From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear this show at KCRW.com.

Start the show with a quiz. What year featured an African-American actor starring in three of the top grossing films of that year? It's not a trick question. That year was 1967. My guest, Mark Harris, has written an amazing book about the films of that year. The book is called Pictures at a Revolution. It's an astonishing book about five films that help to shape, well, film as we know it.

First of all, Mark, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me, Elvis. And we should say

that that actor was Sidney Pochay, and two of those films that he was in were nominated for

Best Picture in that year. Those films were Mark. In the heat of the night, and guess who's coming to dinner and he was almost in a third best picture nominee that year, Dr.

Doolittle.

He was actually cast in it and then cut from it before it was ever shot.

But besides those two movies, he also starred in Sir with Love, which was a huge hit in

1967, and he ended that year as the number one box office star in the country.

And you make an amazing kind of social point, which people tend to not do in these books.

You talk about how the world outside of film affected things. You talked about how television

really sort of helped Pache and the repetition of his films on TV helped to make him a bigger star.

And so there was a climate for him at that time. And even in his own books, Pauci doesn't really

sort of get at this at all.

I think that's true. And I think it came as a surprise to the people in the movie industry.

You know, their relationship to the television networks was pretty hostile at that point.

You know, they knew that they could make money because networks were buying up, you know,

the whole backlist of movies and showing them on the air.

But they thought that TV would ruin movies.

They thought it did ruin movies by cutting them up and interrupting them with commercials.

And they thought that the movie-going audience, the theatrical audience, was going to be demolished by how much there was available on television.

...