. Who wouldn’t? It seemed perfectly clear to me that it should be one of us, but what did I know?”45

  “Listen, In the Heat of the Night was a really good, rousing melodrama,” says Buck Henry. “And a movie that has a lesson to teach about brotherhood will trump everything every single time. Brotherhood does pay.”46

  Some people took the movie’s success as a triumph against the new, a defeat of what one congratulatory telegram called “those smug ones who thought they had it in the bag.”47 “So much for the Bonnie & Clyde-Graduate night predictions,” Silliphant’s son wrote to him. “The champagne went down oh-so-well.”48 If anything, In the Heat of the Night’s five Oscars represented a temporary compromise between the generationally divisive Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate and the dug-in fustiness that young moviegoers were mocking in their response to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. “It was clear that the Academy collectively retains an inherent conservativism,” said the Los Angeles Times, “being less than eager to endorse the value-questioning of Bonnie and Clyde or the daring plot turns of The Graduate.”49

  It had been five years since Robert Benton and David Newman had started talking about Bonnie and Clyde. They were no longer upstarts; they, along with Beatty and Towne and Dunaway and Nichols and Hoffman, were among the charter members of what would become a new Hollywood establishment, a group whose ranks would swell over the next decade as they redefined studio movies. But the day after the Oscars, Benton says, “I think I was a little disappointed. Miloš Forman said to me years later, ‘You get all this attention, and it’s wonderful, but it’s like getting run over by a train.’ And I knew enough, by then, to know that there was a good chance I might never do anything that would get recognized again.”50

  Benton and Newman and their wi
ves went home to New York, feeling that they had had their adventure. “We was robbed,” Beatty had said, smiling, as he was leaving the Oscars that night. His line was picked up by everyone—Bonnie and Clyde’s detractors took it as sour grapes, while the film’s fans understood it as nothing weightier than a wink. “Oh, I wish I had a nickel for every telegram we got afterwards saying, ‘You wuz robbed!’” says Leslie Newman. “But my favorite one came from Jean-Luc Godard.” After the Academy Awards, the man who had come within one conversation of directing the movie dashed off a cheerful cable to Benton and Newman. “Now,” he wrote, “let’s make it all over again!”51

  As is the case with most Academy Awards ceremonies, there was less symbolism to be extracted from the evening than morning-after analysts might have imagined, and even that applied only to the Academy’s taste in movies, not to the country’s. The weekend after the Oscars, The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde continued to be two of the most popular films in the United States. And 2001: A Space Odyssey was already drawing large and curious crowds transfixed by Stanley Kubrick’s intergalactic light show with its mesmerizing final visual metaphor—an ancient traveler, racked by the decrepitude of extreme age, crawling to the finish line of his life so that a starchild could be born. What did it all mean? moviegoers asked as they emerged into the light. Even Benton and Newman weren’t sure. “Plotless? Or beyond plotting?…It matters not,” they postulated in Esquire. “The debate is: Does it have anything to do with movies?”52

  It had, of course, everything to do with movies. Hollywood, which had held insistently to its own ways for so long, was suddenly moving forward, impelled by the demands of an audience that had, in 1967, made its wishes for a new world of American movies so clear that the studios had no choice but to submit to them. The outsiders were about to take flight and to discover that the motion picture universe was now theirs to re-create, to ruin, or to rule.

  EPILOGUE

  At the end of 1968, Variety printed its annual list of the highest-grossing movies of all time. One-third of the top twenty had opened in 1967. Highest of all was The Graduate, which eventually became the third-most successful movie in history, surpassed only by The Sound of Music and Gone With the Wind. The movie ran in theaters for almost two years. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner became the eleventh-highest-grossing movie ever. Valley of the Dolls and The Dirty Dozen finished sixteenth and seventeenth, and To Sir, with Love was in a nineteenth-place tie with Bonnie and Clyde, which grossed more than six times as much in 1968 as it had in 1967, even surpassing the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. In the Heat of the Night was rereleased after its Best Picture win and finished its initial run with a solid worldwide gross of about $16 million, five times its production and marketing budget.1Doctor Dolittle returned just $3.5 million in rentals to 20th Century-Fox, less than 15 percent of its production and marketing costs.2

  The success of the pictures in the class of 1967 focused Hollywood’s attention on a new generation of moviemakers and moviegoers and heralded what is now seen as a second golden age of studio moviemaking that lasted roughly until the late 1970s, when audience tastes and demographics changed once again and the dawn of the summer blockbuster era generated a durable new economic model for the movie business. But old Hollywood—the Hollywood of producer- and studio-driven product intended to reach the widest possible audience—didn’t disappear; it simply reinvented itself. Even at the height of the new-Hollywood revolution, when Altman and Coppola and Mazursky and Scorsese and Friedkin and Schlesinger were dominating the conversation, the studios were beginning to find a way of creating and selling their product that didn’t depend so much on directors. In 1970, Universal, the last-choice studio for much of the previous decade, released Airport, the first movie in what soon came to be known as the “disaster” genre. It quickly became the most popular movie since The Graduate. Many of the films that followed it—The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, The Swarm—were written by Stirling Silliphant, who died in 1996 at age seventy-eight.

  By the spring of 1968, Warren Beatty had begun to develop an interest in John Reed and the Russian revolution. After the Academy Awards, Variety columnist Army Archerd reported that Beatty was “off to Mexico—‘to get away from the phones.’ And then maybe to London before his big opus—a film in Russia.” That plan changed when Beatty became actively involved in politics for the first time, working on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. When he returned to acting later in 1968, it was as a last-minute replacement for Frank Sinatra in George Stevens’s little-seen drama The Only Game in Town. Beatty turned down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the chance to work with Stevens, and never regretted his decision. Throughout the early 1970s, he continued to collaborate intermittently with Robert Towne on the screenplay for Shampoo; they finally made the film in 1975, after Towne’s breakthrough success with the screenplay for Chinatown. Seven years after that, Beatty got around to Reds.

  Robert Benton andDavid Newman teamed up as screenwriters on several more projects, from 1970’s There Was a Crooked Man… to 1982’s Still of the Night, while also pursuing separate careers, Newman as a screenwriter and Benton as a writer-director. Benton went on to win three Academy Awards, for writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer and for writing Places in the Heart. Newman died in 2003 at age sixty-six.

  In late 1968,Arthur Penn directed Alice’s Restaurant, an adaptation of Arlo Guthrie’s eighteen-minute comic talking-blues song that was one of the first studio movies to deal explicitly with the anti–Vietnam War movement. Penn won a Best Director Oscar nomination for the film and followed it with Little Big Man, a project on which he had been working since before signing on to Bonnie and Clyde and on which he worked, once again, with Faye Dunaway. The success of The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968 made Dunaway one of the most sought-after young actresses in Hollywood; she followed the film by returning to work for her theater mentor, Elia Kazan, playing a thinly disguised version of Kazan’s wife, Barbara Loden, in the director’s widely panned adaptation of his own novel The Arrangement. Dunaway then joined Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, which was a major popular success.

  In 1969, just two years after it acquired the company, Seven Arts sold Warner Brothers to Kinney National Service, an owner of parking garages. Later that year, Jack Warner left the company he and his brothers had founded. He produced only two more movies, 1776 and the long-forgotten Dirty Little Billy, both of which were released by Columbia Pictures. One of his last unrealized ambitions was to make a gangster movie the way it “should be made.”3 He died in 1978, soon after his eighty-sixth birthday.

  Shattered by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, Norman Jewison left the United States, turned in his and his family’s green cards,4 and moved to Europe after completing the film Gaily, Gaily. In 1969, Jewison made good on his promise to help his longtime friend and colleague Hal Ashby break into directing, producing Ashby’s debut, the comedy The Landlord. The seven films Ashby directed in the 1970s received twenty-four Academy Award nominations. Ashby died in 1988. He was fifty-nine.

  Jewison’s next several movies, including the musicals Fiddler on the Roof and Jesus Christ Superstar, were made abroad. Fiddler on the Roof, which opened in 1971, was one of the last successful reserved-seat road-show musicals, which, in the few years since Doctor Dolittle and Camelot, had become a virtually extinct genre, a victim of changing tastes and the failure of Hello, Dolly!, Star!, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Paint Your Wagon, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, Song of Norway, Sweet Charity, Half a Sixpence, and The Happiest Millionaire.

  After winning his Academy Award, Rod Steiger received only one offer for a major role during the next year. He talked of playing Macbeth onstage and of his ambitions to portray Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Edgar Allan Poe in movies, but nothing came of it. “There was absolutely no explanation,” wrote Claire Bloom. “It is just the luck of the game. Rod lay on the sofa in the living room and watched sports programs on TV.”5
Steiger fell into a deep depression; in what he later called his “dumbest career move,”6 he turned down the one offer he got, which was for the title role in Patton. Steiger felt that had he starred in the movie, he might have had a chance at Marlon Brando’s role in The Godfather. Steiger went on to appear in nearly one hundred more movies before his death in 2002. In 1999, thirty-three years after they worked together on In the Heat of the Night, Jewison cast him in a small role in The Hurricane, the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter.

  In the summer of 1968, Jack Valenti decided to abandon the Production Code once and for all. Later that year, the Motion Picture Association of America unveiled its first movie ratings system, designating all films with a rating of G, M (Suggested for Mature Audiences), R, or X. The week that the first set of movie ratings was announced, Production Code chief Geoffrey Shurlock retired at the age of seventy-four; he died in 1976. The ratings system was revised several times thereafter; Valenti defended it zealously even after his retirement in 2004, after thirty-eight years running the MPAA. He died in 2007.

  Richard Zanuck was forced out of his job running 20th Century-Fox at the end of 1970, after three years during which the studio lost over $100 million, despite the release of Planet of the Apes, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Patton, and The French Connection. “What did me in was the big musicals,” he says. “Doctor Dolittle, Star! and Hello, Dolly!—three bombs in a row. Unfortunately, that more than counterbalanced the great success of all the other pictures that I did. What can you do? Nobody had crystal balls.”7 Zanuck partnered with David Brown, one of the few 20th Century-Fox executives who had sounded a note of caution about movie musicals in the late 1960s, to form Zanuck/Brown Productions. Two of their first movies were The Sting and Jaws.