Camera And Action, page 7
If a sizeable share of the movie-watching audience was college educated, then that voice would be heard at production centers and box offices. Exhibitors since the fifties have easily exploited the teenage film, but with a new emphasis on the filmmaker as artist, eager cinematic aesthetes encouraged the production of critical perspectives. College audiences demonstrated that there was room for subtlety and discriminating taste in the feature narrative and gave movie directors a chance to dabble in a variety of film styles. The low budget had a special appeal by the end of the sixties. Audience exuberance allowed filmmakers to develop their vision by cultivating a critical distance from both their narratives and their viewers, and still make money.75 What began as an art-house product had unquestionably spread into the mainstream film industry with such notice that film critics tagged the new development the "Now Movie."76 In Harpers' estimation, "What these new movies will do to - and, potentially, for - the art and entertainment business, economically, will be of no small consequence." The former "fiscal upheavals" would pale in comparison to Hollywood's dislocation "by talented young people who are no longer clamoring at movieland's golden West Coast gates."77
The industry had transformed itself, and perhaps the best visible sign that film production registered audiences' tastes, complaints, and demands for more artistic products was the creation of a national organization that legitimized the intellectual value of feature films. Film enthusiasts saw their quest for artistic merit partially satisfied with the formation of the American Film Institute (AFI), a nationally supported film establishment under the Johnson Administration and the National Foundation of the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. The institute was the result of years of discussion, reflection, analysis, and countless proposals. Among these involved entities were the universities, the motion picture industry, the federal government, film museums, archives, and other screen education groups, not the least of which was AFFS. Members of the academic community had submitted a detailed proposal for the American Film Institute by mid-decade. At the Dartmouth conference participants held an AFI session where they pledged not to let the momentum for creating a strong institute dissipate. The critical first step, as the AFFS managing editor remarked, was to establish "how ... each agency [could] best serve the development of an enlightened film public through the relevant channels of the American Film Institute."78
The official governing body was formed June 5, 1967, after a great deal of controversy and fear that it would be just another Hollywood since the board was filled with industry celebrities. Gregory Peck was acting chairman of the Board of Trustees during the planning stage and Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Valenti, Fred Zinnemann, Sidney Poitier, and other Hollywood affiliates served as board members.79 With a substantial contribution from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute was well in place by the end of the decade. In 1968, the Institute opened the Center for Advanced Film Studies, serving "as a bridge between film study and film-making as a profession." The Center drew university graduates interested in a tutorial with accomplished directors.80 Leading filmmakers such as Ella Kazan, Lawrence Turman, and Arthur Penn participated in selecting students who would learn every aspect of the industry. AFI's tutorial program offered filmmaker and student alike an alternative to the studio system and made a career in film after university training not only possible but likely. Arthur Penn chose Jeff Young, a typical AFI Fellow and budding filmmaker, to be a trainee for Alice's Restaurant. As Young quipped, "I got my Phi Beta Kappa for my mother, my law degree for my father, and I'm in films for myself."81
In addition to centralized training, the Institute also funded the formation of film studies programs across the country. For the first time in America, filmmaking emulated European models of aesthetic development supported by national institutions, fashioned by university film departments, and filled with promising university graduates. The education arm of the Institute created film libraries for teachers, conducted teacher training seminars, and funded model curricula sessions.82 As AFI director George Stevens, Jr., remarked, the Institute meant "to transform the essential film experience from making out in the last row of the loges to breaking out of a 70-year straight jacket about the seriousness of literature and the frivolity of film."83 The Institute also set in place the foundational purpose of the AFFS's original call for more substantial films.84
The AFI brought together filmmaker, filmmaking, film society enthusiast, film education for the ideal viewer, film preservation, and accessibility to advance cinema as an art and address its many industrial changes and cultural influences. Fundamentally, film sophistication became a site of debate about whose experience and ideas of truth commercial film should represent. The wider inclusion of a nontraditional art-form in college curricula, occurring at the same time an uncensored film industry endeavored to clarify its professional stance, converged with growing national support for independent filmmaking. These components made it possible to justify experimentation in film, satisfy audience taste, and affect production in mainstream cinema.85
American audiences would soon enjoy the cinematic goods of the young "auteur" coming from film schools and institutes. Until then, filmmakers a few years older caught the attention of mainstream audiences with the artistic "now movie." Critic Arthur Knight confirmed that "what had started out in the art houses had suddenly swept into the mainstream of filmmaking, and with such force, such impact, as to demolish any picture made in the more traditional or conventional modes."86 Despite the exaggeration, by the end of the 1960s, viewers who grew up mesmerized by a world of ubiquitous images provided the necessary vision for the new energy. What began during the mid-1960s helped set the foundation for the growth of film studies as an academic subject while academics formulated more cohesive film standards, campus departments, and training programs.
A new constituent in American culture who wished to talk about art in mainstream movies would be pleasantly surprised by the currency of films released on American screens in 1967. Directors updated their assumptions about who their viewers were and what they wanted. One filmmaker aptly picked up his camera to shape a narrative about changes taking place on college campuses, in the home, and on the streets. Mike Nichols, the director of Virginia Woolf, found the tropes and subject matter to chance cinematic experimentation in the feature film and help viewers understand current social changes. Nichols brought his vision of American film as art in line with broad stirrings about the widening, bothersome generation gap, the counterculture, and campus strife. A key 1960s film, The Graduate, fulfilled new audience desire and responded to the call for making film art. Extensively praised for embodying the concerns of a sixties generation, Mike Nichols' The Graduate became the purveyor of generational dissent, not because the picture inspired revolution, but because it articulated a belief and a vision about film's revolutionary nature. In essence, The Graduate held a mirror up to a generation that saw itself at its most confident and commanding moment.
This is Benjamin. He's a little worried about his future.
- Tagline from The Graduate
It is unlikely that the gap between the young and us vegetables has ever been wider in some respects than it is now.
- Russell Lynes, "Cool Cheer or Middle Age"
But nothing has any meaning until it's released, and the audience decides.
-Mike Nichols, Playboy Interview
Why Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) of The Graduate (1967) should be worried about his future is not entirely clear. He graduated from a prestigious eastern college as valedictorian of his class, has a red convertible waiting for him at his parents' Beverly Hills home, and is surrounded by a crowd of caring friends offering congratulations and innovative business prospects. Mr. McGuire (Walter Brooke), a colleague of Ben's father (William Daniels), lets him in on a secret for a promising life: "The future is in plastics." Despite audiences' resounding laughs, it clearly was. Yet director Mike Nichols had something else in mind for his graduate. His Benjamin would not be satisfied with the older generation's formula for success. Instead, Nichols made it clear that the time had come to discover a new sense of the young, and that meant adjusting the lens to frame Ben's point of view.
No film better exemplifies the convergence of industry and audience changes and no film more successfully exploited the generation gap than The Graduate. Nichols integrated unfamiliar actors, nonformula narrative, daring sexuality, and generational discourse into a synthetic whole. His award winner telescoped multiple changes of attitudes, beliefs, and values into the image of an alienated college graduate. This film not only ensured Dustin Hoffman's fame, but it transformed the image of star icons. The open-ended conclusion and uneven stroryline added to film's experimental appeal. Most notably, the film discarded an older generation's notion of success and cheered on an "inarticulate Benjamin" who found doing nothing a potent form of resistance.' Middle-class youth wishing to distinguish themselves from their parents and challenge an older generation's set of truths now had a co-conspirator.
Promotional poster of Mike Nichols' 1967 film The Graduate (Photofest).
The Graduate became one of the most popular films following its release in December 1967 and one of the most written about. It grossed over $104 million in its initial offering and over $30 million in its rentals and thirty-year anniversary edition. One film critic called it the "epicenter of Hollywood's 1960s' `youthquake' movement" and maybe even "the definitive film of its era."2 Martin Quigley, Jr., pronounced The Graduate "one of the phenomenal Hollywood pictures of the 1960s." Those who "disliked it and predicted a commercial failure," Quigley wrote, "seldom ... proved so wrong in advance about any picture."3 The film had no bankable stars, yet it accomplished what Nichols set out to do - to explore "a subject that has been badly exploited and mangled in Hollywood -the `youth scene .1114 The film caught on and, considering that European films and other American fare had critically approached the youth topic before, it raised questions of why now.
Mike Nichols' mature content for mature audiences took the boomers from the Jan and Dean Surf "epics" into the young-adult SMA category.' The film's irreverent, rebel-graduate sat somewhere in between the Beach Party set and the art film anti-hero. As Hollywood Citizen-News reported, "The Graduate is bawdy, naughty and a bit rowdy - and is recommended for adults only - but the humorous way."6 This film validated Hollywood's talk about the directorial touch of Mike Nichols and also underscored the industry's "new climate of creative freedom and adventure"-as William Tusher described it. The success of producer Lawrence Turman and Mike Nichols, both in their early thirties, granted a certain assurance to directors with an interest in the experimental twist in feature films. With backing from Joseph E. Levine at Embassy Pictures, Nichols and Turman turned Charles Webb's perceptive novel into a "Now Movie." 7
The Nichols team helped crystallize the "under thirty" assumption that materialism was a nasty habit of the older generation. The film became a virtual mirror of resonating symbols-plastic sunglasses, hot cars, California swimming pools, Better Homes and Gardens houses - and a vibrant Simon and Garfunkel musical score. Yet, if the film took viewers on a tour of the post-World War II accomplishment of material security, it also advanced contemporary social attitudes: old is bad; new is good. By conferring onto the younger generation the role of delivering society, The Graduate justified young people's challenge to the authority of their parent generation. This film combined contemporary concerns over guilty pleasures with deeply-rooted American anxieties about what the effects of materialism meant. The Graduate ironically endorsed changing tastes for something new, inventive, and youthful while it circulated images of desire for a de facto lifestyle the younger generation took for granted. As Cue reported, the film "is a clarion call to youth."8 Moreover, this film indicated that Hollywood's "looked-for" audience now existed and did make a mark on the film industry. As Film Society Reviewer critic Paul Seydor commented two years after the film's release, "Had it not been so successful, such films as ROMEO AND JULIET, GOODBYE COLUMBUS, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, EASY RIDER, CHE!, LAST SUMMER, ROSEMARY'S BABY, THREE IN THE ATTIC, THE STERILE CUCKOO, JOHN AND MARY, and ALICE'S RESTAURANT would probably never have been made."9
The film affected and reflected what circulated in the popular press over generational authority. While The Graduate was in production, for example, Life reported that the younger generation would resolve the perils of modernization. This popular magazine touted the younger generation as the new conduit of hope by emphasizing their attributes of honesty and authenticity. In such articles as "The Search for Purpose: Among the Youth of America, A Fresh New Sense of Commitment," Life clearly separated young from old. The older generation was smug in their financial security, and their world of "technocratic totalitarianism" had created meaningless lives. The young, however, were "fully-alive" and refused to be the automatons of old whose robotic dedication to work, duty, and consumerism threatened to deplete their humanity.10
Nichols established the same discourse in the film with opening shots of a newly automated world sucking the spirit out of people. The film opens, for example, with Benjamin having just addressed his graduating class and leaving for his Los Angeles home. He rides the airport escalator while the film's theme song, "Sounds of Silence," plays. Viewers see a closeup of Ben gliding along the LAX walkway while credits roll and Simon and Garfunkel sing about people who hear but don't speak or listen. "Sounds of Silence" defines Ben's alienation and determines his separation from, if not superiority to, those immersed in contemporary society. Ben eyes the figurative 10,000-plus people and establishes the value in his astute observation that he is not one of them. The early sequences determine the validity of the generation gap and echo the same divide as in Life's "Search for Purpose."
Generation-gap arguments also surfaced in the academic setting in the fall of 1967, just before The Graduate appeared. Student body presidents and editors from colleges and high schools and executive officers from young people's political groups organized a forum at a "Students and Society" conference on the West Coast. The focus was on ways to proceed in a "severely troubled national and international order they are soon to inherit." Their foundational premise rested on the assumption that "the gap between the generations today is deep and unbridgeable." Evidence for such an indictment included Vietnam, urban racial strife, American imperialism in third-world countries, and the belief that "never has adult leadership appeared so faint and so unrelated to the basic issues." Conference spokesman W. H. Ferry confidently wrote, "This is why, these young people say, they will not, on passing the magical age of 30, subside into the comfortable slots in the Establishment open to them because of their native intelligence and [mostly] middle-class backgrounds.""
New York University's Frederick Richman declared at the gathering that "a bona fide generation gap exists today - beyond mere difficulties in transition - and it is qualitatively different from those that have occurred before." As he argued, those under thirty are "raising the possibility that society ought to (or will have to) accommodate itself to youth, instead of youth to society." Yet the problem, he contended, was that "students today tend to dismiss all people over 30, including the older radicals from the 1930s. The rascals ... are neither Democrats or Republicans, but simply adults." Generational accommodation defined the pressure point coming from those who demanded more "involvement of students in society" and political liberation ofyouth.12 Age determined separate identity and altered the way political attitudes and stances were grouped and assumptions understood. One student threatened "a full-scale rebellion," with "youth pitted against their elders."" The Graduate helped confirm the growing sentiment that age was a sign of defiance.
By The Graduate's release in December 1967, the popular magazine Ladies Home journal (LHJ) reported agitation between anxiety-ridden parents and American youth. LHJ released the results of a poll and the findings of psychologists, medical doctors, and politicians concerning generational issues. On the first page of the article, LHJ featured a "Man of the Year"-looking youth, hands in pockets, facing off with his parents - a suit-and-tie-clad father and well-groomed mother. "Talking to my parents is a drag.... The last thing I want to be in 20 years is like [my father]," the son complained. "Our kids have everything given to them. My generation had to work for what it got," retorted the father.14
The dialogue in both the Ladies Home Journal and the "Students and Society" conference framed the conflict as psychologist George R. Bach and others relayed it to the American public a month after The Graduate's release. "We Can Close the Generation Gap," Bach promised in one of nine articles centered on young people in Life. Such notables as Robert F. Kennedy offered advice in "What Our Young People Are Really Saying." All in all, social critics, parents, psychologists, politicians, and writers acknowledged the problems of generational discontent and, in a similar fashion as the Students and Society Conference, agreed that America was a "psychologically divided nation." Both parent and child had chosen to deal with generational conflict by becoming "emotional dropouts." American youth rejected the morality and values of their parents and reacted by turning to social promiscuity and new drug indulgence. Parents, on the other hand, disengaged "within their own dismay and disappointment." Those parents who were baffled about "hippie flower children" met head on with these children who saw the adult world as one filled with "drunks and divorcees, who managed to invent nuclear bombs."15 Psychologists and doctors attempted to bridge these poignant divisions by creating "new climates of receptivity" through institutes and group therapy sessions. Recognizing that youth culture had far-reaching implications, Dr. Bach argued that "bridging the gap will lead us to a new and better path."16
