PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: Five Movies & the Birth of the New Hollywood
Written by Mark Harris
&
STREET GANG: The Complete History of Sesame Street
Written by Michael Davis
There’s nothing like the history of popular culture. The best examples combine first rate research, fascinating storytelling & personal gossip, and a strong relationship to all the influences of the time period being examined. Two recent books attempt to milk this formula, but one manages to succeed with more aplomb.
Pictures at a Revolution is a superb snapshot of five extraordinary years where imagination, development, writing, acting & production change the course of pop culture. Five key films, released in the year 1967: every one of them intrinsic to the tearing fabric of morality, politics, and economics that was the United States of America at that time. Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, feminism, censorship…rather than viewing them topic by topic, they are glimpsed through the prism of popular entertainment, and evolution has never been told in such a fascinating and entertaining manner. Where else will you find Warren Beatty & Mike Nichols, side by side with Martin Luther King Jr & Jack Valenti, competing for relevance in so absorbing a manner?
The key to the success of the book is the storytelling. With five parallel films to chronicle, and multitude of famous writers, producers, directors, politicians, critics…this should have ended up being a disaster. Instead, Mark Harris seamlessly intertwines the common threads of these stories, delivering one of the richest portraits of a time period that I have ever read. The sheer amount of biographical info, the gossip, the logistical nightmares of filming…none of this should work in a single book about a ONE film, let alone FIVE. But it does work; five films that hurtle to both success and failure with the gusto of an out-of-control roller coaster. They mirror the unstoppable changes in the US of that time, and the chronicle of events manages to be informative AND entertaining without a single sacrifice in length or quality. In fact, I continue to be stunned by the relative brevity of the book.
Street Gang isn’t quite so successful, though it tries to follow the same format of biography/information/gossip/cultural relevance. Its primary flaw is that it is a very unbalanced book. The first third comprises a series of biographies of each of the key, formative players who contributed to Sesame Street’s birth and first amazingly successful 15 years on television. This should be an ideal intro, but the bios all end up taking too long, and sometimes they don’t seem very relevant to the central topic. On some occasions, they verge on personal info-dumps, at the expense of the revolutionary politico-cultural-socio-economic time period that gave birth to the show. It’s an almost Dan Brown/DaVinci Code style approach to non-fiction.
I wanted more detail about the creation of Big Bird, Oscar, and Cookie Monster…more details on the writing of key episodes, the impact of Sesame Street on the nation and the world…but not only do I have to wait until the second half of the book before I get such material goodness, many opportunities to explore these areas are pushed to the side, in favour of personal issues that can be interesting, but seem far from relevant to the show in general.
Once we get to the second half, things start to improve, and the story of Sesame Street really starts to get going…until we finish with the late 1980s, and everything starts being delivered in rapid fire bursts — punctuated paragraphs that take material deserving of a second volume, and compress them into a couple dozen pages. After an incredibly slow build up, and explosive middle section…the book ends extremely abruptly. My puzzled reaction: is that it?
Street Gang remains successful, because it taps into a massive well of nostalgia for most 30 and 40 year olds, longing for a golden age of childhood fun. But it’s a shame the journey to reach this well ends up being convoluted, inconsistent in organization, and creaking under the weight of too much extraneous information. Pictures at a Revolution experiences no such flaws - it has razor-sharp focus, and an extraordinary brevity that ensures no single section, no single anecdote, and no single moment outstays its welcome.
Two works of pop culture history. Both fascinating, both engrossing. But Pictures at a Revolution is clearly the winner, thanks to its superior focus and balance of research and storytelling. Luckily, the enjoyment and nostalgia factors of both books are equally solid, and neither is, in any way, a waste of time.
