ost years the range of Academy Award best picture nominees has little to tell us about the state of the art, let alone the state of the nation, but in 1968, the five choices offered a view of Hollywood that mirrored the groundswell taking over the country and the industry. Hollywood, run by entrenched old-timers, was about to be overtaken by a new and dissenting sensibility, a younger generation alert to the changes of the ’60s and anxious to capture them on film. Mark Harris’ deeply researched account of the diverging fortunes of these movies en route to Oscar night turns this elegant premise into one of the most fascinating insider histories of Hollywood since Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

The movies were Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and the logistical nightmare that was Dr. Doolittle—offering what Harris calls “a five-snapshot collage of the American psyche as represented by its popular culture.” In Harris’ account, the first two were created largely by cynical, skeptical New Yorkers—Mike Nichols and screenwriter Buck Henry, and Arthur Penn and writers Robert Benton and David Newman—with no pre-existing stake in Hollywood and little deference to its culture. But almost by accident, they laid out a template for the new generation of directors of the ’70s. Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night was a transitional film about racism, updating traditional Hollywood liberalism in a tense thriller.

The old guard was poorly represented: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in Harris’ opinion, demonstrated that the well-intentioned, mid-century paternalistic liberalism of producer-director Stanley Kramer had reached a point of creative stasis. And what to say of Dr. Doolittle, which he characterizes as “a universally dismissed children’s musical that most observers felt had bought its way into the final five.” Producer Arthur P. Jacobs is said to have energetically bribed and browbeaten the smaller craft unions with epic steak-and-martini dinners.

Tracing each movie from the germ of an idea through Oscar night, Harris retells some tales recounted elsewhere, but he has managed to interview almost every single surviving figure anew, conferring freshness upon familiar stories while adding countless new ones. So we glimpse Dustin Hoffman signing up for unemployment straight after completing The Graduate; Mike Nichols somehow winning every creative battle (“I was kind of an asshole,” he admits); Warren Beatty blindly feeling his way toward the proper mood and tone for Bonnie and Clyde; and Doolittle star Rex Harrison, aged, alcoholic and insecure, indulging in grotesque anti-Semitism at the expense of his co-star Anthony Newley (“You cockney Jew!”). Dr. Doolittle was the most troubled of the five productions, but really, all the movies were nightmares to complete. Mastering a wealth of detail, Harris takes the reader on a thrilling journey culminating at the Oscar ceremony, which was delayed for 48 hours because of the assassination of Martin Luther King. The result is a landmark of the genre.

Film on Paper:
The Inner Life of Movies
(Ivan R. Dee, 304 pages, $18.95)
By Richard Schickel

These, happily, are not flaws we can attribute to Schickel, who has always combined clean, clear writing with pugnacious iconoclasm and a nuanced critical judgment that most of the reviewed authors simply cannot muster, resulting in a compilation that is worth any 10 of the books he is reviewing.

Schickel’s brief kiss-offs are toothsomely forthright: “About as dreadful as a star bio can be” (Lee Server’s Ava Gardner); “too much the film geek;” “repetitive, digressive and tiresomely written....”, and so on. It’s a tonic to see so many fools suffered with such a bracing dearth of gladness. The hacks thus dismissed, Schickel then offers his own, often starkly contrasting views on the subject at hand. He is agreeably hard on the manufactured mystique of Katharine Hepburn (“her career may belong more to the annals of celebrity than it does to the annals of performance”) and rightly scoffs at the alleged sexual magnetism of Mae West. His examination of the sad career of Stepin Fetchit looks far past the shuffling negro caricature that whites saw to discern a sly subversiveness that was far more evident to black moviegoers.

Schickel has also been around long enough to take on some of his fellow big-dog critics without fear, pointedly opening the collection with a refutation of David Thomson’s The Whole Equation, even as he lauds its prose. When he encounters a book he likes, though—such as Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting by J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler—he is generous in his praise and respectful with his differences. With over 60 reviews, Film on Paper offers a rich survey not just of the books, but also of Schickel’s capacious and splendidly contrarian mind.

avid A. Price’s well-researched history of Pixar is also a history of the long march of computer-generated imagery from its origins as a gleam in the eyes of several visionary-minded computer geeks to its current ubiquity, and of how Pixar—thanks to the staggering success of movies like Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and The Incredibles—ultimately came to menace even its own most powerful backer, the Disney Company.

From today’s dizzying heights, Price backtracks to the digital stone age of the early ’70s when the individuals who later formed Pixar were in their prime, giddy on visions of what could be achieved with digital imagery, but with none of the necessary technology yet invented or, in some cases, even conceived.

Oddly, the most interesting part of the book is its first half, devoted mainly to technical exploration—the development of rendering technology, graphics interfaces, contour mapping—a process akin to building an entire new language from the letters of the alphabet on up. Price manages to make the material sing with suspense, much as Tracy Kidder did with The Soul of a New Machine about computers in 1981. But when the story switches to the success of the company after Toy Story, Price finds himself locked into a repeating cycle—creation, data-crunching, marketing, release date, boffo box office—and his story slows down noticeably.

Still, the wars between Disney and Pixar, especially between temperamental polar opposites Steve Jobs and Michael Eisner, provide plenty of diversion. Jobs is both hero and villain of the tale, breathtakingly rude to friend and foe. Oddballs do make history, however, and the events chronicled herein have reached into every corner of modern life, making The Pixar Touch a fascinating road map to the world we all live in now.