I’m reading a terrific new book right now: Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris. It’s about the five movies that were nominated for the 1967 Oscar for Best Picture and how they illustrate the enormous changes Hollywood was undergoing in the late sixties.

The five films included three revolutionary pictures — Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and In the Heat of the Night — and two throwbacks, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Doctor Dolittle. Starting in late 1963 and culminating in the Oscars ceremony in the spring of 1968, the book deftly interweaves the stories of the five films as they go from conception to casting to filming to release to awards. You learn about the old guard, such as Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was Tracy’s last film and he died soon after filming ended), Rex Harrison, director Stanley Kramer, and Jack Warner of Warner Brothers; the new guard, such as Warren Beatty, director Mike Nichols, and Dustin Hoffman; and in the middle, Sidney Poitier, fed up with old Hollywood and the racial box it had put him in, but somewhat reluctant to give up his safe, heroic image.

One of the many treats of the book is reading about the fiasco that was Doctor Dolittle. Movie musicals were big in the early sixties — My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins were all big hits within the course of a year — and some people figured, hey, since those worked, let’s make the Doctor Dolittle novels into a movie musical too! Sure, it requires a huge menagerie of animals, but that’s no problem, right? Of course, it became a huge problem.

Here’s one passage, during filming in a picturesque English village where nobody realized it typically rained throughout the summer:

The fields where many of the animals were kept became so saturated with rain that they turned into swamps. The rhinoceros got pneumonia… Even a shot as simple as one in which Dolittle addresses a few lines to an attentive parrot and squirrel who are standing on a railing became a nightmare when the recalcitrant squirrel wouldn’t stay still. When crew members tried to wrap tiny wires around its paws and then attach the wires to the rail with tacks, the squirrel became understandably agitated. The production broke for lunch, and [director] Fleischer, furious, went off to find a local veterinarian to find out how the squirrel could be sedated. In the afternoon, trainers filled a fountain pen with gin and fed it to the squirrel drop by drop. Finally… they got “a few seconds of film showing the squirrel… nodding and swaying” before it passed out cold.

This was compounded by the fact that Rex Harrison was apparently an asshole throughout the shoot and was accompanied by his drunken basket case of a wife who would act out in restaurants.

If you have any interest in film, you’ll love the book.

Mark Harris, incidentally, is playwright Tony Kushner’s husband. (They had a commitment ceremony a few years ago.)

How did we wind up with George W. Bush in the White House?

That’s not just a rhetorical question. I’ve occasionally asked it over the last 7+ years, because I genuinely wonder how we managed to get ourselves such an awful president. Was it just dumb rotten luck, or was it due to inherent problems in the system? And by “the system” I mean everything that surrounds us – the political system, the media, the American people.

I guess it’s a little bit of everything. For us to get into the horrible situation we’re in, where the next president is going to have a devil of a time trying to correct what went wrong, required a convergence of factors.

First, George W. Bush got nominated. And he got nominated because (a) he decided to run, and (b) he locked up most of the Republican establishment as early as 1998, the year he was re-elected Texas governor. There are times when an upstart can upset the establishment candidate (example: Democrats, 2008), but most of the time, if you’ve got the establishment behind you, you’ve got the nomination.

Second, he had a vulnerable opponent. Al Gore ran at the tail end of almost eight years of prosperity – and yet he only barely won the popular vote (by a mere half a percentage point), because he wasn’t a very good politician.

Third, we had a horrible press corps that had no idea what’s important in electing a president. That could be because…

…Fourth, we were in a period of apparent peace and prosperity, where many people thought it didn’t matter who got elected. (And yet we’re now in a time of fear and recession, and the press still doesn’t do a good job.)

Fifth, just plain horrible luck. Theresa LePore and her butterfly ballot cost Gore more votes than hanging chads ever did. And that led to the Florida debacle. People might have expected some states to have close votes, but who could have predicted the freakish closeness of the Florida vote? And who could have predicted that the national electoral vote would be so close that neither candidate could get 270 electoral votes without winning that freakishly close state? After all, it’s not just that Florida was freakishly close but that Florida mattered. The country went down the rabbit hole that night.

All of this helps explain how W got the presidency. But it doesn’t explain why W managed to be so awful.

Historians are always looking for the causes of events. Sometimes the causes are inherent in the system, but sometimes events are just random. Bush’s ascension to the presidency required a little of both.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand how we got here. It’s almost literary, really. If only it weren’t fiction.

Stephen Colbert was apparently on the Today show this morning. You can watch the video.