I’d never pretend to be a book reviewer. On the other hand, it’s been years since I’ve read a book like Mark Harris’ “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” (Penguin), now out in paperback.
Now, you have to understand, there’s a lot of jealousy here -- for one thing, it seems like virtually everyone I know has already won a Pulitzer Prize: my college roommate Tim Page (for criticism for the Washington Post), Ric Burns (for his documentary “The Civil War”), Columbia College classmate playwright Tony Kushner for “Angels in America;” et al. And now it’s Mark Harris', Kushner’s companion, turn for the kudos.
But that’s not really what makes me jealous -- rather, it’s that I thought I had a lock on that old “anniversary year” business … maybe my one great contribution to journalism. (Many would say my “only” contribution.) You have to understand, until I came up with it over a couple of drinks with Mike Ruby (then foreign editor of Newsweek) and Mimi Sheils (business editor) and Lynn Langway (arts editor) at a steakhouse in Manhattan in 1983, no big magazine had ever run one of those now ubiquitous “that was the year that was”-style stories.
Even though I left Newsweek for Disney shortly after, Newsweek continued working on a piece built around the year 1968 and how it changed history, only to be beat to the punch by Time magazine’s “Annus Mirabilus” cover in 1988, looking back to 1968 from the Martin Luther King assignation to the riots in Chicago to Nixon’s election.
Of course, today everyone’s doing it, from U.S. News & World Reports’ recent “1957: The Year that Changed America” to Newsweek’s finally running my “1968” issue last year – 40 years later!
Actually, I can’t take too much credit -- when I was busy pitching the idea to my bosses at Newsweek over martinis, none of them realized I was just recycling a headline I’d found in the subway one day in ’78. In a leftist magazine entitled Seven Days dropped on the subway, I read the headline: “1968, End of the Postwar World” written by that notorious German radical Danny the Red. All I did was add 10 years to the concept!
But the truth was Danny was right -- there are those “moments in time,” as someone once put it, when all the lines in history cross: In the case of 1968, it was not just assasinations and riots from Chicago and to Columbia itself … it was also the year of the Prague Spring (and the Russian crackdown), student riots that convulsed France, the Tet offensive that led to the end of the Vietnam War and more.
And in movies, as Harris points out, it was the year in which the Academy Awards almost equally split the difference between the “old” Hollywood of big-budget musicals like “The Sound of Music” and historical epics like “Cleopatra” and “Dr. Zhivago” and the “new” Hollywood of “The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde” that would lead, the next year, to “Easy Rider” (the movie that changed everything) and an era of unprecedented cinematic upheaval.
