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The years 1967–69 marked a turning point in American film history as Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) attracted the youth market to theaters in record numbers. (Altman’s M*A*S*H [1970] provided a novel comedic coda to the quintet.) The films were unequal aesthetically (the first three being major revisions of their genres, the last two canny exploitations of the prevailing mood), but all shared a cynicism toward established values and a fascination with apocalyptic violence. There was a sense, however briefly, that such films might provide the catalyst for a cultural revolution. Artistically, the films domesticated New Wave camera and editing techniques, enabling once-radical practices to enter the mainstream narrative cinema. Financially, they were so successful (Easy Rider, for example, returned $50,000,000 on a $375,000 investment) that producers quickly saturated the market with low-budget youth-culture movies, only a few of which—Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (1969), Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970), and David and Albert Maysles’s Gimme Shelter (1970)—achieved even limited distinction.

Concurrent with the youth-cult boom was the new permissiveness toward sex made possible by the institution of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings system in 1968. Unlike the Production Code, this system of self-regulation did not prescribe the content of films but merely categorized them according to their appropriateness for young viewers. (G designates general audiences; PG suggests parental guidance; PG-13 strongly cautions parents because the film contains material inappropriate for children under 13; R indicates that the film is restricted to adults and to persons under 17 accompanied by a parent or guardian; and X or NC-17 signifies that no one under 17 may be admitted to the film—NC meaning “no children.” In practice, the X rating has usually been given to unabashed pornography and the G rating to children’s films, which has had the effect of concentrating sexually explicit but serious films in the R and NC-17 categories.) The introduction of the ratings system led immediately to the production of serious, nonexploitative adult films, such as John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge (1971), in which sexuality was treated with a maturity and realism unprecedented on the American screen.

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The revolution that some had predicted would overturn American cinema, as well as American society, during the late 1960s never took place. Conglomeration and inflation did occur, however, especially between 1972 and 1979, when the average cost per feature increased by more than 500 percent to reach $11 million in 1980. Despite the increasing costs, the unprecedented popularity of a few films (Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, 1972; Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, 1975; George Lucas’s Star Wars, 1977) produced enormous profits and stimulated a wildcat mentality within the industry. In this environment, it was not uncommon for the major companies to invest their working capital in the production of only five or six films a year, hoping that one or two would be extremely successful. At one point, Columbia reputedly had all of its assets invested in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), a gamble that paid off handsomely; United Artists’ similar investment in Michael Cimino’s financially disastrous Heaven’s Gate (1980), however, led to the sale of the company and its virtual destruction as a corporate entity.

The new generation of directors that came to prominence at this time included many who had been trained in university film schools—Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader at the University of California, Los Angeles, George Lucas and John Milius at the University of Southern California, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma at New York University, Spielberg at California State College—as well as others who had been documentarians and critics before making their first features (Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin). These filmmakers brought to their work a technical sophistication and a sense of film history eminently suited to the new Hollywood, whose quest for enormously profitable films demanded slick professionalism and a thorough understanding of popular genres. The directors achieved success as highly skilled technicians in the production of cinematic thrills, although many were serious artists as well.

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The graphic representation of violence and sex, which had been pioneered with risk by Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Midnight Cowboy in the late 1960s, was exploited for its sensational effect during the ’70s in such well-produced R-rated features as Coppola’s The Godfather, Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Spielberg’s Jaws, Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), De Palma’s Carrie (1976), and scores of lesser films. The newly popular science-fiction/adventure genre was similarly supercharged through computer-enhanced special effects and Dolby sound as the brooding philosophical musings of Kubrick’s 2001 gave way to the cartoon-strip violence of Lucas’s Star Wars, Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and their myriad sequels and copies. There was, however, originality in the continuing work of veterans Altman (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971; Nashville, 1975; Three Women, 1977) and Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange, 1971; The Shining, 1980), American Film Institute graduate Terrence Malick (Badlands, 1973; Days of Heaven, 1978), and controversial newcomer Cimino (The Deerhunter, 1978; Heaven’s Gate). In addition, Coppola (The Godfather; The Godfather, Part II, 1974; Apocalypse Now, 1979) and Scorsese (Mean Streets, 1973; Raging Bull, 1980) created films of unassailable importance. Some of the strongest films of the era came from émigré directors working within the American industry—John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Miloš Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). In general, however, Hollywood’s new corporate managers lacked the judgment of industry veterans and tended to rely on the recently tried and true (producing an unprecedented number of high-budget sequels) and the viscerally sensational.

To this latter category belong the spate of “psycho-slasher” films that glutted the market in the wake of John Carpenter’s highly successful low-budget chiller Halloween (1978). The formula for producing films of this type begins with the serial murder of teenagers by a ruthless psychotic and adds gratuitous sex and violence, with realistic gore provided by state-of-the-art makeup and special-effects artists. Its success was confirmed by the record-breaking receipts of the clumsily made Friday the Thirteenth (1980). There were precedents for psycho-killer violence in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), but for decades the exploitation of gore had existed only at the periphery of the industry (in the “splatter” movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis, for example). The slasher films took the gore and violence into the mainstream of Hollywood films.

The effect of new technologies

During the 1980s the fortunes of the American film industry were increasingly shaped by new technologies of video delivery and imaging. Cable networks, direct-broadcast satellites, and half-inch videocassettes provided new means of motion-picture distribution, and computer-generated graphics provided new means of production, especially of special effects, forecasting the prospect of a fully automated “electronic cinema.” Many studios, including Universal and Columbia, devoted the majority of their schedules to the production of telefilms for the commercial television networks, and nearly all the studios presold their theatrical features for cable and videocassette distribution. In fact, Tri-Star, one of Hollywood’s major producer-distributors, was a joint venture of CBS Inc., Columbia Pictures, and Time-Life’s premium cable service Home Box Office (HBO). HBO and competitor Showtime both functioned as producer-distributors in their own right by directly financing films and entertainment specials for cable television. In 1985, for the first time since the 1910s, independent film producers released more motion pictures than the major studios, largely to satisfy the demands of the cable and home-video markets.

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The strength of the cable and video industries led producers to seek properties with video or “televisual” features that would play well on the small television screen (Flashdance, 1983; Footloose, 1984) or to attempt to draw audiences into the theaters with the promise of spectacular 70-mm photography and multitrack Dolby sound (Amadeus, 1984; Aliens, 1986). Ironically, the long-standing 35-mm theatrical feature survived in the mid-1980s in such unexpected places as “kidpix” (a form originally created to exploit the PG-13 rating when it was instituted in 1984—The Breakfast Club, 1985; Stand by Me, 1986) and, more dramatically, the Vietnam combat film (Oliver Stone’s Platoon, 1986; Coppola’s Gardens of Stone, 1987; Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, 1987). Responding to the political climate, the studios produced some of their most jingoistic films since the Korean War, endorsing the notion of political betrayal in Vietnam (Rambo: First Blood, Part II, 1985), fear of a Soviet invasion (Red Dawn, 1985), and military vigilantism (Top Gun, 1986). Films with a “literary” quality, many of them British-made, were also popular in the American market during the 1980s (A Passage to India, 1984; A Room with a View, 1985; Out of Africa, 1985).

These trends were taken to greater extremes in the 1990s and beyond, to the extent that the style and content of a film determined its most popular venue. Major advances in computer-generated animation and special effects allowed for films of unprecedented visual sophistication (Jurassic Park, 1993; Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, 1999; The Matrix, 1999), and audiences preferred the experience of seeing such films on large theater screens. Computer animation was also put to good use in films that play equally well on theater or television screens, such as Toy Story (1995), Antz (1998), and Chicken Run (2000). Independent producers, especially those who specialized in low-budget films of intimate subject matter, regained strength under the new regime of home video and created some of the most unconventional and interesting work the American cinema had seen in some time; they included the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan (Blood Simple, 1984; Fargo, 1996; O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 2000), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, 1999; Adaptation, 2002), and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, 1994; Jackie Brown, 1997). It was also an era in which low-cost marketing via the Internet could turn a $50,000 independent film into a $100,000,000 blockbuster (The Blair Witch Project, 1999). These “indie” films were too original to have been made in the studio era and too eccentric for the mass-market economies of the late 20th century. They harkened back to the vitality and integrity of the pre-studio age—to the work of D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Erich von Stroheim, and Charlie Chaplin—when anything was possible because everything was new.