September 1, 2000 | But seriously, folks: Let’s talk about the ‘70s. Forget the sartorial splendor of polyester, the seductive comfort of shag carpeting, the Dionysian exuberance of disco. Rather, concentrate on the decade’s most important artifacts, the movies of the era. In the informed opinion of many critics, academics, fanatical cineastes and film-industry observers, the ‘70s were the last great decade for motion pictures.
During much of the decade, Peter Bart -- editor-in-chief of Variety, the weekly showbiz bible – was a production executive at Paramount Pictures, where he was partially responsible for such instant classics as Chinatown and The Godfather. Not surprisingly, he remembers the time as an age of miracles and wonder. “Every time you saw a movie, or bought an album, you felt that film or music had been redefined,” Bart says. “There seemed to be so much in the popular arts that was groundbreaking. And there were so many people who were groundbreaking, it was contagious.”
Looking back on this unique period of artistic evolution and revolution, Susan Sontag waxed nostalgic in a 1996 New York Times Magazine essay: “It was at this specific moment in the 100-year history of cinema that going to the movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people. You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself.”
Unfortunately, the magic couldn’t last. Peter Biskind speaks for many when he sounds a tragic note while singing the praises of ‘70s cinema in his Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), one of the more fascinating and informative books about the mood and the movies of the era. In Biskind’s view, the 13-year period between Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Heaven’s Gate (1980) “marked the last time it was really exciting to make movies in Hollywood, the last time people could be consistently proud of the pictures they made, the last time the community as a whole encouraged good work, the last time there was an audience to sustain it.”
The roots of this particular American Revolution can be traced back to the 1960s, the decade when movies came into their own as a respected art form, and moviegoers started to read, write and talk about cinema with a seriously passionate fervor. Paperback anthologies of film criticism by Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann and members of the National Society of Film Critics proliferated on bookstore shelves. Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice and Pauline Kael of The New Yorker feuded stridently over the merits of the so-called “auteur” theory – every significant film is a deeply personal expression of an individual director’s style and vision – and disinterested parties actually chose sides in the dispute. Masterworks by such giants as Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa played to packed houses in urban art houses, college campuses and other venues where audiences were ready and willing to read English subtitles.
In many large and mid-size television markets, local stations – especially those not affiliated with ABC, CBS or NBC, the Big Three broadcast networks of the era – inadvertently aided the cause of film literacy. Unable to compete with deep-pocketed competitors for pricey Hollywood pictures, some programmers filled gaps in their schedules by buying syndicated packages of independent productions, English-dubbed imports and other types of alternative cinema that have long since been relegated to niche cable networks.
During the mid 1960s, a struggling UHF station in New Orleans pinched pennies by airing the likes of David and Lisa (Frank Perry’s proto-indie 1962 drama about troubled teens in a Middle American mental hospital), Cleo from 5 to 7 (a ’62 French New Wave drama by auteur Agnes Varda), The Lavender Hill Mob (one of several splendidly quirky ’50s British comedies showcasing the pre-Obi-Wan Kenobi Alec Guinness) and Truffaut’s stylistically audacious Shoot the Piano Player, often repeating the same title three or four times in a single week. Meanwhile, off in Minneapolis, a television host and furniture pitchman named Mel Jass stoked the imagination of two young brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen, who grew up to make such masterworks as Fargo, Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing.
“Mel was sort of an innovator in programming,” recalls Joel Coen, savoring his memories of the nightly telecasts. “He’d show, like, Hercules with Steve Reeves one night. But then the next night, he’d show Fellini’s 8 ½. And he’d come on during the commercial breaks for 8 ½ and advertise Muntz TVs, and say, `By the way, what do you think of the movie? It’s one of those wild, impressionistic things, isn’t it?’ He loved everything, Mel did.”
Chalk it up as another sign of the times: Never before – and never again – have European pictures been so widely embraced by U.S. mainstream moviegoers, and respectfully studied by Hollywood moviemakers. Robert Benton recalls that he and partner David Newman wrote Bonnie and Clyde (1967) very much “in the style of a French New Wave movie,” and actually offered the script to Truffaut (who made valuable suggestions) and Jean-Luc Godard before approaching Philadelphia-born director Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker, The Left-Handed Gun).
Throughout the 1960s, American filmmakers – envious of the seemingly unfettered artistic freedom afforded their European counterparts – repeatedly pressed against the constraints of the Production Code dictums that regulated Hollywood product. Sidney Lumet refused to snip a brief shot of a bare-breasted prostitute from The Pawnbroker (1965), so his searing drama had to be released by an indie distributor. It required extended wrangling between censors and studios for Alfie (1966) and The Graduate (1967) to get grudging approval – and “Suggested for Mature Audience” warning labels -- from Hollywood’s official arbiters.
Universal plotted a crafty end-run around Code censors by establishing a subsidiary to release relatively racy imports such as Charlie Bubbles (1968) and I’ll Never Forget What’s ’isname, (1967), two British comedy-dramas that contained brief, discreetly suggestive scenes implying the performance of oral sex. MGM resorted to a similar subterfuge to get Blow-Up (1966) – complete with fleeting glimpses of full-frontal nudity – into big-city movie palaces.
By 1968, the old guard finally acknowledged the irreversible shifts in artistic ambitions and popular tastes. The Motion Picture Association of America replaced its PCA (Production Code Administration) with the new and improved CARA (Code and Rating Administration), which introduced the alphabet soup of G, M (later GP, then PG and PG-13), R and X (later NC-17) movie ratings. Taking their cue from the new rules of the game, showbiz journalists began to pepper celebrities with various forms of the same loaded question: “Would you ever appear in an X-rated movie?” To his credit, Charlton Heston evidenced grace under the pressure when, during the location filming of Number One (1969), he was pestered by an inquiring reporter. “Before I would agree to make any movie with any rating,” he gravely intoned, “I would have to see the script.”
But even as a new day dawned for filmmakers who wished to push the envelope, a dark midnight of despair engulfed studio executives who had to count the beans. Movies began losing audiences to television in the late 1940s; by 1971, weekly theater admissions had plummeted from a 1946 level of 78.2 million to a paltry 15.8 million. As sure-fire formulas started to fizzle and aging superstars began to lose their luster, a bad situation greatly worsened in the wake of The Sound of Music (1965), a world-wide box-office smash that, of course, every studio rushed to imitate. Expensive and elephantine musical extravaganzas such Doctor Dolittle (1967), Star! (1968) and Paint Your Wagon (1969) were D.O.A. at the box-office. As the tumultuous ‘60s drew to a close, some studios teetered on the brink of financial collapse. A few changed owners, or merged with new partners.
Amid the chaos, a few bold young filmmakers spied a window of opportunity. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas fondly recall their misadventures while skirting under the radar to make The Rain People (1969) for the newly conjoined Warner Bros. and Seven Arts. At the time, Coppola was fresh from flopping with his own overblown Hollywood musical, Finian’s Rainbow, and he knew he needed to try something much smaller and more personal as a follow-up. He also knew that, under normal circumstances, he would never get a green light for Rain People, a free-form road movie about a runaway housewife (Shirley Knight) who can no longer endure the constraints of middle-class comfort. Fortunately, circumstances were anything but normal.
“That was a very peculiar time,” Coppola says. “We capitalized on the fact that one company had bought the other company, and no one knew who was in charge for six months. So we made ourselves in charge.
“Our technique in those days – and I remember this very vividly – was that we just announced to them that we were making (The Rain People). And then we went off and started making it, with our own money. And they said, `Well, what are you making? Oh. All right, we’ll do it.’ So they came in two weeks later.”
Which was a good thing, Coppola admitted, “because we didn’t have the money to get past two weeks.”
“That was Francis’ theory of making movies,” said Lucas, who met Coppola while working as a production assistant on Finian’s Rainbow. “You start the movie, and then figure out how to pay for it later.”
“But, you know, at the time, we were also in a period when avant-garde films were vaguely acceptable. And we took advantage of it. I mean, when I did THX-1138, I knew, and I said, `I’ll never get another chance to do this again. And I’m gonna do it for all it’s worth.’”
Lucas certainly wasn’t alone in seizing the moment. The smash success of The Graduate had already signaled the presence of an enormous “youth market” with an insatiable appetite for new stars, new styles and, if not new stories, then familiar tales spun in fresh new ways. But it was Easy Rider (1969) that really shook up the Hollywood establishment, demonstrating how a no-budget indie by a first-time director with two less-than-stellar leads could earn rave reviews, sum up the zeitgeist, turn antiheroes into instant cultural icons – and make buckets and buckets of money.
Throughout the Hollywood halls of power, the collective response to the Easy Rider phenomenon was a profoundly confused “Huh?!?” “It was frightening,” production executive Ned Tanen told Peter Biskind. “These were aging gentlemen who did not remotely understand where their audience had gone. They looked at a movie like Easy Rider, and they said, 'What in the hell is this?’”
But Peter Bart remembers a slightly different sort of corporate response: “What’s interesting is that, for whatever reason, the managements that were around then embraced the new ideas. They weren’t afraid of them. The people who were at the studios at that time were people like John Calley at Warners, Peter Guber over at Columbia – he was just a kid then – and Bob Evans and myself at Paramount, David Picker over at United Artists. These people were part of the culture. And that’s one reason why it all worked for the new filmmakers.
“Universal was the sole exception to the rule. Witness the fact that, when they got American Graffiti, at first, they wouldn’t even release it as a TV movie. Francis Coppola and I tried to buy it and bring it over to Paramount. At the last minute, they got scared and released it themselves. But I think they were essentially the only studio in town that was essentially a stick in the mud. Which is why they just faded away in the film business for a while.”
Just about everywhere else in Hollywood, things began to change – drastically, dramatically, even chaotically – as recent film school grads (the so-called “Movie Brats”) and veteran filmmakers alike were allowed unprecedented autonomy and freedom of expression. In a mad scramble to attract a younger, hipper and presumably more adventurous moviegoing audience, major studios OK’d, albeit reluctantly, mainstream movies that incorporated mature themes, experimental styles and formerly taboo subject matter. Even basic notions about star power and screen presence underwent severe reevaluation, as the public embraced such unlikely leading men as Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould, Al Pacino and the signature actor of the era, Jack Nicholson.
And the hits just kept on coming. Months after honoring a World War II legend with the rousingly old-fashioned Patton – which, ironically, was co-written by Francis Ford Coppola --Twentieth Century Fox released Robert Altman’s savagely funny anti-war comedy M*A*S*H (1970). Columbia Pictures, which had struck gold with Easy Rider, subsequently released Bob Rafelson’s brooding Five Easy Pieces (1970), Peter Bogdanovich’s bleakly affecting The Last Picture Show (1971) and Floyd Mutrux’s tragically romantic Aloha, Bobby and Rose (1975). (The latter, a drama of ill-starred working-class lovers with a killer soundtrack by Elton John and other luminaries, rivaled Martin Scorsese’s groundbreaking 1973 Mean Streets in its innovative use of pop music to propel and enhance narrative momentum.) Paramount expressed gratitude for The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1972) by financing a far more intimate and idiosyncratic project for writer-director Francis Coppola, The Conversation (1974), a box-office under-achiever that nevertheless is widely revered as one of the director’s best and most influential works.
“The thing to remember,” Bart says, “is that, during the period, the studios were relatively small. Sort of fragile, under-capitalized companies that were not owned by multinationals. If you liked a project, and that was generally because the filmmaker had a passion for making it, you could get it made right away. You didn’t need to go through bureaucracy. You didn’t need to go through marketing committees or get advice from the ad department and the distribution department and all that.”
To be sure, many of the same studios that lost money on big-budget musical behemoths in the 1960s also lost money on such aggressively trendy ‘70s obscurities as R.P.M., Two People, The Christian Licorice Store, The All-American Boy, The Pursuit of Happiness, The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder and The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker. And the occasional commercial breakthroughs of cutting-edge movies during this period should be placed in proper context: According to the Internet Movie Data Base, the top-grossing movies of 1970 were Love Story and Airport. Four years later, Blazing Saddles and The Towering Inferno claimed the Nos. 1 and 2 spots. With the possible exception of Mel Brooks’ rambunctiously raunchy Saddles, none of these films could be described as conspicuously innovative.
And yet, for all that, there is more indisputable fact than rose-colored nostalgia to support those who would designate the ‘70s as the last great decade for American movies. One can sense a spirit of adventure, a willingness to take chances and upend expectations, even in the most frankly commercial and mainstream-directed movies of the period. Popular culture always reflects prevailing moods, but popular movies of the ‘70s seemed particularly attuned to what audiences were thinking, discussing – and fearing. You could chart a parabola of paranoia with movies made during those Watergate-washed years when the full scope of “White House horrors” spilled into headlines and nightly newscasts, when movies as diverse as Chinatown, Serpico, The Parallax View, The Conversation and even Don’t Look Now appeared to reinforce our deepest fear: There is absolutely nothing we can do about them. Even the disaster movies of the age, ranging from The Poseidon Adventure to Airport – 1975, can be interpreted as snapshots of the zeitgeist, each expressing a deep desire for someone, anyone, to lead us from the darkness of a worst-case scenario.
Film brats prospered throughout the ‘70s: For the first time in Hollywood history, significant numbers of movies were made by people who learned their craft through academic study of other movies. But TV graduates and other grizzled veterans also enjoyed a heyday, and many were inspired to do some of their best work during the decade. Sidney Lumet (Network, Dog Day Afternoon), Sam Peckinpah (Straw Dogs, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), Robert Altman (Nashville, Thieves Like Us), Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, Escape from Alcatraz), John Huston (Fat City, The Man Who Would Be King) and other relative graybeards made impressive additions to their resumes even as the younger bucks grabbed most of the fawning press coverage.
And here’s the really amazing part: Throughout this cinematic renaissance, almost every movie worth remembering came from a major studio. Columbia distributed Dennis Hopper’s trend-setting Easy Rider and Martin Scorsese’s shatteringly violent Taxi Driver. United Artists caught heat – and made millions – for releasing Bernard Bertolucci’s boldly erotic Last Tango in Paris. Warners launched, with suitable fanfare, Stanley Kubrick’s ultra-violent sci-fi parable, A Clockwork Orange, and Lindsay Anderson’s audaciously Brechtian musical fable, O Lucky Man! And even stuck-in-the-mud Universal got into the swing of things by distributing – with a flagrantly deceptive ad campaign that made the drama look like a Richard Pryor comedy – Paul Schrader’s Marxist tragedy, Blue Collar.
Not to be outdone in the risk-taking area, Roger Corman – the legendary schlockmeister who gave Coppola, Scorsese and other Film Brats their first big breaks – began to release European art movies through his New World Pictures, an outfit heretofore best known for exploitation fare. The imports counted for only a tiny percentage of New World’s annual output. But because of Corman, Francois Truffaut’s Small Change (1976) got a first-run engagement in Shreveport, La. – not exactly a major market for English-subtitled import – and Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972) played in even more unlikely venues.
“When I finally met Bergman years later,” Corman recounted in his 1990 autobiography, “he mentioned that he thought it was great that we had put his film in drive-ins. `Nobody ever thought about that before,’ he said. `I’ve always wanted my pictures to get the widest possible audience. That’s an audience that never saw my pictures before New World.’”
Corman and his counterparts at major studios may have seen themselves as sophisticates of discerning taste. But they definitely conducted themselves as hard-nosed, budget-conscious businessmen (or, in extremely rare cases, businesswomen). They took chances with challenging material not just because they loved art – they also believed, with some justification, that paying customers of the time would accept, might even desire, something different. Paul Newman recently noted that two singularly uncommercial movies he directed during this period – Rachel, Rachel (1968) and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972) – were released by Hollywood majors. “That would never happen today,” Newman says. “I’d have to go to a Miramax, or a Fine Line. But back then, the studios were more willing to take risks.”
So were audiences. And filmmakers.
Ask any ten critics or academics to note precisely why and when the Hollywood Renaissance started to fizzle, and you’ll likely get ten different answers. Some will tell you that the revolution ended almost before it began, when Dennis Hopper followed up Easy Rider with the drug-addled, self-indulgent gibberish of his aptly titled The Last Movie (1971). Pauline Kael eloquently argued in a much-quoted 1978 essay that audiences wimped out and became “afraid” of American movies. But others claim the young mavericks did themselves in simply by spending more money than they should have on movies that people didn’t want to see. Think Martin Scorsese and New York, New York. Or Francis Coppola and One from the Heart. Or William Friedkin and Sorcerer. Or, worst of all, Michael Cimino and Heaven’s Gate.
In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind renders the New Hollywood of the 1970s as a roiling cauldron of internecine betrayals and rampant egomania, where talented people blunted their creative edges with sexual, material and pharmaceutical excess. (“I think,” Peter Bart cracked, “Biskind may have talked to too many ex-wives and ex-girlfriends.”) Even if you dismiss half the book as apocalyptic hyperbole or recycled dirty laundry, you’re still left with the impression that drugs, booze, womanizing, inner demons and plain old-fashioned hubris destroyed many of the best and brightest.
It didn’t help that quite a few of the new-breed filmmakers burned their bridges early on by behaving arrogantly toward members of the Hollywood Old Guard. (At a 1970 dinner party, a drunken Dennis Hopper reportedly accosted veteran filmmaker George Cukor, growling: “We’re going to bury you. We’re gonna take over. You’re finished.”) It helped even less that the moviegoing public soured on filmmakers who made egregious spectacles of themselves. One could argue that Peter Bogdanovich didn’t fall from grace because he made Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love. Rather, he fell into disfavor because of his highly publicized romance with the star of those box-office flops, Cybill Shepherd.
Because he and Shepherd “were very successful,” Bogdanovich griped in a 1982 interview, “and because she’s very attractive, they thought we were just a couple of spoiled Hollywood brats, running around and spending money. But it wasn’t true. We were working very hard.”
On the other hand, Bogdanovich admitted, “We weren’t very diplomatic. We didn’t know how to deal with the situation, and we sort of blundered through it. I think the thing Cybill and I really did badly was handle the press. And we didn’t handle ourselves that well.”
Something like the truth can be gleaned from all of these theories, excuses and second-guesses. But the picture isn’t complete until you factor in a few intangibles. Popular culture of the 1970s was shaped by a unique confluence of ambitions and attitudes, experiences and influences. But times change, and so do popular tastes. By the end of the ‘70s, many moviegoers – maybe most of them -- probably were “afraid” of the increasingly explicit violence, language and sexual activity they encountered at the multiplex. Just as important, many were tired of gritty reality and bitter disillusionment. They were ready to see Rocky take his million-to-one shot. They were eager to celebrate a romanticized 1950s with John Travolta and Olivia-Newton John. And they were downright excited to join Luke Skywalker on his Forceful quest in a galaxy far, far away.
By the end of the ‘70s, most of the Hollywood majors had been gobbled up by multinational corporations. Show business became big business, and the most successful studio executives were those who followed formulas, respected star power, and green-lit movies that could easily be summed up in 60-second TV spots. It would be unfair and inaccurate to claim that Hollywood executives never take chances anymore. (Consider such high-risk major studio releases as 1999’s Three Kings, Magnolia and, for better or worse, Fight Club.) But those risks are taken far less frequently now than thirty years ago, largely because so much more is at stake with each gamble.
Indie distributors continue to offer a steady stream of alternative film fare. And promising young filmmakers launch careers with debut features every year at the Sundance, Cannes and Toronto film festivals. With the advent of digital video, more would-be auteurs will be able to express themselves in increasingly greater numbers. But the questions remain: What percentage of those video features will be at all watchable, much less admirable? How many of those young filmmakers will be able to fulfill their promise by sustaining their careers?
Most important, can indie distributors ever recapture the magic of the 1970s, and generate the same degree of excitement and enthusiastic support for alternative cinema? In an age when the audience for foreign-language imports is steadily dwindling, and when even a highly praised and Oscar-winning indie drama like Boys Don’t Cry has minimal box-office impact, it’s easy to be pessimistic. And, yes, tempting to long for the good old days.
Keep in mind, however, that not every Film Brat yearns for yesteryear. Peter Bogdanovich may be reduced to making TV-movies, Dennis Hopper could be wasting away in direct-to-video features, Michael Cimino might be chronically unemployable -- and Francis Coppola has been too busy suing people to spend much time in the director’s chair. But George Lucas certainly has survived and thrived. And he makes no apologies for becoming, to a degree unmatched by any other ‘70s filmmaker, more of an audience-pleasing entertainer than an envelope-pushing innovator.
“Coming out of film school,” Lucas says, “I looked at the world and said, `Well, this isn’t the way they told me it was going to be. This is terrible. We aren’t what we thought we were.’ And that, to a young person, is a revelation. It’s like, hey, it isn’t a wonderful place – it’s a horrible place. And so you spend a lot of your time saying, `I’m going to spring this on the rest of the world.’
“But, really, anybody over 30 is well aware of what kind of a world this is. And these kinds of revelations – the fact that the world is not what we think it is – I’ve discovered, in my making movies, that they don’t really help the society very much, ultimately. What helps is to sort of promote the human spirit, to say, `Let’s think of ourselves as those good people that we were brought up in the fairy-tale of adolescence, of childhood, to believe we were. And let’s promote those ideas, and believe in that.
“Because it’s that kind of faith that makes that happen in reality. If we feel we’re a terrible society, then that will overcome all of us. And it will just be anarchy and death and horror.”
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