Camera And Action, page 35
Generated in part by Coppola's blockbuster success in The Godfather in 1972, the "world of the contemporary cinema" emerged. Those experimentalists on college campuses took the high road through mainstream film, popularizing classical narratives in ways that set the standard for content and taste for the upcoming Generation X. The college-trained group such as Martin Scorsese developed sophisticated narratives for the audiences seasoned on probing the complex underbelly of contemporary America. Outside the film-school circle, another boomer with a knack for the visual, Steven Spielberg, drew viewers back to the family picture. His 1975 spectacle Jaws led the next generation of blockbusters forward with the particular kind of electronic experimentation the film offered. More interested in classic stories than the experimental element, Spielberg fashioned myth into the language of American film. Coppola's colleague and collaborator George Lucas further drew the era that brought the independent experimentalists - the Easy Riders, the Alice's Restaurants - into classic stories of good and evil. Once more filmmakers adjusted the lens for an America that had changed. Antigenre and traditional story makers lined their cameras up, side by side, and prepared for the next view of the promise that is the agency of film.
The Seventies movies meant so much to young people.... The kids who said "Wow!" when they came out of a movie and couldn't say any more were expressing some deep feeling. The kids who come out of Twister may say "Wow!" but it isn't the same "Wow!" It's a special-effects "Wow!"
- Pauline Kael interview
As The Godfather: Part II swept the Academy Awards and played in theaters around the world, a rookie director, twenty-nine-year-old Steven Spielberg, completed production near Martha's Vineyard of a film that defined the contemporary blockbuster for decades. The Jaws project began in early 1974 and opened a year later in June at 409 theaters around the country. Bringing in over seven million dollars during its first weekend, the project earned six times The Godfathers' combined initial run. With other big-budgets - The Exorcist (1973), The Sting (1973), and The Towering Inferno (1974)-indeed the experimental era of the "Now Movie" deferred to a new New Hollywood.'
Some saw the beginning of a new golden age; others saw a red flag. Next to the lowbudget experiment of Easy Rider, these big films seemed like sell-outs. Peter Biskind praised the monumental directors of the seventies, but disputed "the cultural revolution of that decade." Real change, he claimed, "like the political revolution of the '60s, ultimately failed." Writer-director Leonard Schrader, Paul's older brother, found that "this group of people started to make really interesting films, and then just took a toboggan ride into the gutter. How the hell did that ever happen?" Like Schrader and Biskind, Peter Bogdanovich lamented the change. To him, the new industry verified that the experimentalist moment had caved in to the American system of wealth. After jaws, filmmakers forgot how to make the artistic movie. "They're no longer interested," he lamented.2
As in the larger society, evolution, not revolution, was possible. Artistry eclipsing economics demanded too much of American viewers and the industry. Within those limitations, however, something had happened. There was a transfer of artistic power from the producer to the director, a new status for independent filmmaking, a rising interest in the artistic potential of the feature, and new content for mainstream cinema. The years 1965-1975 witnessed the end of the old studio structure and the censorship code system and the development of a ratings classification. By the end of the 1960s, the industry redefined itself with new chief Jack Valenti and a national organization promoting quality cinema, the American Film Institute. These foundational changes were generated partially by members of a younger generation who saw film as their art. Interested devotees formed film societies, took film education courses in college, and developed regional film festivals. Accomplishments between 1965 and 1975 confirmed the status of cinema as "the art that matters."3
Subverting convention by picking up a camera seemed a promising form of activism for sixties experimentalists. Film, like a social movement or piece of legislation to reconfigure American society, had the potential to change minds. From the local film society to the campus classroom to the annual film festival, film's agency appeared promising. At the very least, it would provide consciousness-raising, helping "people to think and feel their relationship to their conditions of existence" as film educator Christopher Faulkner put it. "The most important knowledge we can take away from the cinema," he argued, "must be knowledge of our social existence [s] ." 4
In this environment, it was not the big name but the unusual story that engaged viewers. They expected "something new and something different," Richard Zanuck remarked.5 The "amorphous under-30 audience," as film historian Diane Jacobs described them, showed it was tired of the costume drama and the safe situation comedy. "6 Other writers noted, "The self-styled new film generation never thinks of movies as an `industry' but idealistically as `the language of today. "'7 Only a few years before that such an idea would have been "a crass outrage," a Saturday Review pundit declared! With boomer enthusiasm, film earned the status in America as the preferred art form and the place to invest the most artistic vitality at hand. Encouraged by the creative freedom within the industry by the late 1960s and spurred by the antiestablishment sentiment, the young showed their passion for revolutionizing the role of film in American society.
The fervent interest in a cinema of change helped cast a shadow on the musical extravaganza, the bedrock of studio Hollywood. Before 1965, the industry invested in the family epic, the musical, and the spectacle picture. Producers controlled the filmmaking process and directors worked as technicians. Gradually, American viewers showed that the European art film, the auteur cinema, had widespread support in theaters across the country. TwentiethCentury-Fox's Cleopatra (1963) should have been the warning sign, with its extensive losses. The industry was slow to respond, however, and thought it still had a lively market when The Sound of Music (1965) broke box office records. With the dissolution of the censorship code and changing social mores, however, Hollywood awoke to the value of an experimental film such as Easy Rider. Captain America's ride made it clear to filmmakers that Hollywood would no longer be haunted by the ghost of the "zillion million" spectacle or "some ancient Egyptian queen on a cruddy barge," as one Look writer commented.
Experimentation with mainstream film brought a star image better matched to the tastes and identities of the under-thirty audience. By the time Francis Coppola collaborated with Mario Puzo, audiences had seen the new "rough hewn" talent of Hoffman, Fonda, Hopper, Ross, Christie, and Guthrie.10Added to those were Pacino, De Niro, and Duvall. Few knew any of these actors before the improvisation period in filmmaking. Audiences interested in watching stars of a different kind helped the industry turn the corner toward a fresh film business. Together they became forces in Hollywood.
Changes in the infrastructure along with new attitudes toward film ultimately altered the exhibition arm of the industry. Exhibitors at the time confirmed that content, not geography, determined audience choice. They reorganized advertising enticements and targeted the new composition of film markets based on ratings categories." The classification of films established in the latter sixties and early seventies helped guide specific interests for marketers. The R-rated film became a solid money maker and improved the chance for Hollywood's mainstream big-budget film to broaden its appeal. Generally, exhibitors refused to show the Xrated film and newspapers declined space for advertising. In 1971, the industry added another category: PG (Parental Guidance) for the adolescent group. The PG markets sat alongside the R-rated class, and Eisenstein-like aesthetics integrated with Hollywood drama. By 1975, as one film historian noted, "the full impact of the movie ratings system was clearly established. 1112
The body of pictures considered in this study characterizes the development of film as the art that mattered and the place where experimental enthusiasm met commercial success. During this period, both filmmakers and viewers imagined themselves as producers of something called the "Now Movie." Filmmakers arrived in Hollywood politically aware of the culture debates circulating throughout America and eager to challenge the traditional boundaries of film. Collectively, they examined popular notions about the generation gap, counterculture wisdom, feminist insights, and ethnic self-advancement. Each film in this study questioned incongruities in the American promise of equality, whether embedded in generational and gender hegemony or patriarchal dominance and Anglo-centered identity. In one way or another, these films made the contradictory nature of American society "intelligible" rather than cohesive. They each promoted "telling it like it is" to represent youth, men, women, and ethnic cultures. For the role they played in satisfying taste in cinematic changes, they earned an iconic place in American culture. The aesthetic, intellectual, social, and experimental components of these films exhibited the extent to which they were agents in social change. In the way they framed the world, these pictures tested the "boundaries to power and to perception-that is, to representation."13 In the years 1965-1975, between the hope for film to be an agent in social change and raising commercial success to new levels, Hollywood made its contemporary move.
The ten films of this study spoke to a number of contentious issues and offered remedies for American ailments. Each picture voiced the concerns of a particular group. The Graduate spoke for a younger generation that found the consumer culture of American society dehumanizing. In Alice's Restaurant, folk singer Arlo Guthrie took viewers from the East to the West and back again to Alice and Ray Brock's lively Vermont commune. Easy Rider tapped into Americans' fondness for the West. With their Harleys, Wyatt and Billy replaced the classic Western hero bikers on the road again. Midnight Cowboy tested the Western's legacy and its influence on the construction of male identity. M*A *S*H deconstructed American power and exceptionalism and unequivocally dismissed the American military while conjuring conventional roles for women. When feminism asked hard questions of patriarchy in the larger society, McCabe and Mrs. Miller rewrote the Western yet again to allow room for women and changing notions of masculine identity. Just as it seemed a woman could be represented as strong and capable in mainstream film, Carnal Knowledge appeared to remind audiences that nothing had changed between men and women.
A new film model challenged the dominant Anglo culture of autonomy during the multicultural debates.14 Little Big Man brought real Indians to the screen to portray themselves and undo decades of stereotypes. In the process, the film played with new pigeonholes for Native Americans on screen. With the emphasis on ethnic belonging and the family, The Godfather showed audiences that "ethnic heritage ... often plays an integral if rarely examined role in creative activity."15 Two years later, The Godfather: Part II filled in the story of immigration from the turn of the century and commented on the downside of assimilation and success. These two films brought the gangster genre back to Hollywood with contemporary flair.
These films redefined the individual's place in America by imagining new social roles, displaying new attitudes, and forming new perceptions of lifestyle and the young's rejection of tradition for autonomy. Showing the changes taking place in America at the time, these moving pictures marked the shift in the industry's focus from a generic adult audience to a specific young-adult with distinct interests. In The Graduate, Benjamin and Elaine leave their families and carve a new path for their generation. In Alice's Restaurant, Arlo Guthrie shows the limits of the counterculture family and departs for a life on the road, autonomous from even the idealistic hope of the hippie commune. The classic statement of 1960s autonomy comes through Easy Rider and the cyclists' journey away from ties that bind. Finally, Mrs. Constance Miller enters western territory alone to stage her independence in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. These and other films taught viewers to cherish separation and self-sufficiency. The Godfather films joined the conversation and showed that the much revered American individualism was not obvious for families bound to heritage and bent on preserving a culture threatened by the melting pot.
Penn, Altman, and Nichols claimed a new authority as voices for a younger audience that called for alternative renderings and resolutions of social strife through new representations of generation and gender. Hopper and Fonda - closer in age and sensibility to boomer audiences - pushed film further into experimental territory and Coppola incorporated old with new by asking how to widen the scope of Anglo-centered distinctiveness for Italian Americans. From The Graduate to The Godfather, these films showed that meaning is open, not fixed and preset or entirely predictable. Their meaning lies in what Christopher Faulkner labels "the contradictory or the heterogeneous." This in-between space, the unoccupied gaps, is itself the enabling condition - and not the antithesis - of any projected 'unity.""' At a time when Americans saw film as the space for imagining a new society and when the "heterogeneous" and the "contradictory" emerged out of conventional culture, film indeed seemed "now," "new," and "real." This set of films dramatized the meaning-making process celebrated through new images of generation, gender, and ethnicity because of, not in spite of, their noticeable incongruities. These films could ask hard questions about gaps, gendered hierarchies, and repressed desires of identification and still make money.
It was not by filmmaking alone that the "cinematic ferment" of the sixties resulted in a mature film age by the mid-seventies. The next generation of filmmakers asked film to be personal and filmmaking spontaneous. It was the experience, not the message, that mattered. Young viewers saw their lives reflected more closely in Benjamin Braddock's impulsive freeway race to find Elaine than in Maria's story of destiny in The Sound of Music. "Telling it like it is" governed the camera's work and, as one professor said, "Instead of resisting change and bottling it, film intensifie[d] the experience of change, humanizing it in the process. 1117 In answer to the new spirit of viewing, the films' constructions, their fictions, and social life manifested the ways people debated, negotiated, and imagined their relationships at a historical moment of social volatility when American youth were engaged in common antiestablishment protest.
The success of the films speaks for the claims of audiences that cinema could raise consciousness and therefore alter society. Film incorporated social experimentation into cinematic subject matter with help from the active engagement of audiences. As one historian claimed, "The issues raised have demanded new perspectives on society, new analyses, new urgencies for self-examination. 1118 Audiences and directors agreed on film as one avenue of activism for internalizing pressing social concerns.
Independent production and experimentation were encouraged in the early 1970s. At that time, independents made up 30 percent of the movie market, but retreated with the rise of mythic-style narratives in the following years. Interest in European cinematic art waned, and viewers attracted to art films lost their influential voice. Classic stories scripted the new New Hollywood that advanced the next series of films.'
Splitting two decades into late and early years highlights the fundamental change made in the industry and in audiences' taste for film. The grouping also shows the period of time that created culture divisions among Americans. The latter years of radical protest contrasted to the idealistic reform of the early ones. The early seventies highlighted the struggles for resolution of explosive social issues. The gender debates, the Roe v. Wade decision, the controversy over Vietnam, generational conflict, affirmative action, and other legislation challenged the nation in new ways. Debates ensued about Americanness and belonging. It seemed to be a nation of individuals with little sense of community. Yet a unified America, a time of consensus, was a fantasy. As Christopher Faulkner tells us, cohesiveness "can never be more than imagined, fictive, rhetorical." Rather, "continual tension" and "instability" are "the motor and dynamic that tests the limits (and potentialities) of social and personal identity. 1120 The seventies reorganized American society after cultural beliefs, attitudes, and values had already shifted to left of center. Since the films in this study have taken on symbolic meaning as representative of America, they unmistakably show how far shifts could go at the time and how deeply those years implanted social dividing lines.
In reconfiguring Hollywood or the larger society, new contradictions emerged. By and large, whether experimental or conventional genre, film at this time showed and told experiences from white perspectives. Race, in the atmosphere of experimentation, failed to claim significant space. Filmmakers and writers for the most part addressed issues more of generation, gender, and ethnicity than of race.21 African American producers and directors had not yet gained an inside voice in the industry. Race obviously appeared on screen, but safe narratives dominated the screens at the time.22 Films dealing with racialized experience advanced the civil rights agenda as a subject of narratives starring African Americans and receiving both Academy notice and popular acclaim.23
Considering the active engagement of audiences who believed film to be an agent in social change, the reasons for absent images rest on questions of discourse and domination. What did succeed, however, was the incorporation of black actors into conventional narratives. Charismatic detective John Shaft, played by Richard Roundtree, for example, triggered a successful entertainment series of formula films with black actors as heroes. The success of Shaft sparked the development of films appropriately labeled "blaxploitation" that placed blacks in the lead roles of classic detective, spy, private eye, and other formula stories. The cleverness of these twists opened a market for those interested in seeing the silver screen through the lens of "soul," as the popular reference went. Shaft's success marks the extent of possibilities for the popular film to subvert and reconstruct society, but the films in this study also measure the distance between the safe zone and the provocative, the unusual, and the unacceptable. Within the discursive limitations in what proved to be popular lies the work of film as a cultural battleground and an agent between 1965 and 1975.24
