Search Results

This introductory chapter situates the New Hollywood in the context of its times and provides an overview of the contributions to the volume. Although the term “New Hollywood” has been variously (and often vaguely) invoked – and of course, every generation can stake a claim to something suggestive of a New Hollywood – we situate the focus here on that subculture of personal, introspective, European-influenced and often auteur-driven films that thrived in the fleeting and tumultuous decade bookended by the collapse of Hollywood’s old self-censorship production code in 1966 and the birth of the blockbuster in 1977.

Elaine May began her career as a filmmaker during the 1970s when the mythology of the New Hollywood male auteur defined the decade; and the number of women directors, boosted by second wave feminism, increased for the first time in forty years. May’s interest in misfit characters, as socially awkward as they were delusional, and her ability to seamlessly move them between comedy and drama, typified the New Hollywood protagonist who captured America’s uneasy transition from the hopeful rebellion of the 1960s into the narcissistic angst of the 1970s. However, the filmmaker’s reception, which culminated in the critical lambast of her comeback film Ishtar in 1987, was uneven: her battles with studio executives are legendary; feminist film critics railed against her depiction of female characters; and a former assistant claimed she set back women directors by her inability to meet deadlines. This chapter investigates Elaine May’s career within the lore 1970s Hollywood to understand the industrial and cultural circumstances that contributed to the emergence of her influential body of work; and the significant contributions to cinema she made in spite of, and perhaps because of, the conflicts in which she was faced.

This chapter explores why and how the Hollywood Cold War deviance in the 1950s had developed a sharper edge by the mid-1970s. It specifically addresses Peter Davis' Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds and Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor. ‘New Hollywood’ played in the generational shift within the film industry. Hearts and Minds is at once starkly frank yet indirect in its propagandistic approach. It exhibits the degree to which the American intervention was driven by a long-standing, nationwide anti-Asian racism. It is considered today as a masterpiece of political documentary filmmaking, and is widely regarded as the definitive American documentary about the war in Vietnam. Three Days of the Condor contains all the trademark features of the 1970s ‘paranoid’ movie. Its political vision had its limits. Neither these two could be described as anti-capitalist, still less pro-communist.

This chapter examines the integral part independent American cinema played in the formation of 'The New Hollywood' or Hollywood Renaissance.' Starting with a an examination of John Cassavetes, whose film Shadows (1959) is now widely considered a progenitor of contemporary American independent cinema, the chapter then moves to discuss the film industry in the late 1960s, when mainstream studio films such as Dr Doolitle and Hello Dolly proved box-office failures. It then goes on to examine American independent film production as a distinct practice, which was nevertheless actively endorsed by the majors, when this new wave of independent films started proving commercial successes. While films such as Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider were produced independently and their respective filmmakers enjoyed unprecedented creative control, it was the majors that reaped the benefits of their success since they distributed the. The chapter highlights the importance of distribution in any examination of independent cinema (can one talk of independence when a film is distributed by a major?) and points towards the problems of defining independent American cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. Case Studies: Shadows (Cassavetes, 1959); The Last Movie (Hopper, 1971)

In this chapter Phillip Lopate offers a dissent from the main themes of The New Hollywood Revisited, suggesting that the movement did not live up to the standards set by the best of the classic studio era and foreign art cinemas. The New Hollywood, in Lopate’s estimation, tapped into a zeitgeist dominated by the anti-war movement and the counter-culture that too often surrendered to a didactic, simplistic moralism. He acknowledges that there were wonderful passages in these films, with an energetic, cinematic daring. But the films were as well mired in a willful confusion and irresolution. In this introspective essay, Lopate assesses the styles of Cassavetes, Lumet and Altman, among others, and finds much to praise, despite his enduring wariness of New Hollywood cinema.

In 1969 a struggling Columbia Pictures, seeking to connect with a generation that the old studio hands little understood and seemed unable to reach, signed a contract with producers Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner. The six-picture deal with their newly-formed production company, BBS, which traded low budgets in exchange for no studio interference over content, represented the New Hollywood dream: the opportunity to make movies that aspired to be both commercially viable and serious expressions of a more personal cinema. The BBS deal yielded some of the landmarks of the New Hollywood—films that likely would not otherwise have been possible to produce. This chapter considers the BBS phenomenon through a close reading of its films and their contribution to the New Hollywood.

The introduction identifies the tension in Altman scholarship between oppositional and assimilationist positions, explaining how they share an understanding of “Hollywood” as a relatively staid and uniform tradition until the late-1960s box office downturn uniquely afforded newcomers opportunities to reject or simply update establishment style in order to appeal to a hip, film-educated youth audience. This facilitates accounts of filmmakers’ transcendent visionary powers, supposed to generate uniquely expressive breaks with norms. In contrast, Altman is reconsidered here through a historical poetics approach understanding filmmakers as problem-solving agents pursuing inferable goals within the constraints and affordances of specifiable historical contexts. From this perspective, Hollywood is not a transhistorical style but a storytelling paradigm open to constant reinvention. Focusing on a moment and filmmaker typically thought to embody a break from the establishment clarifies the complex historical texture of Hollywood filmmaking as a vital cite of contestation, innovation, and elaboration.

In 1965, when John Lindsay was elected mayor of New York City, “the ungovernable city” was spiraling economically, and crime rates were on the rise. That same year, only two major films were shot on location in New York. Just two years later, in 1967, forty-two features were shot in the city, for one straightforward reason: the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. One actor embodied the New Hollywood vision of the city: Al Pacino. This chapter engages with Pacino’s films of this era—spanning from Panic in Needle Park to Cruising, with Dog Day Afternoon as centerpiece—to examine how New York City, which came to symbolize all that was wrong with the American city in the troubled 1970s.

This chapter focuses on Ingmar Bergman’s historical drama The Serpent’s Egg (1977), made in West Germany during the director’s 5-year self-imposed exile over a tax scandal in Sweden. Set during the hyper-inflationary Weimar Berlin of the early 1920s, the film retells in an expressionist mode the rise of German Nazism. Produced by Italian-born film mogul Dino DeLaurentiis and filmed on set in Munich with an international cast, The Serpent’s Egg was meant to provide an English-language European art film for American audiences, situating Bergman for Hollywood exposure. It simultaneously engaged with a silenced, repressed part of German history that New German Cinema directors had not yet begun to address by the mid-1970s. The massive exterior sets were re-used for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and served a central role in that episodic TV-miniseries. Thus The Serpent’s Egg becomes not only an ‘elsewhere’ of Bergman’s production and New German Cinema, but also of New Hollywood.

This chapter discusses New Hollywood horror, addressing how the counterculture movement in the United States championed alternative spiritual experiences while rejecting mainstream organised religion. As such the so-called Church of Satan, established in San Francisco in 1966, quickly gained tens of thousands of followers while membership of the Catholic Church fell precipitously. It was against this backdrop that Ira Levin's novel Rosemary's Baby (published 1967) managed to capture the mood and resonate with a society in a state of transition. Whilst the story also plays on the distrust of the older generational establishment, so much a feature of the youth counterculture of the 1960s, its themes of alienation and loss of personal control go back to the dawn of horror cinema. Its arrival also came at a time when Hollywood found itself facing some of its greatest challenges in terms of market forces and changing demographics. The chapter looks at how the major studios reacted to this, assimilating new approaches to film-making while retaining much of their influence and power, albeit under new ownership. It also considers Roman Polanski's film adaptation of Levin's novel in 1968.

Robert Altman helped define New Hollywood cinema with the dark comedy film MASH in 1970 and helped close out the era with the surreal 3 Women in 1977. But Altman was an unlikely New Hollywood icon; New Hollywood auteurs were supposed to be young movie brats straight from film school, whereas Altman was a forty-something autodidact who had learned his craft making industrial and educational pictures. This chapter focuses on three of Altman’s most important and influential films: the 1971 western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which builds extraordinary emotional power while radically revising both the myth of the frontier and a key Hollywood genre; the 1975 musical Nashville, a large-canvas portrait of modern-day American politics, patriotism, popular culture, and celebrity; and the oneiric 3 Women, a small-canvas dreamscape that marks the outer limits of New Hollywood iconoclasm.

In this chapter the legendary New York film critic J Hoberman revisits the Bicentennial, 1976, a year characterized by a longing for rebirth and a search for new heroes, in Hollywood and in politics. The nihilistic Taxi Driver, opened in February 1976; it featured the decade’s most compelling anti-hero Travis Bickle, who can be seen as the ultimate expression of the New Hollywood (not least in its critical and popular success). Bickle’s antipode arrived in the person of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, protagonist of an even more successful movie that, retrograde in every way, was the first major expression of a reborn Hollywood—a narrative paralleled in the political realm by Jimmy Carter’s “Cinderella” ascension to the White House.

In January 1967 executives from MGM contracted with European New-Wave icon Michelangelo Antonioni to distribute his Palm d’Or-winning picture Blow-Up in the United States. With the commercial success of that picture, MGM entered into a second contract with Antonioni giving him carte blanche to make an American studio movie about the youth counterculture eventually titled, Zabriskie Point. This chapter evaluates the MGM-Antonioni interlude, emphasizing its historical importance as an early and fraught attempt at an American studio auteur picture revealing an industry on the verge of some very big changes.

In this chapter, I explore the audible link between masculinity, silence and soundtrack by focusing on a selection of silent, alienated male characters from renowned New Hollywood films. In this discussion, the ‘type’ of silence I often refer to is that described by Paul Théberge as ‘a kind of silence that is produced when, for example, music is allowed to dominate the soundtrack while dialogue and sound effects – the primary sonic modes of the diegetic world – are muted’. I explore the specific use of silence in these texts as well as the ways in which non diegetic music and diegetic sound are used to express meanings not divulged by the male characters, due to their limited dialogue. I argue that this acoustic construction contributes to a projected sense of alienation of male characters and that it can also be linked to the blurring of gender boundaries often accounted for by the counter-culture movements taking place in America throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

As Wolper Productions continued to make documentaries and experiment with fiction, the studio provided a professional entry point for promising talent and off-and-on employment for filmmakers involved with New Hollywood features. This chapter investigates Wolper Productions’s output during a period in which the film and television industries faced a precarious financial situation. The studio helped create a political imaginary for Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Additionally, Wolper Productions’s forays into programs with Jacques-Yves Cousteau charted a fresh path for nonfiction. Packaging American history or capturing recent events, however, soon proved to be a troublesome venture. Wolper Productions’s prospective adaptation of William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) was one of the earliest attempts by a major studio to make a commercial film about black power themes and figures. The opposition to the film, however, resulted in a public relations disaster for Wolper Productions. Wolper and his circle came to understand the importance of having community support from the minority group the studio sought to represent.

This chapter explores the tensions in Cukor's late style through three of his later films. Justine (1969) is Cukor's most sustained encounter with modernism and his most vigorous effort to engage with stylistic and narrative “advances” of the New Hollywood. Travels With My Aunt (1972) is something of a retrenchment, unapologetically “old-fashioned” in many ways, yet selectively incorporating new techniques and post-Production Code material in a manner that illustrates Cukor's attitude toward the new dispensation. Rich and Famous (1981) synthesizes these approaches, harking back to Classical Hollywood after the New Hollywood itself had waned, yet it evinces a certain surface chic more effortlessly than any of Cukor's other late films.

This chapter uncovers the Countercultural origins of the Fifties nostalgia wave. Attention to the early career of Fifties revival band Sha Na Na (particularly their performance at Woodstock) and the 1973 release of American Graffiti (produced by the New Hollywood collective American Zoetrope) reveals how Fifties nostalgia functioned as pastiche before its association with Reagan. This history is rendered invisible by contemporary accounts of the film—though it was produced and originally understood as part of the “New Hollywood,” with its attendant values of aesthetic experimentation and progressive politics, George Lucas’s film is now considered in retrospect to be a prelude to the blockbuster era, with its associated values of commercialism and conservatism. The literal and figurative packaging of Fifties nostalgia is made visible in promotional materials that accompanied the film’s multiple reissues and rereleases on various formats and in various editions.

In studio production between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, the period often referred to as “New Hollywood,” the music soundtrack was the site of significant upheaval. As box office revues continued to plummet, the studios allowed filmmakers greater freedom to experiment with narrative structures and with soundtrack conventions. Specifically, they allowed directors to exert new control over film music, which they did often by jettisoning new composed orchestral scores in favor of compilations of preexisting, recorded music. Film music scholars have long acknowledged this shift, but few have recognized the degree to which the new soundtrack practices that emerged in the New Hollywood period were also the result of radical shifts in popular music and contemporary listening practices. By looking at two films from the early 1970s, Zabriskie Point (1971) and The Strawberry Statement (1970, this article considers the degree to which progressive rock, FM radio, and countercultural listening practices changed not only the content of film soundtracks but also the placement of music in film, unseating long-standing sound hierarchies and privileging music in new ways.