While pop culture's history on the go so often brushes away with a graceless gesture an art life's layers of mystery, the realm of creative nonfiction somewhat revives that glamour, weaving together experience and memory in such a way that even small moments are as beautiful as the big pictures they create. With the precision and patience of a historian, veteran entertainment journalist Mark Harris pens Pictures At A Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, his recently released page-turning study of the 1967 Oscar Best Picture race, in a language crisp, at turns hysterical and at others heartbreaking. It's as if Harris conjures with the beauty, humor and depth of his detail the spirit not only of the films he studies but of that whole idealistic, later downtrodden era just learning to become itself.

Already favorably compared to riveting works John Gregory Dunne's The Studio and Peter Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls, Pictures At A Revolution charts in colorful detail from development to award's night the production courses of unhappy bedfellow nominees The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, Doctor Dolittle and In the Heat of the Night. "The old and new existed in uneasy proximity, eyeing each other across a red-carpeted aisle that was becoming easy to mistake for a battle line," Harris writes by way of introduction. Where directors Mike Nichols (The Graduate) and Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) represented the coming guard of hip and challenging independent-minded production, Stanley Kramer (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?) and Richard Fleischer (Doctor Dolittle) harkened back to the once-great bygone studio days, their creations well-crafted if not aesthetically innovative. Somewhere in between sat Norman Jewison with the socially cognizant In the Heat of the Night, the film appropriate for its sandwiched identity crisis that took home the Oscar that year.

In seamless shifts between one film and the next, the book's multiple narrative lines are each rendered gripping, the stories' players tripping up in pride, egotism, neurosis and impatience, all of which make for better stories than the ones sometimes lived out on screen. From examining Sidney Poitier's essential melancholy as the perpetual inside-outsider to recreating the ridiculous scenes of Rex Harrison and Rachel Roberts' alcohol and impulse-driven marriage, Harris manages moment after moment to build a momentum that's so compelling and intimate that it's, ironically, easy to escape into reality. Each moment, vivid as a snapshot, seeks its soul in that tireless inspiration not uncommon in Americana, that unflappable desire to produce, often at all costs--million dollar costs--the next big trend.

Pictures At A Revolution opens on a spring afternoon, 1963, Esquire art director Robert Benton heading to the New Yorker Theater to see Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim. Energized by several films of the French New Wave, Benton would soon after set out on what was to become a four-year filmmaking journey, and almost as a fated circle, he and writing comrade David Newman would early on in the process meet Truffaut himself to discuss helming direction for their debut screenplay Bonnie and Clyde.

Establishing his players in such an immediately personal, nostalgic way that still maintains its distance as informative while avoiding the academic, Harris organically breaths life into his copious interviews and stacks of research. There's a sense even from the first sentence that as an editor he's a master of his material, the grand volume of knowledge in the 400-odd page book failing to overwhelm his confidence in storytelling. Particularly standout as an example is his craft in writing about the very tangible, although at the time unnamed clash of old and new Hollywood at Jane Fonda's 1965 Fourth of July party. In one corner were established heavyweights like Gene Kelly, Lauren Bacall and Darryl Zanuck; in the other were newbies Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, Buck Henry. Then there was Andy Warhol as well, who showed up for his requisite fifteen minutes, although his New York Underground flare was of another fashion entirely. In the background, the Byrds played live.

"In the middle of the party," Harris writes, "and yet, as always, standing at a cocked eyebrow's distance from it, was Mike Nichols. Once again an immigrant in a new land, he surveyed the tribal rituals, the lapses of etiquette, the deferences and courtesies and small humiliations of this hothouse of West Coast privilege and restlessness, and filed them away for future use." The sheer structural and rhythmic beauty of the sentence is cause for reflection and were it merely an anomaly, it would still be mesmerizing. As it is, however, Harris' attention to cadence and emotion remains this fluid throughout the entire section, its reading more closely compared to poetry than to prose.

Balanced with his lyrical wanderings, Harris also cuts historical business deftly, navigating explanations of the Production Code, the industry's antiquated self-censorship tool; opening discussion about the racial issues in constant plague in both the business and the nation at the time; interjecting commentary by other journalists and critics; and all the while sketching broken and mended relationships with a sharp edges of minutiae: how Ava Gardner, in lobbying for the part of Mrs. Robinson, sadly admitted to Nichols "You know, the thing is...I can't act. They'll all tried. Huston, all of them. I just can't act,"; how Poitier, missing his daughters, spent his time at Fonda's party teaching director Roger Vadim's young daughter Nathalie how to tap-dance; how Faye Dunaway's obvious eating disorder landed her the nickname 'Fadin-Away' on the set of Bonnie and Clyde.

All these tiny imprints of human interaction and reaction pay off as Harris draws to a close, wrapping up at the awards ceremony itself the last chapter of Pictures At A Revolution. Although the winners are already known, have been known for some 40 years, the brilliance of Harris' work here is that he uses each paragraph to make the announcements feel new. For a few seconds, we feel a screenwriter's anxiety and disappointment; for a few seconds, we cheer Rod Steiger and his rather bold speech; for a few seconds, we are there sitting in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. We are, for a few seconds, all those filmmakers and actors and executives who accompanied us for the last 300 pages. It's a glorious type of reading high.

Despite a cringeworthy alliterative ending, Pictures At A Revolution seduces with undeniable charm, and it's perfectly honed voice is no less than a wild ride, a history lesson and a mirror of the themes of an everyman life. With its spotlight seemingly, deceptively only on the cinema, it presents cultural experience and memory not only in the way it is remembered but in the way it ought to be.