Camera And Action, page 36
The early 1970s showed that experimental success could not sustain an industry. In time, a new set of filmmakers combined art with the potential for commercial success. These directors were "creatures of their own times," as film historian Jeanne Basinger put it. They were "comfortable with the big screen and the small, educated to have high artistic goals, but comfortable in the world of commerce."25 The Academy and critics had to catch up once again with the stirrings of viewers and accept the return of the good, common hero, the average "little guy" in the film that marked a turning point and brought the foundational years into a contemporary Hollywood. Spielberg's Jaws showed that the industry, audiences, and assumptions about the art and function of film were reconfigured during the sixties and again by 1975. Seasoned as a television director, Steven Spielberg shaped a provocative classic narrative about good and evil and confirmed what Coppola's pictures suggested earlier. Spielberg in 1975 "proved that genre films, skillfully directed in a traditional style, had returned."26
By Spielberg's entrance into the business, the tensions, anxieties, and fears that terrorized everyday Americans were imagined as a mechanical fish rather than an institution. The studio-trained enthusiast was an iconoclast of a different sort. Spielberg's anti- anti establishment art rescued vacationing tourists. His 1970s "everyman" helped displace the antiestablishment idol. Spielberg's "influences" themselves came from within. "I was truly more of a child of the establishment than I was a product of USC or NYU or the Francis Coppola protege clique." His heroes were locals who saved the town from Jaws, the shark in the depths of the deep eastern sea. Bringing up the rear of the film-school generation, Spielberg represented that part of the boomers more interested in conventional genres. The switch brought directors and producers of the blockbusters personal wealth unsurpassed by the previous generation in the business. Studio and censorship changes shifted the Hollywood infrastructure to accommodate historic conditions and the needs of filmmakers and audiences. Producer Richard Zanuck, for example, exceeded his father's entire career earnings with the Jaws receipts, video reproductions, and tie-in products.27
The blockbuster success did not mean that all filmmakers turned away from the artistic film. Changes in the industry made it possible for the social commentary pictures to succeed alongside the entertaining extravaganza of Jaws. The Academy recognized its investment in feature films as art. Cinema as a language of social change surfaced in the industry's choice of winners for the 1975 Oscars. Spielberg was sure he would win Best Director, but he was not even nominated. Instead, the Academy chose Milos Forman for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and decided Jaws was more notable for sound, music, and editing. Popular features challenged the success of the antigenre strain and offered a "celebration of renewal," a resolution for "the social order and its salvation," to use the words of Fredric Jameson.28
The iconoclasts continued to make the unusual film. Robert Altman tried to rouse viewers with Nashville (1975), a story of a rock star who pursues a Tennessee housewife. Arthur Penn offered to deconstruct the detective genre with Night Moves (1975). Both films' low box office grosses made critics such as Pauline Kael rail against the thought that "there's no audience for new work." Yet, Jaws was new and had an audience. As pundit Peter Biskind said it, "`Us' is no longer narrowly and tendentiously defined as the hip counterculture, but is expansive and inclusive, a new community comprised of just about everyone." Biskind conceded that Spielberg's film "transcended the political and demographic divisions between the Easy Rider counterculture audience and Nixon's ... middle-Americans."29
By 1975, the blockbuster shared its fame with new technology, offering Americans other options for screening enjoyment. Technology and computers guided the silver screen and the new cameras of success. The world of electronics not only changed production for the feature film but also redefined viewing habits. Sony helped viewers stay home and have their feature films, too. The company introduced Betamax, a cassette recorder for TV in 1975 and initiated the video-age in filmmaking and viewing. Time, Incorporated, added the concept of pay television with the Home Box Office (HBO) channel, which offered subscribers uncut and uninterrupted movie viewing. Ted Turner purchased MGM and its film vaults.30 The cable business, as Variety predicted, would be "the next great big-money market for Hollywood, which will dovetail perfectly in complementing profile with the theatre-going demographic studies. "31 Paying to watch movies in living rooms and renting a copy led the American film business promptly into its multinational, corporate era.
Like the films in this study, we remain much in the framework of the debates from the 1960s that developed into the 1970s multiculturalism, political correctness, and personal politics. All pertain to different levels of understanding and desire for redefinition of social, economic, and political structures in America and all were outgrowths of critical moments in 1960s social protests. The challenges required everyone to think about and respect change. Pro-civil rights, pro-gender equality, pro-ecology, demands for sexual freedom, and other once-radical notions were mainstreamed during this time. As one historian observed, "We are fundamentally a different culture, facing fundamentally different questions" because of the cultural environment developing during these years.32 This narrative, as historian David Farber writes, cannot seem to "go gently into the night," even as aging baby boomers made room for their younger siblings.33 American film's visual nature, reproductive capabilities, and highly developed industrial system have influenced the meaning of modern experience. The impact goes deeply into the American imagination and the period under question is part of the medium's potency. Changes in the industry, the break-up of the code era, and audience interest in European art films moved filmmaking into a new direction.
The enthusiasm for the artistic potential for commercial film coming out of campuses has become a legend for those remembering this era as foundational. New Yorker writer David Denby, nearly three decades later, pined yet again for those golden experimentalists. Why, he asked, would viewers fail to resist the phony exterior of another exploitation movie? Denby hankered for the critical eye of the college audience, those who saw themselves as the movie generation. Looking back nostalgically on the sixties and seventies in response to the unexpected success of independent director Nia Vardalas' My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), Denby wondered, "If filmmakers were able to find an older audience with this film, couldn't they also find that audience with a stronger movie?" In reality, what Denby wished promoters would discover was a "different audience." Yearning for that counterculture moment, Denby asked, "What happened, for instance, to the college kids who were courted so assiduously in the late sixties and early seventies? When movies were aimed at them, directors and writers were encouraged to take risks, and American mainstream filmmaking entered its most creative period." As Denby continued, "The college audience has ceased to exist in Hollywood's mind as a vanguard of taste."34
The boundary breakers of a time past, however, were most likely in the driver's seat. Making films and looking backward as much as forward, they no doubt noticed that even if it were true that today "practically everyone goes to college," it would not guarantee the same dynamic between filmmaker, viewer, and critic. Denby hoped the fault was with the filmmakers who failed to see that "maybe millions are waiting for new subjects and moods - waiting for a little attention."35 Yet it is more complicated than imagining an audience. It has to do with an attitude about what film can be, a new technology of moveable equipment that supplies the creative interest, and a social energy molded out of movements and intent.
Popular film is a valuable resource for understanding what was at stake for Americans at the time. Film and all of its complex aesthetics, storytelling, industry, presences, and absences means looking at a narrative's discursive make-up positioned within its role in mass entertainment. Generation, gender, and ethnicity frame what mattered in the debate over America, its people, and its social issues. As visualized stories constructing Americanness, these films serve the memory of the sixties and seventies. They relay the possibilities and limitations in advancing film as an art form, commercial success, and an agent in social change. Likewise, contemporary film, the new New Hollywood, found ways to resist and restore images of the cinematic past.
To answer why film mattered is to return to the year 1915 when D. W. Griffith proclaimed that American cinema would soon be the primary vehicle for educating audiences. Like a history book, film would serve as a window onto the past, with each frame revealing events as they must have been and speaking to a present time vividly and completely.36 Unlike books, however, film is a hybrid of stage entertainment, literature, art, photography, history, and technology and shares those traditions but creates something new out of them. The commercial industry took Griffith's hope beyond the margins of a visualized history and crossed popular, academic, and entrepreneurial boundaries. Not quite the primer Griffith had imagined, film at the very least is still a chronicle and a record. Depending on the lens, history ambiguously appears in feature films and confirms cinema's role as both an agent and a window treatment at once covering, enhancing, and decorating the past for the present. Reflective and affective, commercial features are part of the play with images believed to be the power in the agency of film.
Introduction
1. Joseph J. Mangano, LivingLegacy: How 1964 Changed America (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 170.
2. One of the motivations behind this project is to test the limits of the feature film as a piece of evidence from a historian's point of view. This project does not focus on the historical film or the "costume drama" that chooses specific historical subjects for narrative material but the feature film that operates as a form of mainstream entertainment and is recognized by the industry through the Academy's nominations and awards. The feature may contain historical references such as Alice's Restaurant does, but does not intend to pass as historical drama. Analyses of specifically historical films characterize the review section in American Historical Quarterly and journal ofAmerican History. Most often, the reviewer is concerned with film as it parallels "but cannot duplicate the methods or findings of" written history within the discipline as historian Robert Rosenstone points out. The film in this view functions as a mode of history similar to "serious works of visual history." Unlike many studies of historical films, this project does not begin with the fact or fiction of a film. To the contrary, the concern is with the construction of fiction that does not consciously engage in the discourse of history but is historical because it engages in discourse of the 1960s and 1970s and can be treated as a visual record of what existed in the dynamic between cameras and audiences for a new generation of filmmakers from 1965 to 1975. The historical film is the focus of such important works as Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions ofthe Past: The Challenge ofFilm to Our Idea ofHistory (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995); Tony Barta, ed., Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History (Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 1998); Mark C. Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995).
3. For example, the Pantages in Los Angeles was built in the summer of 1930 for $1.25 million. Part of the Fox Theater chain, it seats 2700 spectators.
4. Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 1.
5. Cinema of Third World Countries, for example, may use film as a "powerful tool of oppositional movements" against Hollywood's influence. For ways film studies can teach resistance reading of film, see Robert Sklar and Charles Musser, eds., Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 9.
6. Anthony Schilacci, "Film as Environment," Saturday Review 51 (28 Dec. 1968): 10.
7. David E. James, Allegories ofCinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 350.
8. The musical held on for another few years with Dr. Dolittle and Camelot, but after 1968 Hollywood largely abandoned it. Musicals also fared poorly in Europe, the market that provided a large percentage of revenues for successful pictures. When Bonnie and Clyde received nine nominations and The Graduate seven, it was clear that a new kind of movie had registered itself with American viewers.
9. Ronald Bergan, The UnitedArtists Story (New York: Crown Publishers, 1986), 1. See also Lis Pontecorvo, "The Raw Material: Film Resources," in The Historian and Film, ed. Paul Smith (Cambridge, London, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 16.
10. Stephen Greenblatt, "Culture," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990). As Greenblatt explains, "The concept of culture gestures toward what appears to be two opposite things: constraint and mobility" (ibid., 225). Culture both regulates and guarantees movement. Film is therefore a way to "come to terms with the governing patterns of culture" (ibid., 229). See also Stephen Greenblatt, "The Circulation of Social Energy," in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 1-20, for an explanation of the way an artistic work maintains social prominence and becomes an important means of transferring culture.
11. In Stephen Greenblatt's terms, culture is a "regulator and guarantor of movement," a means of "passing on order." To the degree that it recycles core American beliefs, values, and ideals, film guarantees cultural identity and regulates its parameters. Stephen Greenblatt, "Culture," 228.
12. Christopher Faulkner, "Teaching French National Cinema," Cinema Journal38.4 (Summer 1999): 88-93.
13. Hayden White, "AHR Forum," American Histori- calReview 93.5 (Dec. 1988): 1198. Quote is from Faulkner, "Teaching French National Cinema," 90.
14. Homi Bhadha defines cultural passage as the "recreation of the self in the world of travel, the resettlement of the borderline community of migration." Though film offers a different kind of travel, it still functions as a migration of sorts when viewers leave feeling as if they have participated in the world presented on the screen before their eyes. Homi Bhadha, Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge), 9.
15. See Joseph J. Mangano, Living Legacy, 1-2.
16. Douglas T. Miller, On Our Own: Americans in the Sixties (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1996), 181.
17. Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon What Happened and Why (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 3.
18. William O'Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History ofAmerica in the 1960's (New York: Quadrangle, 1971); Hodgson, America In Our Time; Alan Matusow, The Unraveling ofAmerica: A History ofLiberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
19. David Halberstam, "Farewell to the 60s," McCalls 97.4 (Jan. 1970), 85.
20.' Dominick Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).
21. Village Voice, 23 Dec. 1967, p. 22.
22. David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta, "Race, Ethnicity, and Political Legitimacy," in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 121.
23. Peter Biskind and Susan Sontag in Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-and-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 17.
Chapter I
1. William Tusher, "Hollywood 1967," The Film Daily Yearbook ofMotion Pictures 50 (1968): 90; Vincent Canby, "Jack Warner, 75, Resigns Top Job: Move Makes Darryl Zanuck the Last Tycoon," The New York Times, 25 July 1967. The Big Five (Paramount, RKO, Warner's, Loews, Inc., and Twentieth-Century-Fox) controlled production, film processing, music publishing, and other movie-related interests by 1929. William Tusher, "Window on Hollywood," The Film Daily Yearbook of Motion Pictures 49 (1967): 90, 92. William Tusher, "Hollywood 1967," 90.
2. Tusher, "Window on Hollywood," 94.
3. "Theatrical and TV Producers Unite Under a Single Hollywood Roof," Variety 234.7 (8 Apr. 1964): 5. By the mid-1950s, a large segment of television production had moved from New York to Los Angeles. The timing was right by the 1960s for such a unification to take place effectively. With Los Angeles turning into the dominant region for television production by then, the industry integrated well into the development of consumerism and a rising popular culture.
4. "Producers Unite in Movie-TV Group," The New York Times, 29 Mar. 1964. The movie companies consisted of Allied Artists, Columbia, Disney, M.G.M., Paramount, Fox, Universal, U.A., Warners, and the television sector consisting of Bellmar Enterprise, Amigo Productions, Bing Crosby Productions, Calvada, Daystar, Desilu, Mayberry Enterprises, and others. The former organizations included the Association of Motion Pictures and the Alliance of Television Film Producers.
5. "Movie Producers Reporting Gains," The New York Times, 5 July 1964. See also Peter Bart, "Expansion Begun by Movie Studios," The New York Times, 21 Apr. 1965. New York Times' specials writer, Peter Bart, remarked, "The expansion programs are in contrast to the aura of economic gloom that pervaded the major studios as recently as two years ago when at least one studio, 20th-Century-Fox, was all but closed down."
