Hillary Hilarity (Sort of)

I went back and reviewed my earlier posts about Hillary Clinton, now that her campaign has been pretty widely exposed -- at least by lefty bloggers (and Andrew Sullivan) -- as both inept and underhanded. In the earliest ones, I was mostly impressed by her experience (even if some of it was vicarious). But as the campaign has dragged on, it's become evident to me that either she's incapable of leading -- of enforcing dignity and discipline upon her staff -- or that she's just plain cynical, as the video above suggests.

The Geraldine Ferraro flap, coming as it does just a day or so after the resignation of Samantha Power from the Obama campaign, only underscores the unpleasantness that has overtaken Hillary Clinton. Perhaps it has nothing to do with her ability to govern, but she has allowed a pointlessly divisive comment to stand, and it makes me even gladder that I didn't vote for her in the California primary. Keith Olbermann had some especially cogent words on the Ferraro remarks:

The Magnolia State

It's been odd hearing the word "Mississippi" uttered on TV today, especially by news anchors who've probably never been there. But it's been odder seeing Democratic candidates for president actually campaigning there, in a state that has gone Republican in the worst way.

I haven't written much about Mississippi, where I was born and raised, but this seems as good a time as any to run a couple of old Mercury News reviews that pretty much sum up my feelings about where I'm from.

I graduated from the University of Mississippi in May 1962, before the violence that accompanied the admittance of James Meredith to the university. So I was drawn to William Doyle's splendid account of that event:

AN AMERICAN INSURRECTION:
The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962
By William Doyle
Anchor, 416 pp., $16 paperback

I think of 1962 as the year the fictions died, and not just because William Faulkner died on July 6, 1962.

It was a tense summer: A black man, James Meredith, had applied for admission to the University of Mississippi, and the state tried every legal maneuver -- and some clearly illegal ones -- to prevent it. In May, I had graduated from the university, which is known as ''Ole Miss'' and is in Oxford, where I grew up. At the end of September, when I left for a year in Germany on a Fulbright grant, Meredith was about to enroll, and demons were about to be unleashed in the town.

The fictions that died that fall were white supremacy and state sovereignty. But it took a bloody riot and armed military intervention to kill them.

William Doyle's ''An American Insurrection'' is a compelling account of how the last battle of the Civil War came to be fought in my hometown. For what took place on the Ole Miss campus and in the town of Oxford in the first days of October 1962 was, as Doyle puts it, ''the biggest domestic military crisis of the 20th century.'' To end the disorder, the Kennedy administration deployed ''more soldiers than the United States had in Korea, and the peak troop strength of nearly fifteen thousand in the Oxford vicinity was three times more American troops than were stationed in West Berlin.''

Any reader of Faulkner knows how steeped Mississippi was in its own past, how white folks were caught up in tales of great-granddaddy marching off to Shiloh or Chickamauga. And that much of the state was mired in the kind of poverty that breeds the resentment, frustration, hatred and folly that Faulkner depicted. But I doubt that anyone realized how deadly the state could be until the riot happened.

Intelligent leadership, however, might have prevented it -- or even just leadership based on political cunning. The year after the Ole Miss riot, George Wallace would do what Doyle calls a ''carefully choreographed charade'' at the University of Alabama, blocking the ''schoolhouse door'' until forced to submit -- saving face and launching a national political career in the process.

But the Ole Miss disaster was the product of political indecision -- the ''dithering,'' as Doyle calls it, of John and Robert Kennedy and the utter ineptness of Mississippi's governor, Ross Barnett. To be fair to the Kennedys, they had no idea that Barnett was as dumb as a stump.

Barnett reminded my father of ''an old mud turtle,'' which with his thick neck and beaky nose Barnett surely resembled. But turtles have the sense to stay in their shells when threatened by things beyond their control. Barnett didn't.

The conversations between Barnett and the Kennedys that Doyle recounts -- available on the presidential tapes that were the subject of Doyle's earlier book, ''Inside the Oval Office'' -- show that Barnett wanted to do the kind of face-saving charade at which Wallace would be so successful a year later: a capitulation in the face of federal power, which would both allow Meredith to enter the university and make Barnett look like a martyr in the eyes of the segregationists. But Barnett couldn't make up his mind how far things should go until they had gone too far.

And they went too far on Saturday, Sept. 29, when Barnett made an appearance at the halftime of an Ole Miss football game. The crowd was already inflamed by the appearance of the world's largest Confederate flag, which was unfurled over the heads of the Ole Miss marching band. When Barnett ''strutted onto the field,'' Doyle writes, he was ''saturated with one of the most powerful crowd raptures ever given to an American politician.'' A witness remembers it as ''the way Nuremberg must have been!'' An unstoppable, tragic confrontation was under way.

My parents lived on the edge of town, and from the woods and fields behind the house, my mother recalled, strange men appeared throughout the following day, crossing our yard on their way to the campus. They were also arriving by car from as far away as California.

Imagine hundreds of Timothy McVeighs -- racist, anti-government fanatics -- blending with hormone-driven college kids, many of whom may have thought of the thing as just a big fraternity prank. Until it got out of hand, that is: Two people were killed in the night of Sept. 30 and morning of Oct. 1, but Doyle's vivid, appalling account of the riot makes it hard to believe there weren't more.

Amid the madness there was also heroism. Doyle singles out for praise the U.S. marshals and, more surprisingly, the Mississippi National Guard, which was called out to support the marshals until Kennedy could decide whether to commit troops to the scene. These weekend soldiers did their duty despite being assaulted and vilified by their fellow Mississippians.

But the most heroic figure was James Meredith. Doyle's portrait of this strange, almost quixotically courageous man is one of the best things in the book. Meredith maintained a Zen-like composure through it all -- he is said to have slept through the riots taking place only a few hundred yards from the dormitory where he was guarded by a handful of marshals.

He was a civil rights movement of his own, never identifying himself with other leaders or organizations, and his later career was, to say the least, enigmatic. He was almost killed by a sniper in 1966 during a one-man march for voting rights in Mississippi, but in the years that followed he denounced integration as a ''sham;'' worked on the staff of Sen. Jesse Helms; opposed affirmative action, welfare and busing; and even announced his support for Klansman David Duke's run for governor of Louisiana. But as Mississippi civil rights leader Aaron Henry put it, ''If any of us has earned the right to be eccentric, Jim has.''

Doyle's book has its flaws: He likes to hammer home his points, telling us again and again that the killers of the two men who died in the riot were never caught. And the chaotic events make for chaotic narrative -- Doyle struggles to keep track of what was happening when, but doesn't always succeed. Still, it's as precise and evocative an account of the riot as you're likely to get: It wasn't filmed -- in 1962 TV news was not the force it would become later, and the few photojournalists who showed up had their cameras smashed quickly.

And the book is valuable in reminding us of an event that today seems to be largely forgotten. Even in 1962 it was overshadowed by the Cuban missile crisis a few weeks later. But it was one of the great turning points of the civil rights movement: If Mississippi could be desegregated, any place could.

The troops lingered in Oxford until the next summer. This worked a small hardship on my mother, who set out one day to do her shopping with a carton of Coke bottles in her car. (Those were the days of refillables.) But she had to stop at a checkpoint, where the bottles were confiscated as potential material for Molotov cocktails.

When I came back to the United States in August 1963, the troops were gone and the riot was already being forgotten. As I was going through customs in New York, the agent looked at my passport and said, ''You're from Mississippi?''

Uh-oh, I thought, self-consciously determined not to be identified with my home state's bigotry and bloodshed.

The agent continued, ''Then maybe you can answer this: Where does the Southern cross the Yellow Dog?''

He was a blues lover for whom Mississippi meant a railway crossing near Moorhead, celebrated by W.C. Handy.

History is, after all, a matter of point of view.

Times change. A black man, with the help of a largely black electorate, has just won most of the state's delegates to the Democratic National Convention. But how much have they really changed? Paul Hendrickson made an effort to measure that change with his fine book "Sons of Mississippi.

SONS OF MISSISSIPPI: A Story of Race and Its Legacy
By Paul Hendrickson
Knopf, 320 pp., $26

In February 1995, Washington Post reporter Paul Hendrickson was browsing in a bookstore in Berkeley, where he came across a book of photographs by Charles Moore from the civil rights era.

In one photo, a group of white men has focused its attention on a man gripping a wooden stick as if it were a baseball bat. He has a cigarette clenched in his teeth as he demonstrates, with evident amusement, how he intends to use this stick. Meanwhile, the man to his left, whose cigarette is dangling from his upper lip, tears a piece of white cloth into strips -- a man at the extreme right of the photo has tied one of the strips around his left arm.

Another man, with a Stetson pushed back on his head, is laughing -- perhaps at what the stick man is doing. At the left of the photo, a man with the soggy stub of a cigar in his mouth is similarly amused. In the background, a serious-looking man is apparently in conversation with a man obscured by the others.

Context is everything. When we know that these men are Mississippi sheriffs, gathered on the campus of the University of Mississippi in September 1962 just before the attempt of a black man, James Meredith, to enroll at the university, then we think we know the context. Recognition floods in: racist lawmen of a certain age and time, kinsmen of the bully cops of Birmingham and Montgomery and Selma.

I know these men, or the men like them who were my neighbors, my uncles, my friends' fathers and our Sunday school teachers and scoutmasters. When I was growing up in Mississippi, they would say such appalling things about black people that even to remember 40 or 50 years later causes my gorge to rise. Yet I also know that when they weren't spewing racist filth, they could be men one could respect and even love. It was as if, in the lives of these men, a tributary of human feeling had been dammed, grown stagnant and polluted, and its foulness had seeped out and corrupted a mainstream that should have run clear.

Hendrickson has noted this paradox, too: ''In the South, as has been observed, people who aren't victims of injustice often are victims of irony.'' Is it any wonder that so many Mississippians have written so much good fiction?

If we look at any image long enough, it begins to ''tease us out of thought,'' as Keats put it when he tried to wrest the secrets from the figures on his Grecian urn. And something kept Hendrickson looking at this image: ''I wanted to know: How did these seven white Southerners get to be this way, and how did it all end, or how is it still going on, and was there no eventual shame here, and what happened to their progeny, especially their progeny, and was it all just ineluctable?''

It seems that no one spends much time in Mississippi without trying to write like Faulkner, resorting to words like ''progeny'' and ''ineluctable.'' And Hendrickson spent a lot of time in Mississippi trying to answer the questions raised by this picture. Context is everything, but contexts have contexts, ad infinitum. Especially when you're dealing with something so integral to the American experience -- so, yes, ineluctable -- as racial conflict.

For seven years, Hendrickson searched through the contexts of this image. Most of the men in the picture were dead, but their families, as well as the two surviving men, sat down to talk with him in that generous but wary way that Southerners have. The survivors were defensive but not apologetic, Hendrickson tells us: ''Anything in the direction of atonement or expiation -- even if never named that or understood as such -- has been left to sons, or to sons of sons, or to sons of sons of sons.''

And so the most poignant profiles in his book are of the grandsons of two of the men. John Cothran's grandfather is the man with the armband in the photo, then the sheriff in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood. The grandson is a man with anger-management problems that wrecked three marriages before he was 30, a high school dropout who works as a supervisor at a Home Depot, a job that gives him more stress than gratification.

Ty Ferrell's grandfather is the man with the stick, Billy Ferrell, the sheriff in Natchez -- a job that Ty's father, Tommy, now holds. Ty has followed in the family profession, but not in Mississippi -- he's a Border Patrol agent, working out of El Paso, and is so deeply conflicted about what he's doing that it sometimes brings him close to tears in his conversations with Hendrickson. Ty exhibits ''what seemed like existential torment, as if he were meant to be a roiling repository for so many unnamed, unclaimed Ferrell family shames.''

Hendrickson understands the pain of John Cothran and Ty Ferrell, which makes the profiles of the grandsons more affecting than those of the men who appear in the photo. For Hendrickson never succeeds in answering the first of his questions: How did they get to be this way? ''It's so puzzling that a land of such charm and physical beauty, a people of such natural grace and disposition to kindness, could have so appalling a history,'' Hendrickson muses. How did a bigotry so pathological take hold of an entire region?

The best Hendrickson can do is to cite ''The Mind of the South,'' W.J. Cash's 1941 classic, in which Cash, a Southern journalist, wrote of a ''crisis of white masculinity'': ''The ultimate and as-yet-unrealized expression of the overthrow of slavery in the white male mind would be the destruction of the white sexual order.'' So Hendrickson asks about the men in the picture, ''Is it too much to suggest that there may be a faint undertone of sexualized tension in their faces?''

What I see in this picture I have seen in locker rooms and committee meetings and other all-male gatherings, where testosterone speaks to testosterone and the old primate emerges. But what I also see are the products of a closed system, of a place where opinions went unchallenged by other ways of thinking, to the point that prevailing attitudes could be swaddled in a communal bigotry. (There are many other places like this in the world, which makes understanding the Mississippi experience all the more crucial.)

By far the most potent figure in Hendrickson's book is a man who doesn'tappear in the photograph: James Meredith, who shattered the monolithic system of racial repression -- if it could happen in Mississippi, it could happen anywhere.

But Meredith stepped out to his own drummer -- after his graduation from Ole Miss, he stubbornly refused to align with any civil rights organization, starting his own solitary crusade for voting rights, including a one-man march through Mississippi during which he was almost assassinated. Later, he would shock and appall even those who had regarded him as a hero: He took a job as an aide to Sen. Jesse Helms and endorsed ex-Klansman David Duke's candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination -- Meredith even volunteered to be Duke's running mate. Hendrickson's interviews with Meredith only reinforce his reputation for eccentricity.

As the 40th anniversary of Meredith's entrance to Ole Miss approached, his son, Joe, quietly enrolled in a Ph.D. program in business at the university. Joe, who had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, seems puzzled by his father, too. He tells Hendrickson, ''My father has an overwhelming need to be famous and so will do whatever he thinks will provide that and get him attention -- Jesse Helms, David Duke, you name it, even if it's only for a day.''

''Sons of Mississippi'' feels like a substantial, maybe even essential, contribution to our understanding not only of Southern racism, but also of the ways that the past can mark and mar. The book is sometimes over-reported -- not every detail of Joe Cothran's messy, mundane life is worth telling, for example. And complexities sometimes overwhelm Hendrickson -- his book occasionally seems like several very good magazine articles struggling to get out of the stack of paper in which they're buried.

But Hendrickson is a humane observer who can disarm the reader's impatience. And he's clearly on a mission -- you don't spend seven years researching a book if you're not. As he puts it, ''In Mississippi, nothing ever changes, and everything always changes, and sometimes it seems as if God put Mississippi on earth purely for our moral and confounding contemplation.''

Eliot Mess

Another pol with his pants down. Of course, this time it's a Democrat, and a once-promising one (though I gather that his tenure as governor of New York hasn't much pleased anyone), so we can't feel the Schadenfreude that we enjoyed so much when it happened to Larry Craig or David Vitter or Mark Foley. Still, the hypocrisy and the hubris are the same.

The question lingers: Why do these guys think they can get away with it? Politicians must suffer all the time from cognitive dissonance, from the knowledge that their flawed private selves are so very different from the tough and virtuous public image they have to project. They're like movie stars who know that they're not really as strong and as handsome and as virile -- or as glamorous and beautiful and sexy -- as the characters they play. As Cary Grant said, "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I do."

But movie stars can get away with all kinds of scandalous behavior. Maybe we should let politicians do that, too. As long as they do their jobs -- create and enforce laws -- to our liking, who cares if they cat around? When Bill Clinton was caught getting blown by an intern, I thought he should resign. But he went on to be one of our most popular public figures, and his wife may be our next president.

Lord Acton got it right: Power tends to corrupt. The question is, who's being corrupted? The powerful, or those of us who elect them?

Black Friday

I canceled delivery of the San Jose Mercury News today. It's no longer the newspaper I worked for. It's no longer a paper I need, or particularly even care, to read.

When I left the paper, taking the buyout on 2005, they were trimming fat. (I contributed my ounce of blubber.) When the layoffs started, they cut into the muscle. Today, they hacked into the bone.

I don't have any confirmations about who got laid off today, only rumors, so I won't mention any names. But the ones I've heard include some of the most talented reporters it's been my pleasure to know. And I've heard rumors about reassignments of some of the people who remain -- rumors that make it clear that the management of the newspaper doesn't share my values or interests.

For as long as I remember, I've read a newspaper at breakfast: The Memphis Commercial Appeal, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Mercury News. Tomorrow, it'll be the Chronicle again, not the Merc.

A sad day.

Update: Here's the list.

Layoffs

Lisa Chung, Metro feature writer, ex-columnist

Steve Chae, Library

Katherine Conrad, commercial real estate reporter

Barbara Egbert, copy editor

Barb Feder, medical writer

Dennis Georgatos, 49ers beat writer

Elizabeth Goodspeed, features designer

Joanne HoYoung Lee, photographer

Carolyn Jung, food columnist

Dave Kiefer, sports writer

Thu Ly, photographer

Mike Martinez, travel writer

Erik Olvera, Metro reporter

Connie Skipitares, metro reporter

Barry Witt, Metro reporter

Buyouts

Alvie Lindsay, state bureau chief

Matt Mansfield, deputy managing editor

Pam Moreland , features editor

Rebecca Salner, AME of Business

Steve Wright, head of editorial pages

Voluntary departures

Sue Hutchison, features columnist

Julie Kaufmann, food editor

Levi Sumagaysay, assistant Business editor

The Merc in the Murk

Michael Bazeley, a former Mercury News staffer, has a perceptive comment on the state of the newspaper. Tomorrow is Black Friday, when another round of layoffs take place, and my friends there will be sitting by their phones waiting to hear whether they've been cut. Sad times.

So Many Thoughts, So Little Time

• Tuesday's primary turned out to be the Groundhog Day primary: Obama saw his shadow, which means seven more weeks of campaigning.

• McCain at the White House: Whatever was Bush on yesterday? Or has he gone bipolar? Tap-dancing for the reporters, interrupting McCain, generally acting loony. Or maybe he's just realized that he wants to be gone from the White House as much as we want him gone.

• My one hope for McCain, and it's admittedly a weak one, is that he might rescue the Republican party from its current role as the Whatever It Is (i.e., taxes, regulation, an equitable energy policy, universal health care, a solution to global warming, gay rights, abortion, habeas corpus, an impartial judicial branch) We're Against It And If We Really Don't Like It (i.e., Iraq, Iran) We'll Go To War With It party. But as I say, I don't hold out much hope.

Update: Somebody else thought of that first joke, too.

It Isn't Over Till the Lady in the Yellow Pantsuit Sings

Yeah, I kinda wish Hillary would drop out gracefully, but mainly because I'm getting bored with this endless string of primaries. Certainly not because I think it's going to do any great damage to the Democrats once they finally settle on Obama (which given the numbers looks like a foregone conclusion). As usual, Kevin Drum has a lot of good, sensible things to say about the matter of a drawn-out, contentious struggle for the nomination. I'm certain we'll get nothing so sensible from my namesake about it.

It's a Joke. It's Only a Joke. Right? Isn't It?

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Peace Be With You

On his blog yesterday, Kevin Drum commented on a British study that questions the efficacy of antidepressants, particularly SSRIs such as fluoxetine (Prozac) and paroxetine (Paxil). Apparently the study is a headline maker in the British press, yet it has attracted very little attention over here. Kevin wonders why the American press hasn't picked up on it -- with a veiled implication that the influence of Big Pharma may have something to do with it. The blogpost brought forth a long, long string of comments, many of which are worth reading.

Now, I'm no friend of the pharmaceutical industry. But I have great reason to question the accuracy of this study. It may be that a placebo would have curtailed the anxiety attacks that were making my life hellish (and me even less pleasant to be around), but I'm perfectly happy to credit paroxetine with helping me knit up the raveled sleeve of care. I do hope the American press takes a look at this study and questions its assumptions (the Brits seem to be endorsing it). But asking the American press to do anything these days is like asking a drowning man to smile for the camera.

Oscar Week cont'd: Forty Years Ago

I was maybe more in tune with the day's big hoopla with this review that ran in the Washington Post today:

PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
By Mark Harris
The Penguin Press, 496 pp., $27.95

Oscar plays it safe. You can trust the Academy to pick a “Forrest Gump” over a “Pulp Fiction,” an “Ordinary People” over a “Raging Bull,” or a “Kramer vs. Kramer” over an “Apocalypse Now.”

Or a well-made, socially conscious melodrama like “In the Heat of the Night” over groundbreaking movies like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate.” That’s part of the story that Mark Harris tells in his richly fascinating book, “Pictures at a Revolution,” which focuses on the five nominees for best picture in 1968 – the other two were “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “Doctor Dolittle.”

The conventional way of writing about five movies would be to devote a section of the book to each. But Harris does something more difficult and far more illuminating: He weaves together the stories of how each movie was conceived, crafted, released, critiqued and received. He writes about the five or six years in which the filmmakers, some of them old pros and some of them rank novices, struggled with a studio system in collapse, an audience whose tastes and enthusiasms seemed wildly unpredictable, and a culture being transformed by volatile social and political forces.

A few figures dominate Harris’ narrative – writers Robert Benton, David Newman and Robert Towne; actor-producer Warren Beatty; producers Lawrence Turman, Stanley Kramer and Arthur P. Jacobs; studio heads Jack Warner and Richard Zanuck; directors Mike Nichols, Norman Jewison and Arthur Penn; actors Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Dustin Hoffman, Rod Steiger, Rex Harrison and Sidney Poitier. The book has what Hollywood publicists used to brag about: a cast of thousands.

Poitier figures in the stories of three of the movies – "In the Heat of the Night" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," in which he acted, and "Doctor Dolittle," in which he was cast in a featured role until its chaotic filming led to his being written out of the script. He had become an unexpected star – in 1967, Harris tells us, “Box Office magazine … rated Poitier as the fifth biggest star in Hollywood, ahead of Sean Connery and Steve McQueen. His drawing power was a shock to an industry that had, until recently, treated his employment in movies as something akin to an act of charity.”

But at the same time, a “rift had grown between Poitier and a younger, more militant black cultural intelligentsia” that mocked him as an Uncle Tom. The author of one of these denunciations, Clifford Mason, now admits that he “jumped all over Sidney because I wanted him to be Humphrey Bogart when he was really Cary Grant,” but he persists in his criticism of the “role that Sidney always played – the black person with dignity who worries about the white people’s problems – you don’t play that part over and over unless you’re comfortable with that kind of suffering.”

Racial tensions and the protest against the war in Vietnam played a large role in shaping these movies. Harris, a writer and former editor for Entertainment Weekly, not only demonstrates how the filmmakers responded to social and political change, but he also has a working knowledge of the film industry that allows him to elaborate on how a colossal flop like “Doctor Dolittle” came about (and how it could be nominated for a best picture Oscar over better-received movies such as “In Cold Blood,” “Cool Hand Luke” and “Two for the Road”). Its producers were inspired by the smash success of “My Fair Lady,” “Mary Poppins” and “The Sound of Music.”

“Historically,” Harris comments, “the only event more disruptive to the industry’s ecosystem than an unexpected flop is an unexpected smash, and, caught off guard by the sudden arrival of more revenue than they thought their movies could ever bring in, the major studios resorted to three old habits: imitation, frenzied speculation, and panic.” Imitation was the first impetus behind “Doctor Dolittle” – Alan Jay Lerner, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews were the talents the producers sought for the film, but they wound up with only one of them. The panic came later – a good deal, but not all, of it caused by the irascible and demanding Harrison, whom Harris presents as a man filled with "anger and paranoia." Among other things, Harrison was an anti-Semite, which led to confrontations with his co-star Anthony Newley, whom he disparaged "sometimes to his face, as a 'Jewish comic' or a 'cockney Jew.' "

Harris has created what seems likely to be one of the classics of popular film history, useful to dedicated students of film and cultural historians, and also to trivia buffs. (Did you know that Beatty’s original choices to play Bonnie and Clyde were his sister, Shirley MacLaine, and Bob Dylan?) Harris writes with a wit that’s sly, not show-offy. He can encapsulate the woes of shooting “Doctor Dolittle” in four words: “The rhinoceros got pneumonia.” And he can slip in a bit of insider humor with a reference to Newley’s then-wife, Joan Collins, who “reentered the Hollywood social scene she loved with the vigor of an Olympic athlete” – the syntax leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the prepositional phrase modifies “reentered” or “loved.”

Indeed, almost the only complaint about “Pictures at a Revolution” is that, except for an “Epilogue” that briefly sums up the later careers of the major figures, it ends at the Oscar ceremony. You want Harris to go on, to talk about how the success of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate” also caused the studios to resort to their old habits of “imitation, frenzied speculation, and panic.”

And there were other consequences: “Kramer vs. Kramer” now seems like little more than a well-made domestic drama, while the film that it defeated for the best picture in 1979, Francis Ford Coppola’s audacious mess of a movie, “Apocalypse Now,” is regarded as a classic. “Kramer vs. Kramer” also won Oscars for its writer and director, Robert Benton, one of the writers of “Bonnie and Clyde,” and for Dustin Hoffman, who had become a movie star in “The Graduate.” In eleven years, Benton and Hoffman had gone from being icons of a film revolution to pillars of the establishment. That’s the way things work in Hollywood. If you can’t beat ’em, assimilate ’em.