Hollywood in 1970s-1980s

2. New Hollywood
• Hollywood 1960s - fundamental
change in filmmaking
• becoming more expensive to
produce
– Due to monetary inflation.
– Diffusion and influence of
television.
– Because of Hollywood's
blockbuster strategy.
• New niche markets for young
audiences (no longer all the films
for all the people) sexploitation,
blaxploitation, cult films
– B-Flicks
– American International Pictures
– Roger Corman

3. New Hollywood
• Influence of European Art films
– innovative and experimental storytelling
• Italian Neo-realists
– Location shooting, non-professional actors
– Fellini, De Sica, Antonioni
• New Cinemas
– French, Czech, German, British
– Godard, Truffaut, Resnais
• Japanese Cinema
– Kurosawa, Ozu
• Impact of U.S. Underground and experimental
traditions
• From dominant to counter-cinema
– Narrative transitivity to Narrative intransitivity
– Identification to Estrangement
– Transparency to Foregrounding
– Single diegesis to Multiple diegesis
– Closure to Aperture
– Pleasure to Un-pleasure
– Fiction to Reality

4. New Hollywood
• Heralded by Bonnie and Clyde.
• Easy Rider
– youth culture film produced for
$375,000
– $50 million at the box office
– cause Hollywood to embrace the
youth market
– Hire young directors
• Explicit treatment of sexual conflicts
and psychological problems
– a sense of permissiveness that led
to the end of American film
censorship
– Graphic sex and violence was
cynical toward classical Hollywood
genres (optimism and
wholesomeness of nation under
the Code)

5. New Hollywood
• Style
– Anti-establishment - tackled social issues: racism,
classism, sexism, homophobia, war, political and
legal system.
• Mixing of the comic and the serious
• Open or unhappy ending
– Character
• Offbeat antihero protagonists - charming, exciting,
funny, social misfits, deviates, outlaws.
• Antagonists are often the legal officials
– Perspective
• character over plot; feeling over action
– Location shooting
• self-conscious use of cinematic effects (slow
motion, rapid montage, stylized flashbacks, freeze
frame, split screen)
• reminded audience it is watching a movie;
intensified filmic mood
• Sound: less canned nondiegetic scoring; more
motivated diegetic audio (radio, ambience); popular
rock music
• Auteurs
– Independent production boom
– John Cassavetes, Woody Allen, Robert Altman,
Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Terrence
Malick, DePalma, Stanley Kubrick

6. Blockbuster Hollywood
• Late 1970s - Studios change
– Financial
• Bankruptcy and Conglomeration of Studios
• Disasters of kid directors - Heaven's Gate.
• studio heads became lawyers &
accountants with no industry
backgrounds.
– lack of creativity
– focus on playability
– Ideological
• Feel-good movie: Vietnam syndrome, rise
of the moral majority, nostalgia
– Mid 1970s - Rocky and Star Wars were
catalysts
– People were asked to fulfill more roles,
spend more (even if on credit); poverty
and suffering unacknowledged
– Return of myth: muscular heroes, friendly
robots, tough cops,
» If not Pro-establishment, definitely
not anti; looking for something to
believe in rather than to be angry
at
» resourceful teens

7. Blockbuster Hollywood
• Film School Generation
– Beginnings of college courses in film studies.
– Francis Ford Coppola
– Martin Scorsese
– George Lucas
– Steven Spielberg
• Blockbuster mentality (films that take in over
$100 million in box office)
– Finance
• Distribute a few big films for enormous profit. That
ONE MONSTER HIT to carry through the lean films
– International Marketing
• And not only theaters, but other tiers
– Home video distribution.
– Conservative audience calculation
• prescreening scores, focus groups
• Sequalization, remakes and franchise
• Marketing - franchising synergy with TV and
publishing interests, tie-ins, cross-promotion and
ancillary
– ENTERTAINMENT is ALL
• Intensely manipulative of audience response
– construct films so meticulously that they lose
spontaneity to become almost machine-like in
their effect
• Films become a RIDE - wide-screen; color;
stereophonic; special effects; action over
reflection; happy ending
– Technically advanced; politically retreated (well
really, reactionary);