Two books about movies, some of which are based on books. One book technically works as a sequel to the other.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Welcome to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit.
Occasionally I’ll sneak in a contemporary review if I’ve gone out of my way to buy and read something brand new. Every so often I’ll borrow from my wife Anne or from our local library. But the majority of our spotlighted works are presented years after the rest of the world already finished and moved on from them because I’m drawing from my vast unread pile that presently occupies four oversize shelves comprising thirty-five years of uncontrolled book shopping. I’ve occasionally pruned the pile, but as you can imagine, cut out one unread book and three more take its place…
7. Mark Harris, Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood (2008). In Entertainment Weekly‘s heyday Harris was among my favorite contributors, a pop-culture authority and devotee whose columns were a reliable source of insights into showbiz workings and mentalities. In Twitter’s separate, later heyday his timeline was essential Academy Awards-season punditry (apart from the years he recused himself whenever his husband was nominated). His 2014 book Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War was a fascinating crossover between my interests (film journalism) and my wife’s (extreme deep-dive WWII history). I knew I’d one day circle back around to his first book, crafted in a narrative format that his sophomore winner would repeat with equal skill: five interwoven tales of Hollywood during a specific era of major sea change, examining the nuts-and-bolts of their Big-Picture context and relevant behind-the-cameras developments, and the ways in which every participant would emerge radically changed, and not always for the better.
Revolution‘s film-geek intensity focuses on the 1968 Oscars race in general, and in particular the nominees for Best Picture. Each contender represented a different aesthetic perspective at the congested intersection of major-studio blockbuster largesse (when blindered execs failed to sense how the dominance of bloated three-hour musicals was on the decline, not unlike today’s superhero films), low-budget risk-takers, post-Baby Boom disillusionment, and the Civil Rights Movement. The five nominees were:
* In the Heat of the Night, the racially charged crime drama that ultimately took the honor. It’s remembered as one of Sidney Poitier’s career pinnacles, yet crested a wave of simmering anti-Poitier backlash…not (just) from racist Southerners, but from some Black audiences who grew tired of his typecasting as gentle, virtually neutered saints. Not that Poitier entirely disagreed, but during a stretch of his career when he was treated as America’s Greatest Black Actor, he struggled to be the iconic standard-bearer that others perceived and in many ways needed, which came at the expense of exploring any real acting versatility. In some ways the Night experience wobbled slightly outside those strict lines, but director Norman Jewison had more pressing concerns, such as the part where the Deep South was still unsafe for Black actors on film sets, no matter how many white coworkers surrounded them.
* Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Poitier also played the mostly perfect center of a well-intentioned ebony-and-ivory bigotry takedown, except this time the lower-key bigotry was coming from among the well-intentioned. More crucially to the cast and crew, it would be the final showcase for the classic team of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, who signed on even though Tracy was terminally ill and required a lot of workarounds to accommodate.
* Bonnie and Clyde, what could’ve been an ordinary crime caper if its co-screenwriters, a pair of Esquire writers heavily influenced by French New Wave cinema, hadn’t spent years in search of the right collaborators. After being rebuffed by the unlikely likes of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, along came Warren Beatty, who fell in love with the project, direly needed a hit, and helped lure in the rest of the team, though he may or may not have required toning down Clyde Barrow’s alleged bisexuality in the finished product.
* The Graduate, an indie-distributed novel adaptation more discreetly satirical than downright funny, a hard sell to the studios who passed on it and to anyone who couldn’t buy ordinary-looking off-Broadway rookie Dustin Hoffman as a lead. He had so little faith in its prospects (or his own) that he was still collecting unemployment checks the week it hit theaters.
* Dr. Doolittle, a mega-budgeted musical based on a racist children’s-book series, and an unmitigated disaster at the box office. Nevertheless, producers gripped by sunken-cost-fallacy fever wooed enough Academy voters with free screenings and steak dinners to push it into the Oscar-noms. It was embarrassingly over budget, stricken with calamity after calamity (bad weather! waterborne illnesses! hundreds of animals’ worth of set accidents!), and anchored by a temperamental leading man past his prime whose anger, prejudices, drinking, unreasonable demands and outrageous behaviors were nearly as jaw-droppingly horrifying as his wife’s.
Not every Best Picture race could lend itself to a compelling narrative (imagine, say, Milk v. The Reader: Dawn of Ennui), but Harris compellingly illustrates how this eminently contrastable five-pack represented an artistic pivot point for American filmmaking into the ’70s and beyond. The Doolittle segments in particular are a Schadenfreude-fraught cautionary tale about how no movie genre is too big to fail, a lesson not yet learned by certain moviegoers in 2023.
8. Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation (2022). Much like Kevin Smith, the director’s geek musings can be more interesting to me than some of his films. One-half boyhood memoir and one-half extended listicle, Tarantino’s second book (after his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood self-novelization) name-checks Harris’ Scenes from a Revolution in his prologue, in which he describes himself as a child of the aforementioned New Hollywood wave. His mom and her various friends took him to the theater all the time, often regardless of content, then held lively discussions on every car ride home so he’d gain a more informed appreciation and have the foggiest clue what was happening in some of the more “mature” scenes. By adulthood he’d pretty much seen it all, up to and including way more Blaxploitation flicks than any other ’70s white kid in the universe.
After much setup about how he was influenced and thrilled by his precocious exposure to various genres, subgenres, and what some hoity-toity might deem Low Art, Tarantino’s essays cover an eclectic mix of specific films not necessarily featured in scholarly tomes. Some of them I’ve seen (Dirty Harry! Taxi Driver! Deliverance!), some I should’ve seen by now but haven’t (Bullitt!), some I’ve never heard of (Daisy Miller?), some sound tempting to try (Rolling Thunder, a revenge flick with future Knots Landing villain William Devane), and some I’m 101% certain I’ll never sit through (George C. Scott in Paul Schrader’s Hardcore). As you can imagine, our author super-loves transgression for transgression’s sake a lot more than I do, but his trash-is-treasure perspective champions some peculiar underdogs, evinces deep love for The Movies, posits the most thoughtful defense of/explanation for Brian DePalma I’ve ever seen, and explains a lot about my least favorite Tarantino films in a way he might not have intended.
Two of these were signed by their creators at 2023 conventions; the other one may be autographed soon, depending on how next weekend goes for us.
9. Terry Matalas, Travis Fickett, Tony Shasteen and Stephen Downer, Witch (2011). Once upon a time there was a short-lived publisher called Kickstart Comics (nigh impossible to Google today thanks to the unrelated crowdfunder) whose graphic novels seemed specifically created to be flipped into movies that could then boast “BASED ON THE GRAPHIC NOVEL”, which some Hollywood execs are still convinced is a surefire moneymaking imprimatur. Before the publisher realized there’s more profit in actually working in Hollywood and gave up on books (he’s now a producer on Amazon Prime’s The Boys), among his handful of finished products was this obscurity written by a college-buddy duo with almost no IMDb credits at the time. One of them would later become the showrunner of Syfy’s 12 Monkeys and Picard, and the other would keep sticking by his side.
Their concept here is rote (though polished) YA-gimmicky dark fantasy in which a traumatized teen learns she’s a Witch (no edgy spellcasting in the misnomer — instead she just has a feral invisible familiar who pops out of her head and ravages her foes), finds she isn’t the only Witch, reels at a second-act twist regarding her non-Witch parents, and leaves the door open for a possibly more witchy sequel. That door might keep flapping in the breeze forevermore, but at least the artists gave their all to make it look good and move briskly.
10. Ryan Browne, Blast Furnace, Recreational Thief! (2015). The co-creator of Curse Words and Eight Billion Genies, the mind behind God Hates Astronauts, also unapologetically concocted this high-concept hazardous material made of unpasteurized id and tongue-in-cheek manly-man antihero Axe Body Spray carnage. Its very creation was an experiment that would make Dr. Frankenstein cry: every single page was written and drawn in exactly one hour, no more and no less, and no pre-planning was allowed. The results are total nightmare-fueled system-shocked Grand Guignol misadventures of a pro robber who…well, a lot happens to him, and because of him. It’s Not Safe for Work, School, Church, Critics, the Faint of Heart, or impressionable killers who might get new ideas from so much hastily scribbled blood, guts, mayhem, amusing non-onomatopoeic sound effects, and flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, most of which somehow miraculously do circle back around and reconnect to the author’s hallucinations that pass for “the narrative”. It’s a demented sort of fun that Tarantino might love and consider novelizing if he doesn’t have anything against hyperviolent talking animals, which make up half the cast and the casualties.
11. Steenz, Heart Takes the Stage (2022). This compilation of the Heart of the City comic strip (est. 1998 but never carried in any of our local papers) picks up where Steenz took over in April 2020. Our heroine Heart is a Philly middle-schooler with literal drama-club problems and the requisite friends-and-family stresses and hi-jinks. I’m not necessarily the target audience, and sometimes the punchlines fall on the next-to-last beat and stumble over the last one, but the characters are adorbs, the feels can be cozy, some chuckles pop out, and a few belly laughs add to the scales. (The winner on page 70 is a mirror with my reflection in it.)
More to come!