The morning after this year's Oscars, journalist and author Mark Harris took time out of his schedule to speak about his beautifully wrought Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, a glimpse at the 1968 Best Picture race where old Hollywood met the innovative likes of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. Given Mark Gill's recent statement about the state of independent filmmaking, the optimism of the early part of this conversation, an exploration of the 2007 independent scene, may find itself sealed in time, may express the type of energetic hopefulness that rightly layers itself into so many of Harris' pages for Pictures at a Revolution.

With Harris reading this Thursday evening at the New York Public Library, we reflect upon the conversation and seek in it some clues for the future of filmmaking from its rarely sensible, sometimes ridiculous and often inspired past.

SM: You said in the EW.com interview something interesting in that if we’re about to see a new revolution in filmmaking starting this year, what we’ll see is that specialty divisions will become permanent homes for serious American filmmaking. After having seen the show last night, do you still feel that way?

MH: I definitely do. The specialty divisions had four of the five Best Picture nominees, and it looked to me like they really dominated the awards last night. The Bourne Ultimatum took a few and Michael Clayton won one, but other than that No Country For Old Men, which won four Oscars, is a co-production of two specialty divisions, Paramount Vantage and Miramax; La Vie En Rose was released in the United States by Warner Bros.’ specialty division Picturehouse; Juno came from Searchlight; Atonement, which won for Best Score, came from Focus. So, I think this is a model that’s likely to stay in place for several years because with very few exceptions, the big “studio” side of studios right now are not really interested in producing the kind of movies that win Oscars, or even get nominated for them. The only ones we saw really make a hard try for it this year were Universal with American Gangster and Charlie Wilson’s War and Paramount-DreamWorks with Sweeney Todd, and they both clearly fell short.

SM: It also points out the differences and intersections between art and consumerism, the question about whether or not those lines can be further blurred. Juno, for example, in hitting that $100 million mark, showed that those lines are often malleable, which is a similar to what happened in ’67.

MH: And, it should be pointed out that the Coen brothers’ movie is by far the highest grossing movie that they have ever made, including movies like Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers’ that were clearly designed to be big audience hits.

SM: And were clearly awful.

MH: Right. So it shows that you can do well by doing good.

I’ve read a lot this year that suggests that there’s something very dire in the fact that collectively the Best Picture nominees only grossed about $300 million, and I don’t quite understand the complaint. It seems to me that if you’re saying something’s really wrong with that, what you’re really saying is that either the Academy is out of touch with popular taste—which I think is really foolish because the Academy was never meant to be a reflection of popular taste; it was meant to reward excellence, and if anything, it’s good that it’s moving away from the box office and toward that—or, you’re complaining that studios don’t know how to make really good movies anymore, which is arguably true, although the thing is, all of these movies were made by studios. They have subcontracted the making of mid-price, quality movies to specialty divisions within their own organizations.

I suppose one could say, “How horrible that quality is now a specialty.” But, my feeling is, “Big deal as long as the movies are getting made and getting seen.” I don’t think there’s anything less independent in spirit in a movie like There Will Be Blood or No Country For Old Men because it had the money of a studio division behind it. Can anyone really look at No Country For Old Men and say, “Well, the studio must have told them to put that ending in”? These don’t look like movies that were ravaged by the notes of studio executives.

SM: Like you said, it does have to do with that definition of ‘independent’, and that’s generally the problem with definitions, that as soon as you place them down, they’re going to change.

MH: I always want to ask people, “Independent of what?” No movie is independent of money. Any movie, including an independent movie, has someone putting up the money to finance it. Unless it’s the writer-director, you have someone potentially who can interfere with the content of a movie. Harvey Weinstein now runs a completely independent company, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to leave someone like Todd Haynes alone. We’ve already read accounts that he had very strong opinions about what did and didn’t work in a movie like I’m Not There. So, it’s a mistake to equate independence, as we’ve narrowly defined it, with artistic integrity and studio money automatically with compromise and a corresponding loss in quality. It really does come down to the people running these individual divisions.

One thing that I’m very optimistic about right now is that there are a lot of these companies. We’re not in a situation where it’s all of the studios, Miramax and then almost nothing else, the situation that we lived through in the ‘90s. The wealth was spread this year among four, five or six different divisions, and they are largely run by people with taste. James Schamus, who runs Focus Features, is a screenwriter and a Columbia professor and a producer. He wears many hats. He’s not someone who’s going to go in there and tear movies apart because a focus group told him to.

SM:…There is that fear though in the studio system, that you have to make your opening weekend, and this was even addressed in the book, this idea that Bonnie and Clyde shouldn’t be opened in a wider release because it wasn’t expected to make money as it had already been around a while. Ultimately, though, that film ended up showing that word-of-mouth can help a film gain traction.

MH: That’s one change between 1968 and now that I find somewhat discouraging. A lot of people have asked me, “Well, could Bonnie and Clyde still get made now?” And, the answer is, “Yes.” Of course it could get made, although it would probably get made by a studio’s independent division rather than a studio.

What I don’t think could happen is that it would be allowed to sit in a theater for two to three months without doing much business, until it found an audience. Bonnie and Clyde made five times as much money in 1968 as it did in the five months that it was open in 1967. Five months from your opening now, you’re on DVD in all but very rare instances.

The reasons that’s changed are partly good. The reason that movies stayed so long in theaters in the 60s was because there was no aftermarket of any kind; all there was was network television where yes, you might eventually be able to see the movie, but it would be chopped into pieces, and all the good parts would be cut out. Now you know you can see a movie on DVD, on cable, on On-Demand television, but there is definitely less of a sense of urgency in many cases to go see it in a theater. The kind of audience that is discriminating if you will, that prefers movies like No Country For Old Men to summer blockbusters, is also the kind of audience that is getting largely turned off by the theatrical experience right now: It’s expensive. If you wait more than a couple of weeks, you’re likely to see a print in really bad condition. The theaters all smell like food. Somebody next to you, probably at No Country For Old Men, will have brought their three-year-old kid. At the same moment, home TV systems and sound systems and DVDs are allowing you to watch a movie that looks better and better and bigger and bigger, so why not stay home? If there’s going to be a revolution in the next few years, I really wonder if that might be it, if moviegoing becomes increasingly privatized.

SM: This might be optimistic, but my hope is that when we begin to see more of that technological revolution you refer to, we’ll also see more support of the Indywood base. So, the Sundance premiere films, the film festival circuits films, we’ll see more of those come up the ranks and land at the Academy. But, again, that’s likely optimistic, and I’m not sure what you think about that.

MH: I don’t know how to say this without sounding like an incredible snob, but I’ll say it anyway. The only thing you might be too optimistic about is the amount of talent out there. I do think, yes, there’s no question that digital video technology makes it much easier for people to make movies. There’s no longer the financial or technological impediment. If you have the vision to make a movie, it’s going to be easier to do that than ever before. However, having the vision to make a movie does not mean you have the talent to make a movie. As we know from American Idol, the number of people who think that they can sing is exponentially larger than the number of people who can actually sing. I worry that if there’s an immense pile of mediocrity to sort through, it actually sometimes does become harder for the jewel in the haystack to get spotted.

We’re going to see a lot of very, very bad movies made on DV, and I worry about that a little bit. In Manhattan, where I live, about 10 years ago, I think around 250 to 300 movies opened theatrically in a year. Last year it was closer to 600. The increase in that number was due entirely to tiny, indie movies that got a theatrical release of a week or maybe two on one screen and then disappeared or went directly to DVD. Some of those movies were really, really good. There were some foreign movies that we never would have gotten the chance to see 10 years ago; there were some American indies. But, if eight indies are opening a week, are the consumers really going to read all of the reviews and do IMDb searches of the filmmakers? How do you figure out which one is the one that is really worth your attention when there are seven others that look sort of like it the same day? And, more seriously, if one of those movies is really good and really deserving of an audience but might not be a first week blockbuster, how does it hold onto its theater for the second, third or fourth week when fourteen more movies are pressing for screens the next weekend? There is a disadvantage potentially to overcrowding.

SM: Anthony Kaufman’s been saying much the same in Village Voice articles in say the last eight months.

MH: It worries me, and I think it has a trickle-through effect to the rest of the country because a lot of other cities, cities that book indie movies, will look at how an indie performs in New York and Los Angeles as a means of deciding whether they want to give it a shot. We have a screen shortage in Manhattan relative to the population that we have here, so it’s tough.

It sounds paradoxical, but too many indies flooding the marketplace could be bad for really good indie movies. So, we’ll see. Like all revolutions, it comes with asterisks.

SM: I’ll switch off here because I’d really like to talk about the crafting of the book. I’m in love with the crafting.

MH: Oh, thank you so much.

SM: It’s masterful. Wendy Smith over at the Chicago Trib was one of the first to come out with a review of it, and she writes something I thought was brilliant. She likens this work to Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders & Raging Bulls, and in doing so, she said of Pictures of a Revolution that it’s more generous, less judgmental and doesn’t reduce any group to caricature, which I thought was the perfect way to define what’s happening here.

It didn’t seem to me when I was reading that you’d started with any thesis but that you’d really gone in with an open mind, talked to people and started gathering these stories. I don’t want to say that’s what you did, though. That was just my impression. So, with that thought, where did you start from? How did you begin to look at the book and pull these pieces together?

MH: I did start with a thesis, but it was a very quiet thesis. The thesis I started with was that no one thing is ever going on in the movie business at one time, that what we look at as a revolution does not start overnight.

I was fascinated by the fact that Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate seemed to tap instantly into the hunger of a gigantic under-recognized audience for the kind of movies that they were. I thought this was paradoxical because when we see a movie in a theater, we tend to automatically imagine that it emerged from yesterday’s newspaper, that it reflects whatever is in our consciousness right now. Yet the reality is that we know that movies take two or three or four years to make. So I wanted to write a book that explored how these movies, which must have been generated in, I thought 1965 or 1964, but it turned out 1963, ended up reflecting 1967 so well. That question led me backwards in time through the mid-60s and the early 60s. Then as I got more and more curious about the pre-revolution period, that 1963-1967 period, and started thinking more and more about other movies from that time and about the collapse of the Production Code, I started developing my idea.

The idea to make the structure of the book based on those five Best Picture nominees came actually very late in my thinking…It was the last thing that fell into place, that looking at all five of these movies could give me something that I really wanted the book to have, which was an ability to drag a lot of the 60s along with it and to show all of the issues that were leading not only to something new but to the collapse of something old.

I think when you say that my book feels like it didn’t start with a thesis, you’re right. I didn’t have an argumentative thesis. I very consciously did not want to write a book in which I felt I was going to have to amass evidence to make the same point on every page. That’s not a criticism of Peter Biskind’s book at all. Peter Biskind’s book has a subtitle which is something like, “How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.”

SM: You got that exactly right. Word for word.

MH: I remember the book very well. I admired it a great deal when I read it. It is very deliberately a thesis book. He felt really strongly that these people came into Hollywood, made something great out of it and then, through their own personal excesses and egos, wrecked their careers. He’s very upfront about that thesis in the book. I think the book is, for many people, definitive about the 70s and that period of moviemaking.

I didn’t have a thesis like that about the 60s. I was interested in understanding the idea that what we now envision as the beginning of a revolution did not, I think, to anyone seem like a revolution at the moment, including the revolutionaries. On this day after the Oscars, 40 years ago, people weren’t necessarily saying, “Well, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate may have only won one Oscar a piece, but they will clearly define movies for the next 10 years.” I don’t think they were thinking that. I think that at the studios, they were looking ahead and thinking, “Thank God we can get back to normal now. We’ve got Oliver and Funny Girl and Hello, Dolly in development, a whole bunch of big musicals.” The revolution didn’t become apparent for a little while longer. So, my goal in the book was to try to recreate how people understood what was happening in movies between 1963-1968 as it was happening, not as we understand it now.

That kind of took away my chance to have a thesis. To me it was much less interesting what I in 2008 think of the racial politics of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? than to explore how they played out at that particular moment, what the issues were as that movie was being thought of, made and released.

SM: With that example, one note I thought was particularly great was that you mention that even in its time Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? was seen as representing antiquated ideology.

MH: Oh, yeah, that’s a mistake we make all the time. We can judge an old movie too harshly from the present perspective, but we can also judge it too gently. We’ll often look at an old movie and say, “Well, for its time it was really bold and innovative.” Then you look back at the reaction at the time, and you see a lot of people really complaining about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?. You can even go as far back as Gentleman’s Agreement, the movie about anti-Semitism in 1947, and say, “Well, for 1947 it was very bold, and it won the Best Picture Oscar, so it really must have impressed people.” But, in 1947 there were tons of people who said, “Are you kidding?”

That was a huge research challenge for me in doing this book, was really trying to understand and to open my ears to how things were received at that moment, how they were talked about at that moment. People’s memories about that particular issue are unreliable. You really have to go back and look at what was written and said then. That started to give me a roadmap.

Particularly with the question of race, which, of course, runs through two of the five movies of that year through the story of Sidney Poitier, one of the big challenges of researching the book was just to keep my ears open to how Poitier was discussed. That changed so dramatically year by year as I was going through the book. Where people were in terms of American race relations in 1968 was tremendously different than in 1963, or even 1965. I had to give myself a crash course in that.

SM: With the depiction of Sidney Poitier in the book, it feels as if there’s a huge amount of compassion, and the imagery you use is really great in terms of getting the reader in the right place to emotionally invest in that story. All of the reviewers so far have mentioned the Jane Fonda-July 4 scene,…that idea of Poitier sitting with this little girl and teaching her how to tap dance. It’s so beautiful and so sad, and you can imagine his feeling of outsiderness there.

Was there a certain amount of compassion that you dealt with in this scene?

MH: Oh, absolutely. I felt compassion for Rex Harrison even.

SM laughs, remembering the egomaniacal leading man of Doctor Dolittle.

MH: Maybe not a lot, but…

I spent four years on the book, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to spend four years writing about people I felt hadn’t contributed something really valuable, people I didn’t admire.

The Sidney Poitier story in the book was the most emotional part of the book for me to work on…I don’t think his story is a simple story. It’s very complicated. It’s not as simple as he was the victim of prejudice by people who didn’t like black people; he was also the victim of the prejudice of exceptionalism; and, at moments, he was the victim of some of his own choices.

The more I read about him and the more research I did, the more I was very moved by the immensity of the burden he faced in knowing that every single decision he made was going to be taken as representative of his race, was going to be scrutinized, was going to be analyzed by white audiences, by the Hollywood establishment, by African-American moviegoers. It is so truly a no win situation that even at the end of the book when he literally wins, when he becomes the number one box office star in the country, his options are all being closed off.

Because Sidney Poitier was one of the people that chose not to talk to me for the book, I felt really obliged to try to get his voice in the book in as many other ways as I could—by talking to people who knew him, by talking to people who worked for him and by using his own words. Fortunately for me he had written two autobiographies and done a great deal of press over the years. He was really a public figure, and, he wore his heart on his sleeve, not completely, but a little more than he does now.

I think when someone doesn’t talk to you, or when someone has died, you feel an especially steep obligation to try to get it right as far as they’re concerned. I also made a vow to myself at the beginning of working on the book that I would never in this book say what someone was thinking. I would never say what someone was thinking or feeling unless they had told me themselves, or unless they had told someone. So, to try to get him right without overstepping myself and making psychological assumptions about him that there was nothing in the public record to warrant was challenging.

SM: As a converse example, you get the portrait of Mike Nichols, who is willing to go into that psychological realm. What were those interview processes like, particularly when you were digging well passed what’s superficially seen in a film as being its messages and into the human moments that made it up, what it is about a film that identifies humanity?

MH: I was dealing with a pool of interview subjects who, because of the nature of this book, were between 60 to 95-years-old, and asking people to talk about something that happened 40 years ago is a challenge to them. When you’re researching something, and you’re head is really deeply in it, you tend to make the assumption that the people who you are going to talk to, who lived it, will have it every bit as vividly in their heads as you do, or you think you do. But, that’s not necessarily true. If somebody asked you what you were doing in October of 1989, you’d probably have to take a moment, place yourself and think, “How old was I? Where was I in school?” Beyond that, if you’re being asked, “What was I feeling? What was I thinking? What was my emotional state of mind?,” I don’t think most people could pull that up instantly.

Besides that, with a lot of these people, they have been asked a lot over the years. They have talked a lot over the years about The Graduate, about Bonnie and Clyde. This was not turf they had never explored before, so the challenge for me as an interviewer was, in some cases, to try to get them to not go into their automatic stories so to speak.

There are some people who will say things that are not quite true, and it’s not because they’re lying. It’s because they’ve told the same story so many times that they’re not really thinking about the content of the story anymore, they’re thinking about the storytelling. So, what I would often find was that by asking some strange, sidelong question that was not about them but about someone they worked with, it was like I would see a new window open in their heads, and I’d suddenly get something that I knew was fresh from them, that I knew was a story they hadn’t told before. As soon as they did that once, as soon as they started to think about the actual experience, instead of thinking about an old story they were telling, the floodgates would open, and you’d suddenly be back in their heads in 1967 hearing them really revisit this time.

Some of them had easier access to those memories and were more willing to go there quickly than others, but by and large I was so impressed by the willingness of people to revisit not just the triumphant aspects of these movies but the painful experiences too. It wasn’t just a bunch of people that were interested in taking verbal victory laps. They were all very willing to look at this from a fresh vantage point.

SM: In having to live in the years in which this was all happening, not looking from a perspective of 2008, two sequences that do that so beautifully are the first, which I already mentioned, the Jane Fonda-July 4 party and the second the closing scene when as readers we’re at the Santa Monica Civic Center [for the awards ceremony.] I was hoping that you could talk about writing and developing those two sequences.

MH: I came upon Jane Fonda’s party by accident. I first encountered it in Jane Fonda’s autobiography, and then after reading the autobiography, I realized, “Oh, that was the party that Mike Nichols had talked to me about. That was the party that Buck Henry had talked to me about.” I started looking for everything that I could find on that party—guest lists, other accounts of it. There’s a mention of it in a book by Peter Fonda; there’s a mention of it in an as-told-to biography by Henry Fonda; it’s covered in Roger Vadim’s autobiography. So, it became a huge goal for me to get enough information about that party to construct it as a narrative chapter.

One of the immense structural challenges of this book was that I knew all along that I was going to be intercutting between five different stories. To avoid the syndrome where every three pages you’re reading the word ‘meanwhile,’…along the way I was looking for any place where more than one of these stories could intersect. I knew that I would get that with Sidney Poitier because, as you know from reading the book, his story actually goes through three of the movies, since he intersects briefly with Doctor Dolittle as well as the two movies he was in. But, the Jane Fonda party, once I realized that everyone was there, I just thought if I could make this a moment where I could somehow figure out how to get my whole cast together and set that against the backdrop of the entire movie business, which also seemed to be there, I would be lucky.

I worked on that chapter for a really long time, just until I felt that I’d found enough material to justify making it a scene, until I felt I knew enough about the party and the atmosphere and the music that was playing and the setting to make it believable for myself. A lot of times I think you feel that you do enough research and something clicks. You feel like, “Okay, now, yes, I get it. I have enough accounts of it so that I know what happened at that party. I know what that must have felt like.”

The 1968 Oscars was easier because I knew what I was doing in advance. I always knew that the book would end there or shortly after. So, in terms of research I just asked everyone along the way who I interviewed who was at the Oscars to tell me their experience of the Oscars. For anyone who had died or who wasn’t available, I had read what they had said about those Oscars.

Then I think really almost the very last piece of research I did for the book was to go to the Academy video archives in Los Angeles and watch that telecast. As much as I want to convey the experiences of people that were in the auditorium, I want to convey what viewers at home would have seen.

I really can’t say enough about how shockingly different it is from the Oscars that we see now. It was much more like a camera covering a news event. You were watching a private gathering of people in the industry, and yes, they know they’re on television, but remarkably few concessions were made to it as a TV production.

I didn’t know what I was going to see in terms of the show itself until I saw it. Of course I was a little disappointed. There’s no red carpet material, or about a minute of it. There are very few reaction shots. There isn’t that evil and wonderful thing that they do now where all five nominees sit in a little box on the screen, and one of them wins and for a split second you get to see the faces of the four people who didn’t. So the evidence of what happened is thinner, but happily I had so much from people not just talking about their own reactions to being there but also things like Dustin Hoffman talking about sitting across the aisle from Rod Steiger. They really were a community, and they did watch each other. Even knowing who sat next to whom was really helpful.

I knew that my challenge in writing that section would be to get all of that because, of course, there’s really no suspense to be built about who won. I can create suspense about what was at stake, how people felt and what the mood of the room was, but anybody who wants to can drop out of this book at any time, and they’re a Google search away from having their answers about who won the Oscars that year. So, I really wanted to be careful that it not turn into a book that built to this incredibly suspenseful account of who won and who didn’t because I think it’s sort of a losing game…I was hoping the suspense could be created by just the fact that by this point in the book you would feel that you knew those people so well that you kind of had your own rooting interests, whether you knew who won or not.

SM: That was pretty much my exact experience with that final chapter.

MH: Good! The whole idea was, “Well, you’re now going to the Oscars with people you know.” And, when Robert Benton is disappointed to lose, you’re disappointed too because you’ve spent all this time with him.

SM: Talking about your background a bit, EW actually has a really good record of turning out journalists who write books of this quality, of this detail and of this fact about popular culture. I’m thinking right now of David Hajdu, which I don’t know if you were contemporaries at the magazine?

MH: We were. I was actually at EW from three months before it launched. I started there in 1989, and I only left the staff officially in 2006. So, yeah, David and I absolutely worked together. I’m also a tremendous admirer of his writing.

SM: I was looking back at [Hajdu’s] Positively 4th Street recently, and with the amount of detail in both of these books, it makes me think that there’s something about EW itself that encourages that type of work. I was hoping you could tell me what kind of an influence and what kind of an experience you brought from working there for more than 15 years that helped you create this book.

MH: One thing that working at EW really taught me is that there’s so much shoddy entertainment journalism out there. The reputation of entertainment journalism in general is so degraded and has been for a really long time. I always felt at EW that we were trained there that it was especially important to do your work, to nail down your sources, to report deep, to know the context of whatever it was that you were writing about. I’m certainly not saying that we always did that successfully at the magazine, but in terms of the way that EW informed my experience, it certainly taught me to take entertainment journalism very, very seriously and not to cut corners, not to take it less seriously even if people on the outside world thought that you were writing nothing but fluff or trivia or lists; to do your work. I certainly learned that when I was a writer at EW, and I learned it as an editor as well. It helped me tremendously when I decided to write this book and then eventually decided to leave the magazine to work on it full-time.

I thought, “I have to push myself to the absolute outer limits of my reporting ability, my thinking ability, my research ability, my interviewing ability, my heretofore nonexistent ability to work with archival material.” I really thought, “I’m writing a book about a piece of 20th century history that really means a lot to me. The fact that it has to do with pop culture gives me more of an obligation not to cut any corners, that I really have to nail this down 100 percent, especially because anything to do with the movies and journalism is so prone to exaggeration, ornamentation, conflicting memories or sometimes lying.” I just felt like I’d better be really, really thorough and really exacting in my own thinking and also try not to bring any preconceptions to what I was doing that would overwhelm what I was finding out. I wanted to let the material shape the book, not the book shape the material.

SM: Another influence on your writing, or someone who might be a side influence, is Tony Kushner. It must be so amazing to live with another writer, this Tony Award-winning, Academy Award-nominated writer at that. Is there any wonderful, healthy sort of rivalry in the household about writing itself? I assume that must be so fun.

MH: Oh, God! It is fun, and no, there’s no rivalry. Tony and I have been together for 10 years, and so Angels in America had already happened by the time I met him. I think it would have been somewhat foolish for me to approach life with Tony as a contest. That would be, I think, a very bad way to embark on this relationship.

I can tell you that he’s been tremendously supportive of me since we met both when I was at EW and not even thinking of doing a book, and then particularly in the time I was working on the book. He’s a tremendously good listener. I talked to him a lot about the work I was doing as I was doing it, but I also would read him what I wrote at the end of every day. Reading my own writing aloud helps me find the bad parts of it to put it really simply. When I hear it with my ears, no matter how many times I’ve read it to myself, there are clumsinesses and infelicities that I don’t see until I hear it. Tony was just a great listener. He was really great about telling me when certain things needed to be clearer or when he thought I could go a little bit farther with something than I had.

He also sat through two years of like 600 movies from the 1960s.

SM laughs.

MH: We’re talking everything from Don Knotts in The Reluctant Astronaut to the fifty viewings of Bonnie and Clyde. We do have separate offices, but still, I have to say, he has the patience of a saint when it comes to this. It was also just that Tony loves movies, and so he was a great person to watch these movies with.

SM: I think that’s so great, to have two great artistic minds helping each other out.

MH: (laughs) I would not qualify myself as that, but I think one thing that really helps the two of us so much is that we do really different kinds of writing, and we’re both deeply sympathetic to the struggles that each of us faces as a writer. They’re not the exact same struggles, and that makes it a lot easier.

The author reads from the book at 6PM on Thursday, July 10 at the New York Public Library, Donnell Library Center, Media Center, 20 W. 53 St., New York, NY 10019. For more information on the book, visit www.picturesatarevolution.com.