Harris’s research allows him to raise the ante on just how stupefyingly timid and hidebound the industry had become. The pilot for the sitcom “Bewitched” languished for more than a year because of complaints by ABC’s Southern stations that its adman-loves-witch premise was “a veiled argument for racial intermarriage.” The book is full of these sorts of “Who’d have imagined?” pleasures. Had you known that Doris Day and Ronald Reagan were the early choices to play Mr. and Mrs. Robinson? That “What’s new, pussycat?” was one of Warren Beatty’s signature seduction lines? That Artie Shaw compared reading the script of “Bonnie and Clyde” to “looking in a sewer”?

Harris’s decision to track the projects year by year, alternating among them, allows us to so fully engage the filmmakers’ dogged will in the face of setbacks that we find ourselves rooting hard for even “Doctor Dolittle” to work out. “Bonnie and Clyde” may furnish the zippiest narrative: from its conception as a gangster film about, in Robert Benton’s words, “all the things they didn’t show you in a gangster film,” including the way rollicking good fun could turn instantly lethal; to its composition, with Benton and his screenwriting partner, David Newman, working while Flatt and Scruggs played “at full volume on the phonograph”; to its memorable and successful ad campaign. (“They’re Young. They’re in Love. And They Kill People.”)