The Hollywood Renaissance, 1970sModule 6 · COMM/THEA 479W: American Film History

A Changing Industry

MPAA Rating System

On October 7, 1968, MPAA president Jack Valenti issued a press release announcing a voluntary rating system with four initial categories: G (general audiences), M (mature audiences, parental discretion advised), R (restricted; no one under sixteen admitted unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian), and X (no one under sixteen admitted). G, M, and R films received an MPAA production seal; X films did not. The system replaced more than thirty years of censorship, but it was foremost a business proposition: rather than regulate content, it differentiated films so studios could advertise more effectively and target audiences more precisely, with an emphasis on parental guidance and studio compliance. (Lewis, pg. 293; Lecture)

Popularity of Pornography

Pornographic films were quite popular in the 1970s. Between June 1972 and June 1973, three hard-core features, Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, and The Devil in Miss Jones, outearned all but a handful of the major studios' releases, making the X rating seem chic. Lewis argues that this porn-chic phenomenon was fueled as much by broad social trends, such as the sexual revolution, as by the films themselves. In 1973 and 1974, the Nixon court (four of its nine justices were Nixon appointees) issued decisions that effectively banned hard-core films from public theaters while shielding mainstream studio films from censorship. (Lewis, pg. 296-297; Lecture)

Auteurs and Landmark Films

Easy Rider

Made for just $375,000, Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969) earned $19 million in its initial release and showed how important the youth audience would be to a Hollywood recovery. Produced independently by BBS Productions and picked up by Columbia, it blended the teen biker picture, the French New Wave, and direct-cinema documentary into a free-form road picture. Handheld camerawork, unprofessional actors, and unscripted dialogue encouraged viewers to sympathize with its counterculture heroes, Wyatt and Billy, who are gunned down by two rednecks at the end. Its rock soundtrack provided a template for later youth-oriented films, and it is very much an auteur picture that transformed a familiar genre. (Lewis, pg. 295, 298)

The Godfather

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) revived the thematic core of earlier gangster films: the parallel dramas of assimilation, as immigrants become Americans, and ambition. Legend has it that Coppola saw the story as being about family rather than gangsters, and the intersection of the gangsters' business and a family's private life is at the heart of the Godfather films. In the first two films he achieved his main goal as an auteur: taking a mainstream genre product and making it his own. They were also timely, exploring links between legitimate and criminal capitalism as Vietnam raised awareness of corruption in the military-industrial complex. Made for $6 million, the first film earned over $80 million and set the auteur renaissance in motion. (Lewis, pg. 296, 303-306; Lecture)

Chinatown

Paramount's Robert Evans bet on Chinatown (1974) as the studio's next big film after The Godfather, choosing Roman Polanski to direct even though the Manson-family murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, had derailed his American career. The film grossed five times its budget and received eleven Oscar nominations. Like The Godfather, it is a prototypical studio auteur film that sticks close to a tried-and-true genre: Robert Towne's cynical neo-noir follows detective Jake Gittes through a water-rights scandal and an act of incest tied to the millionaire Noah Cross, and the rich and powerful get away with their crimes. Its downbeat ending coincided with Watergate and marked the defeat of Kennedy-era optimism by Nixonian cynicism. Lewis adds that Polanski's 1977 guilty plea to unlawful sex with a minor complicates his legacy. (Lewis, pg. 306, 309-310)

Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese originally wanted to become a Catholic priest, but he attended NYU as an undergraduate and graduate student and made award-winning short films. His ability to capture real life, especially the gritty streets of New York, was rooted in a childhood spent watching the world pass by his window; as a sickly, asthmatic boy, he was often kept indoors. All his films share a recognizable personal visual style, above all an incessantly and fluidly moving camera that immerses viewers, as in Taxi Driver (1976). After Raging Bull (1980) his career stalled until Goodfellas (1990), and he also made The Age of Innocence (1993) and The Departed (2006). He is arguably one of the greatest American auteurs of all time. (Lewis, pg. 310-314; Lecture)

Robert Altman

Robert Altman was not one of the movie brats; he began at an industrial-film company making training shorts and commercials, then in 1955 moved into episodic television, directing shows such as The Millionaire, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Maverick, Bonanza, Route 66, and Combat. His feature career took off with MASH (1970), the number-two film of the year, which also won the Grand Prix at Cannes. With Vietnam on young filmgoers' minds, its sarcastic, hedonistic doctors seemed akin to counterculture rebels, and the Korean War was shown, like Vietnam, to be absurd and senseless. Though considerably older than most Renaissance auteurs, Altman captured the irreverence and cynicism of America's young and discontented, and he developed a new style built on a complex layering of sound. (Lewis, pg. 314-316; Lecture)

Stanley Kubrick

It is difficult to say where Stanley Kubrick fits in the auteur renaissance: by the time The Godfatherreached screens, he already had nine features, including Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971), and he made only four more before his death in 1999. He began as a still photographer, selling his first picture to Look magazine at seventeen, and a photographic aesthetic dominates his films, along with a reputation as an uncompromising craftsman who demanded multiple takes. His films immerse viewers in their spaces, and a pervasive misanthropy runs through them, with violence treated as instinct. American youth embraced Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange even though he had almost nothing in common with them. (Lewis, pg. 316-318)

George Lucas

George Lucas was initially as committed to auteur filmmaking as his predecessors but is forever associated with phenomenal box-office success. While Coppola is credited with jump-starting the auteur renaissance, Lucas and Steven Spielberg are saddled with a reputation for hurrying its demise and providing the template for the blockbuster era. Lucas's American Graffiti (1973) cost $750,000 and earned over $21 million, and Star Wars (1977) broke the record set by Jaws with over $210 million, spawning merchandising and tie-ins. Lucas gained fame less for a signature style than for a signature product; unlike Coppola and Scorsese, who focused on production, he concentrated on postproduction, using visual and aural effects and editing to control rhythm and pace. (Lewis, pg. 324-327; Lecture)

Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg's first big success was the horror picture Jaws (1975), which he made by expertly manipulating the genre's major tropes. It broke the box-office record set by The Godfather, became the first $100-million film, and created the summer blockbuster season. With Lucas, he provided the formula for high-concept entertainment: films based on ideas that, as Spielberg put it, could be expressed in twenty-five words or less and condensed into a single tagline. Though simple in structure, they were big, loud spectacles emphasizing special effects. Like Lucas, Spielberg pursued the auteur goal through postproduction, inserting effects and using editing to modulate the beats between action sequences, the phase that gives a director the most complete control. (Lewis, pg. 324-327; Lecture)

Genres Reflecting the Times

Ultraviolent Western

In 1969, Sam Peckinpah reinvented the western with The Wild Bunch, escalating the intensity and duration of the violence at the genre's heart. A veteran who began by directing TV series such as Gunsmoke, he used slow motion and deft action editing to make carnage look at once horrific and beautiful. Despite the radical change, the film is profoundly nostalgic, clinging to classic western themes of modernity, violence, idealism, and masculinity, while suggesting that Peckinpah was saying something profound about America at a particularly violent moment. Critics quickly saw a parallel between its violence and the savagery of Vietnam on the nightly news, and ultraviolence soon spread, as in Dirty Harry (1971). (Lewis, pg. 332-335; Lecture)

New American Horror

Long the dominant genre in cheap exploitation moviemaking, horror reemerged in the mid-1970s as another arena for the new auteur cinema. The first important new horror film was Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), the seventh-highest-grossing film of its year. In the mid-1970s, two young American cineastes revitalized and retooled the genre: Brian De Palma, whose Carrie (1976) earned $33 million on a $1.8-million budget, and John Carpenter, whose Halloween (1978) earned over $47 million on $325,000 and, by linking teen sex to irrational violence, set the template for teen horror. (Lewis, pg. 332, 335-339; Lecture)

Woody Allen

Woody Allen began as a gag writer for other comedians; though he enjoyed some success as a stand-up comic, in the 1960s he was primarily regarded as a comedy writer, and it was as a writer that he first made his mark in Hollywood. After a decade of movies poking fun at an absurd modern world, he turned to autobiographical material in 1977 with Annie Hall, which marked his entrance into the commercial mainstream. The film is revealing and funny on American ethnicity, contrasting Alvy's Jewish family with Annie's rich white Protestant one. It won Oscars for Best Picture, Directing, Writing, and Actress in a Leading Role (Diane Keaton) and established Allen as an auteur. Lewis notes that allegations dating to 1992 complicate any consideration of his work; Allen maintains his innocence. (Lewis, pg. 332, 339-344; Lecture)

Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks's stand-up career began in the 1940s in the Borscht Belt, a swath of Catskill resort nightclubs catering primarily to a Jewish clientele, and led to writing for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. His first feature, The Producers (1968), proved to be a landmark in contemporary comedy: crude, lewd, and outrageous, it follows two showmen who set out to produce a flop. His biggest hits were Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974), spoofs of the western and old horror pictures that balanced potty humor with social commentary, particularly on race. Like Allen, he joked at his own expense, building a caricature of a neurotic urban Jew. (Lewis, pg. 332, 339, 344-345; Lecture)

Richard Pryor

Richard Pryor was a sensational stand-up comic, but unlike other stage comedians who succeeded in films by playing versions of their stage personae, he was cast at first in supporting roles, such as in Wild in the Streets (1968) and Car Wash (1976). His first important starring role was in Stir Crazy(1980), opposite Gene Wilder. Pryor was at his best onstage, and his concert films, beginning with Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979), became landmarks of the genre, with an irreverent, deeply personal, and honest style. He was also brutally frank about racial issues, as in his jokes about the racial makeup of an Arizona prison population. (Lewis, pg. 332, 339, 345-346; Lecture)

Blaxploitation

In the 1970s, African Americans made up about 15 percent of the U.S. population but more than 30 percent of the national first-run film audience, yet many executives thought films aimed at them were unnecessary, while others saw an untapped audience starved for films about lives like theirs. After the studios touched on race only tangentially, as in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), and radicalism complicated Sidney Poitier's reception, an alternative genre took shape between 1968 and 1974: blaxploitation, a term referring to the anticipated black audience and to the genre's exploitation production style and marketing. The two best-known films are Shaft (1971, Gordon Parks) and Super Fly (1972, Gordon Parks Jr.), with heroic, capable men, action, sex, and tie-ins to popular African American music. Melvin Van Peebles was among its most compelling and controversial filmmakers. (Lewis, pg. 332, 346-350; Lecture)

The New Woman's Film

Although the studios had a history of embracing social movements that could be marketed cleverly, women's liberation proved difficult to capture on screen. Perhaps the most celebrated women's film of the era is the urban thriller Klute (1971), directed by Alan J. Pakula and produced by an all-male team; Jane Fonda won an Oscar as call girl Bree Daniels, who came to symbolize emerging sexual and social freedom, though the film serves the thriller genre more consistently than feminist politics. Hollywood was still very much a man's town: the few women directors, shut out of commercial financing, relied on independent microfinancing and screenings at art houses, university film series, and art museums, and several of their best films remain hard to find today. (Lewis, pg. 351-353; Lecture)