weekend p5
Film is the slowest medium to reflect dramatic shifts in popular culture or taste. The time-scale involved in writing, raising finance, and putting together a movie, means the world can change before the finished product hits the screen. This was never so obvious than in late 1960s Hollywood.
While social protest was sweeping America, the Hollywood studios were still in the grip of grizzled old septuagenarians like Daryl F. Zanuck or Jack Warner. Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones were redefining popular music but Hollywood, still mesmerised by the huge success of The Sound of Music in 1965, was turning out expensive, flaccid, old-fashioned musicals like Dr Dolittle and Camelot.
On the fringes of the mainstream industry, newer, more marginal voices were beginning to be heard. Stanley Kubrick had directed his Cold War satire Dr Strangelove, John Cassavetes was developing his improvisatory techniques. But at the time, these must have seemed like the sort of maverick auteurs who had always struggled to survive on the fringes of Hollywood.
The real energy in 1960s cinema was coming from outside America, from the directors of the French New Wave such as Truffaut and Godard, from Antonioni and Fellini in Italy, from Bergman and Kurosawa. At the newly-established film schools in New York and Los Angeles, students were devouring these films, and rediscovering the works of the great Hollywood masters: Hawks, Ford and Hitchcock.
Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, vividly describes the revolution which took place at the end of the 1960s in US movies, and the extraordinary wave of talent unleashed upon the world by the movie brat generation
The first cracks in the old edifice appeared in 1967, with two groundbreaking films, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and John Boorman's Point Blank. Both movies appropriated elements of the classic gangster genre, but also introduced many of the innovations of European art cinema - elliptical narratives, anti-heroes, new ways of filming and editing.
Bonnie and Clyde and Point Blank were breakthroughs, but it was the commercial success of another film which really kick-started the New Hollywood.
Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper's drug-fuelled, shambolic road movie, baffled studio executives but had hippy kids queuing barefoot around the block. It was the first time the Flower Power generation had seen their lives reflected onscreen, and they reacted ecstatically. Cinema owners had to take the doors off their toilet stalls to stop audiences retiring there for some reefer madness.
Easy Rider is awful rubbish, but it finally proved the point made by Bonnie and Clyde and Point Blank, that audiences were sick of Hollywood's deep conservatism - in style as well as subject matter. The floodgates opened.
Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, a broad satire on military incompetence in the Korean War, chimed well with the anti-war feeling running so high at its release in 1969, and introduced Altman's episodic, sardonic style to audiences.
Altman was a maverick talent with a background in 1950s television drama who had enthusiastically embraced the hippy movement, and who was to make several of the most important films of the following decade. William Friedkin made the gritty, cynical thriller The French Connection in a naturalistic style that which drew on his own background in documentaries. Peter Bogdanovich, an ardent cinephile who had written extensively on the work of John Ford and Howard Hawks, made The Last Picture Show, an elegiac poem to small-town America (shot in black and white, unthinkable at the time).
Perhaps most memorably, Francis Ford Coppola, who had been making features for several years (he shot his debut, the Roger Corman-produced Dementia 13, in Ireland in 1963), and who acted as mentor to several of the younger directors, made The Godfather, an extraordinary adaptation of Mario Puzo's pulp novel which redefined the gangster genre.
Another Italian-American New Yorker, Martin Scorsese, made a startling debut with the extraordinary Mean Streets, following it up with the equally explosive Taxi Driver, a film which encapsulates more than any other the darkness at the soul of the 1970s.
Many other movies - like Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Terence Malick's Badlands, Alan J. Pakula's Klute - were produced in this incredible blossoming of talent, which found its strongest media champion in the New Yorker's film critic, Pauline Kael.
While many of these films reflected the concerns of the 1960s counter-culture, in their distrust of father figures, their pessimistic dissection of the American Dream, and their explicit depiction of sexuality and violence, they are also very much of their own time - of Watergate, of disillusionment and some at least, can be seen as harbingers of the right-wing backlash to come. "In the seventies, we felt families were disintegrating, and our national family, led by the family in the White House, was full of back-stabbing," says Chinatown writer Robert Towne, talking about The Godfather. "Here was this role model of a family who stuck together, who'd die for one another . . . It was really kind of reactionary in that sense - a perverse expression of a desirable and lost cultural tradition."
The new wave of films brought new stars with them - actors like Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson whose stalled careers were revived in the late 1960s, or Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, whose brooding intensity and anti-WASP looks were attuned to the times. But for these film-makers, the director was the real star. Biskind details the obsessive length to which many of them went in order to retain as much control as possible and, just as important, claim all the credit at the expense of writers, producers and technicians.
In the tradition of other Hollywood Babylon tell-all books of recent years, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is also packed with tales of the excess, megalomania, self-abuse and abysmal behaviour of its key protagonists. Biskind's book is a catalogue of Boys Behaving Badly, from (one of his more interesting points is that most of the new directors were younger brothers, driven by a desire for the power and recognition they were denied in their own families). Women were treated like dirt, : "like lampposts to be pissed on", in the words of one contemporary, and it's hard to feel any sympathy for the anguished squeals when many of those featured were saddled with multi-million dollar alimony suits in the 1980s.
And when things got difficult, the drugs didn't help. Many of the producers, writers and directors who define the era came to Hollywood at a time when it was earnestly believed that dropping as much acid or smoking as much grass as possible would make you both a better person and a better artist. By the time they started gaining the fame and fortune they craved, cocaine had become the drug of choice, and it's easy to see its effect in the increasingly overblown, narcissistic and self-indulgent movies of the later 1970s. Many of the Hollywood brats were spinning out of control, and their hugely expensive follies de grandeur were failing to find audiences. Some of these movies - Scorsese's New York, New York, Malick's Days of Heaven, Michael Cimino's Heavens Gate - had (and still have) their champions, but their commercial failure spelt trouble for the New Hollywood. And it was becoming clear that there was another, safer way.
Steven Spielberg had always been the odd one out among the movie brats. Shy, bespectacled and nerdish, he was almost a figure of fun, but he had the last laugh when Jaws broke all box office records in 1975. It was Jaws, and the even greater success of Coppola protege George Lucas's Star Wars two years later, which showed the studios the power of the popcorn blockbuster.
"Star Wars swept all the chips off the table," says William Friedkin. "What happened with Star Wars was like when McDonald's got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared. Now we're in a period of devolution. Everything has gone backward toward a big sucking hole."
Lucas, not surprisingly, disagrees. "Star Wars didn't kill the film industry, or infantilise it", he says. "Popcorn pictures have always ruled. Why do people go to see these popcorn pictures when they're not good? Why is the public so stupid? That's not my fault. I just understood what people liked to go see, and Steven has too, and we go for that."
From a cynical, commercial perspective (which is what drives the Hollywood system, after all), the early 1970s was a period of wiping the slate clean, getting rid of old wood and preparing the industry for the multiplex-oriented, effects-driven action blockbusters of the 1980s and 1990s.
The subsequent stories of many of the seventies wave make for sad reading. The careers of Rafelson, Bogdanovich and Friedkin tailed off into mediocrity. Altman spent years in the wilderness before making a typically erratic comeback in the 1990s.
Terence Malick disappeared for two decades - The Red Badge of Courage, his first film since Days of Heaven, is one of the most intriguing releases of the next few months. Coppola's career spectacularly imploded in a flurry of debt and recrimination following the catastrophic One from the Heart. Since then, he seems never to have recovered his film-making talent - apparently preferring to devote more of his energy to his California winery.
Only Scorsese has managed to continue producing work of consistent quality and interest, and Biskind rightly places his Raging Bull as the final great work of the period. So much talent and so much promise was squandered or crushed in the space of ten years, but a body of work which includes The Godfathers I and II, Nashville, Taxi Driver, The Last Picture Show, Five Easy Pieces and China- town, along with many other significant films, still stands as one of the greatest eras in cinema history.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, by Peter Biskind (Bloomsbury, £20 in the UK)