The subtitle of this account of the genesis and fate of the five movies in competition for the title Best Film at the 1967 Academy Awards is ‘the birth of the New Hollywood’. Hyperbole being the most reliable trope known to publicity, we are promised that 1967 was ‘the year that changed film’ and that ‘… a fight that began as a contest for a few small patches of Hollywood turf ended as the first shot in a revolution’. The loud implication is that the time taken to make the announcement ‘And the Oscar goes to …’ were ten seconds that shook the world. Mark Harris believes that at least three of the movies were radical departures, in conception and style, from all that had gone before. His long, and often very interestingly detailed, history tells how, and under whose aegis, the contenders came to line up at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where the Oscars were presented in the days before they were a prime-time attraction.
The great sleeper of 1967 was undoubtedly Bonnie and Clyde. It opened small, and achieved legendary success and status mainly because of Warren Beatty’s energy, charisma and never-take-no-for-an-answer chutzpah. ‘Whatever it takes’ being his motto, he went on his knees to Jack Warner to get the picture financed and clenched his fists at Elyot Hyman when, after his take-over of Warner’s, he threatened to bury it. Making a movie is one thing; getting it enthusiastically distributed and marketed is another battle entirely. Warren not only starred but also produced the story of the two Texan psychopaths who passed into myth as Depression Age Robin Hoods (banks were the baddies, which seems to excuse shooting their $10-a-week employees). David Newman and Robert Benton were, however, the project’s authors and prime movers.
Virgin screenwriters, admirers above all of the nouvelle vague (François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were among those who promised, for a minute or two, to direct the script), Newman and Benton wrote endless drafts until, exhausted but never disillusioned, they were somewhat gently bumped off the picture (but not the credits) by Bob Towne, who grew fat as first Warren’s and then Hollywood’s uber-rewrite man. In nouvelle vague-speak, Bonnie and Clyde was ‘un film de Arthur Penn’, but Warren produced in the hands-on bully-boy style of any old Warner brother: Penn was his employee as well as his director. As for Faye, with whom (we are told) Warren had no more carnal connection than did Clyde ‘I ain’t no lover-boy’ Barrow, she was never happy on the picture, nor much liked by those who were heartless enough to call her ‘Fadin’ Away’ or ‘Done Fade Away’. Faye had the last laugh, but not until she won the Oscar for Network, almost a decade later.
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