"The unspoken premise of Harris' look back is not quite what you'd expect from a writer-editor at Entertainment Weekly, where instant zeitgeist readings reign: When you live through a tumultuous time like the 1960s, and you work in an industry like the movies—whose projects, unlike a rock 'n' roll song, take years to gear up and require the investment and teamwork of seriously disparate people—it's more in retrospect that you can see the pattern of how a new sensibility was born. On the ground, there are hunches and uncertainty. Only over time—after the film comes out, after spontaneously erupted polemics and unplanned popular borrowings and an embrace or rejection by the audience (back then a much longer process than our make-or-break opening weekend)—can you trace out which direction the culture was heading in."
In Slate, Sarah Kerr reviews Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.
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