New Hollywood Era

Hey all! As you may know, the Calling All Classic Film Lovers thread has a clear cut-off date of 1967.

Why 1967 you ask?

Well, with the demise of the studio system and end of the Hays Code and, well, just the 1960s in general, came a new type of film in America.

The film that caused it all? Arguably, Bonnie and Clyde (or The Graduate depends who you ask). So now films were more violent, more sexual than ever before. And a new school of directors and films came with it: you've got your George Lucases, your Martin Scorseses, your De Palmas, and your Cappolas, and so and so forth!

So here's the thread to talk about those films! But it's not limited to American films only. Yak about all different types of films from 1967-1981.

(Why 1981? Google, that's why.)

Edited by LongTallShorty64 on Sep 17th 2018 at 9:00:28 AM

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."

I would love to see a highlight reel that shows each rule from the Hays Code and then show clips from a major American film in the 60s and 70s that broke said rule.

Oh, don't make people google!

1981 is because of Heaven's Gate, the massive bomb from Michael Cimino that ruined a lot of careers (including his) and is generally regarded as bringing the New Hollywood era to a screeching halt.

It's not bad, although it could have been a lot shorter.

As far as The Hays Code rules getting broken...

...there was some nudity in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in 1969. There was a toilet in Psycho. I wonder what was the first "bad guy got away with it" movie produced by Hollywood? Maybe The Godfather? That's Protagonist Journey to Villain...maybe The Godfather Part II is a better example.

Edited by jamespolk on Sep 17th 2018 at 10:57:57 AM

Oh, god!!! A toilet! The horror! Yeah, the Hays Code was always dumb.

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."

Baddie got away with it...Mmm.. that's a tough call but the Godfather is a good guess.

Edited by LongTallShorty64 on Sep 17th 2018 at 2:12:12 PM

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."

The Conversation is a pretty unambiguous "bad guys got away with it" movie.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is a good example of a movie that only could have been made in New Hollywood. Not so much the nudity, sure, they had a couple of Fanservice Extra topless ladies to say "hey, we can have breasts in the movies now". But the whole content of the film, a movie all about sex and adultery in which people view adultery as a positive good. Absolutely a film of its era.

It's always fascinating mapping New Hollywood as part of the overall studio trajectory, and it's interesting to just see how many problems with studio thinking (especially "X was popular so let's do something similar regardless of creative context") are seemingly eternal.

I can only assume your talking about the end of the movie musical? Because this era is when it died big time.

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."

I heard disaster movies were the most successful of the studio-driven works of the 70s.

No I was speaking of New Hollywood itself.

3: Not to mention that it took out the studio that produced it, United Artists...

If any of you want to know the whole sordid story find a copy of The Final Cut.

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

I was just about to mention that book. Final Cut by Steven Bach, who was the head of production in the last years of UA and who greenlit Heaven's Gate. There's a great line in the book where Bach remembers a dinner where he was going to talk about the project, and he muses that if he'd only been hit by a car, UA would still exist.

Anyway...it's not just about Heaven's Gate, he gives a history of UA and how it had had problems ever since Chaplin, Pickford, and the rest had founded it. How it almost folded around 1950 or so but came back with a vengeance once the Hollywood studios went downhill. Bach focuses on Heaven's Gate at that time but also talks about the other stuff UA was doing, like how they were putting out the all-time great movie Raging Bull at the same time that Heaven's Gate was turning into a disaster. He also makes a really good point about another United Artists production made shortly before Heaven's Gate and how it was a nightmarish Troubled Production with cost overruns and production delays and a Prima Donna Director and everything going wrong.

That was Apocalypse Now which turned out to be a spectacular success. So if you squint you can kind of see how the studio just kept writing checks for Michael Cimino.

Anyway, the point upthread about Hollywood types who keep making the same mistakes was well-made and Bach's book is a great illustration of how it happened.

I'm adding my post from the other thread because it fits the timeline, and I want to complain that the other romantic comedy that gets more attention than this one.

Watched the The Goodbye Girl. When I saw the trailers for this, Dreyfuss' character seemed like one of those typical unbearable romcom dudes that we're supposed to like for whatever reason, but he was actually charming and more than just quirks. Damn fine movie!

And for 1970s romcoms, this isn't the one that gets mentioned. It's Annie Hall... all the time. For my money, The Goodbye Girl is leagues better: we don't have to stand the neurosi of Woody Allen every five seconds and the characters feel lived in.

Watch it, y'all!

---

I was watching Klute the other day and couldn't make up my mind whether Donald Sutherland is the best, most understated actor ever or he can't emote more than one emotion other than passive annoyance. I still don't know.

Edited by LongTallShorty64 on Sep 23rd 2018 at 9:02:27 AM

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."

A common pattern that I see on these types of movies from this era in the US is how they used European and Asian artistic movies (e.g. Kurosawa flicks, Nouvelle Vague movies) for editing, camera angles and certain shots, and visual inspiration. But are there American movies from that era that reflect an European sensibility (and I mean the "sensibility" of those days - the Berlin wall stood tall, Baader Meinhof in West Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy, Mai '68 in France, - in regards to specific American issues (social, economic, political issues)? Or, even better if they show an inner political sensibility from an American mindset?

Besides Taxi Driver, of course (since that movie deals with a very universal kind of alienation, loneliness and political fury/anger - the latter certainly was true in Europe in that time period, across most political ideologies).

Edited by Quag15 on Sep 23rd 2018 at 2:58:50 PM

Zabriskie Point although that's made by an Italian in America, it deals with campus radicalism. Then Nashville which is considered the big political movie of that era (albeit a flop). Paul Schrader's first film, Blue Collar.

In general very few of the mainstream New Hollywood movies were really political in a specific sense. Mostly it's about a general "Old Hollywood lied to us", i.e. Chinatown is about a Film Noir detective who fails, The Godfather is about gangsters who get away with it, Annie Hall is a romantic comedy about relationships not working. It was always couched in genre. And a good number of the big famous Hollywood films are actually period films.

Then eventually you had the new genres, with Star Wars coming in.

The Goodbye Girl was just stellar. One of the best romcoms ever made, in all honesty.

A Hollywood film with European sensibility—hmm, The French Connection? Gritty, grungy crime drama. The Big Bad escapes the Cowboy Cop, most everybody else gets light sentences.

Oh, I forgot the best lines from The Goodbye Girl. Marsha Mason wants to go into Richard Dreyfuss's room. She says "are you decent?", he says yes, she opens the door and finds him sitting on his bed naked playing the guitar.

"I thought you said you were decent!"
"I am decent. I'm also naked."

Good times.

I didn't mentioned Zabriskie Point because of Antonioni's nationality (he's essentially an outsider looking at campus radicalism). I remember the movie (particualrly the discussion scenes between students in a room). I was more looking at American filmmakers, specifically. I will take a look at Nashville and Blue Collar. Thank you.

Keep in mind that I'm not just looking at something specifically political (in spite of the European context examples I provided). It could even be something like the fallout of the hippies and all that 60's idealism, or life in general in the Flyover Country, warts and all.

I don't really remember that movie, tho I do know Gene Hackman was in it. I'll have to check it again to see if it fits what I'm looking for.

From reading on George Lucas, (on whom I am something of an amateur specialist, Full Discl. I am a prequel fanboy)...I get the sense that the dominant theme of the seventies was getting away from flyover country to the big city. One of Lucas' first jobs, was a documentary he made on Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People, which is a movie about a married woman going on a road-trip to Flyover Country and finding nothing there. And American Graffiti is about little towns being boring. Star Wars took that to a cosmic scale. Being stuck on a small planet instead of a town.

The defense some people have put against the idea that Lucas ruined the New Hollywood is to point out that they were never all that rebellious. I mean everyone talks about the "movie brats" but Robert Altman made more movies in that decade (15) than any of them, and he comes from an older era, being a world war ii veteran who passed his early career in TV. His movies were more political, and more feminist, but they weren't as successful and not as well remembered. Like Nashville isn't a proverbial New Hollywood movie unlike Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde.

The other problem is also that people have this misinformed idea of the hippies as somehow being leftists in the contemporary sense. Very few of them were involved in civil rights, many of them were sexists, and homophobes. A lot of people said Charles Manson and Jim Jones poisoned the counter-culture but the truth is they were probably closer to what it really was then people would want to admit. Most of the hippies was a lot of middle-class white kids and in some cases rich dudes with time on their hands, trying to have a good time and get laid. The '80s stereotype about the hippies wasn't wrong. It's only wrong in that it exaggerated them as representing the entire social revolution. There was that documentary about the Black Panthers a few years back, and well if you judge movements by how authorities are scared of you, the FBI never tried to shut down the Hippie movement like they did the panthers.

And none of the major film-makers in New Hollywood were dealing with African-American issues in that decade, not in the mainstream at least.

Watching The Last Waltz again. Man, I never get tired of this movie, even if there are way too many Robbie Robertson interviews. Best concert film ever made.

Also in its way something that probably could only have been made in the New Hollywood era. Martin Scorsese takes a break from directing big production New York, New York to make a Concert Film. Would a concert film even get wide distribution these days?

Wasn't the last one a Katy Perry one or are those "documentaries"?

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."

Not sure. I remember hearing that the Katy Perry movie had a shot of her singing without Auto Tune that revealed how hilariously awful she is.

I think what sets The Last Waltz apart from average-to-mediocre concert movies/DVD's is that it deals with the last gig of The Band (well, at least the original line-up; I presume different line-ups appeared throughout the years), and that carries a lot of weight (no pun nor reference intended to their song "The Weight").

The only movie I can think (and it's more of a contextual documentary around the band and the city said band comes from around their one-off gig in said city) of in recent times that shows a 'last gig' experience is Pulp: A Film about Life, Death & Supermarkets, released some 4 years ago.

The Last Waltz also has the sheer load of guest stars as well: from Van Morrison to Joni Mitchell, from Dr. John to... Neil Diamond(?), Ringo Starr, Ronnie Wood and Dylan, so it was fairly elaborate, all things considered (and it was probably a headache to organize).

Edited by Quag15 on Sep 29th 2018 at 3:03:02 PM

I don't know if it would really be considered a New Hollywood movie, but after Burt Reynolds death I saw my local theater doing a screening of Smokey and the Bandit and it was a renowned movie I hadn't seen before so I checked it out. I knew almost nothing about the movie, if only that it served as inspiration for the likes of The Dukes of Hazzard and Knight Rider.

It definitely revels in the anti-authoritarian nature most New Hollywood movies carried. I wasn't very impressed with the first 10 minutes and was wondering why the movie was so beloved, but when Bo eluded his first cop and gave the camera an Aside Glance I started to catch on. The car stunts are still impressive today, in many ways even more impressive because of more relaxed safety policies. You see crowds of people running between vehicles, entire families in the same frame as the Trans Am is racing through a football field and one particular stunt involved a guy leaning against a gate with his back turned to the semi-truck about to crash through (there was a bit of Under Crank involved, but the dive out of the way still looked extremely close).

The main thing for me that holds the movie back is how farcical it is with Carrie as a Runaway Bride just leaping into the Trans Am, it's such a blunt plot development barely makes any sense. But it does spark the Stern Chase with Sheriff Buford T. Justice (a hilarious name for a lawman) and the police cruiser slowly whittles away to nothing.

Edited by KJMackley on Sep 29th 2018 at 9:03:22 AM