Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris Page A

hate ourselves,” Hedda Hopper snapped in her column. 17 The answer was evident: Even by its own declining standards, the Hollywood studios had mustered an embarrassing lineup of films in 1963 and then failed to nominate the best of them, Martin Ritt’s Hud. Two of the year’s Best Picture nominees, Fox’s Cleopatra and MGM’s slow-moving Cinerama omnibus How the West Was Won , had been scorned by critics and were clearly the beneficiaries of bloc voting by the large roster of studio employees that, at the time, made up much of the Academy’s membership. It was not a year for Hollywood to celebrate its own accomplishments. Some young stars—Steve McQueen, Tuesday Weld, Julie Andrews, Jack Lemmon—showed up as presenters, along with veterans like Edward G. Robinson and Ed Begley. Warren Beatty was in the audience with Leslie Caron; his sister, Shirley MacLaine, was also there, and up for Best Actress. But overall attendance among the nominees was sparse; three of the four acting winners— Hud ’s Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas and veteran British character actress Margaret Rutherford for The V.I.P.s —didn’t even show up. 18
    The fourth winner did, and provided the evening with its headline. Sitting in the audience, a nominee for Best Actor, Sidney Poitier, his palms sweating and his tension increasing with every category, thought, “I’m never going to put myself through this shit no more.” 19 Poitier knew that all eyes were on him, that his win would provide a moment of genuine meaning for black Americans and an occasion for an avalanche of self-congratulation within his industry. He had been here before, five years earlier, when, as the costar of The Defiant Ones , he had become the first black man to be nominated for Best Actor. Now, he could be the first to win—a moment that he knew would make history and yet change almost nothing.
    The movie for which Poitier was nominated, Lilies of the Field , was a sweet, thimble-size parable in which he had played a wanderer in the Southwest who stumbles across an isolated convent and helps a group of nuns from Germany build a new chapel. They don’t share a culture, a homeland, or even a language, but they learn mutual respect through working together. Almost nothing of Poitier’s character is revealed in the film’s script; he is a holy stranger who arrives, helps, teaches, learns, and leaves. Poitier accepted a salary cut, taking just $50,000 plus a percentage of the gross to play a role that his friend Harry Belafonte had rejected. 20 Shrewdly handled by United Artists, which missed no opportunity to hard-sell the mild little movie as a beacon of tolerance and cross-cultural understanding, Lilies had become a minor success.
    While nobody was claiming that the film was a masterpiece, much of Hollywood and the press were willing to laud it as a step in the right direction. More than a decade after the McCarthy era and blacklisting had caused many in the movie business to retreat from any public association with political issues, the civil rights movement was becoming the occasion for many in Hollywood to reassert their right to speak out on political issues. Actors like Paul Newman and Marlon Brando felt free to make their voices heard, and so did those considered industry leaders like Gregory Peck and Robert Wise. 21 The August 1963 civil rights march in Washington had been a galvanizing moment for the repoliticization of Hollywood, which New York Times columnist Murray Schumach wrote had “decided to rejoin the nation after nearly 16 years of spiritual secession.” 22
    The content of Lilies of the Field was anything but political, but the fact that some movie houses in the South declined to book the film only added to its status as a good cause. And Poitier was a hard man to root against. Before Oscar night, one of his competitors for Best Actor, Hud ’s Paul Newman, announced that he