A smug glance at the seventies—the so-called "Me Decade"—unveils a kaleidoscope of big hair, blaring music, and broken politics—all easy targets for satire, cynicism, and ultimately even nostalgia. The contributors to this volume look beyond the strobe lights to reveal how profoundly the seventies have influenced American life and how the films of that decade represent a peak moment in cinema history. Bringing together ten original essays, American Cinema of the 1970s examines the range of films that marked the decade, including Jaws, Rocky, Love Story, Shaft, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Deliverance, The Exorcist, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Apocalypse Now.
A smug glance at the seventies--the so-called -Me Decade---unveils a kaleidoscope of big hair, blaring music, and broken politics--all easy targets for satire, cynicism, and ultimately even nostalgia. The contributors to this volume look beyond the strobe lights to reveal how profoundly the seventies have influenced American life and how the films of that decade represent a peak moment in cinema history. Bringing together ten original essays, American Cinema of the 1970s examines the range of films that marked the decade, including Jaws, Rocky, Love Story, Shaft, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Deliverance, The Exorcist, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Apocalypse Now.
Winner of the 2018 Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theater Library Association Liberating Hollywood examines the professional experiences and creative output of women filmmakers during a unique moment in history when the social justice movements that defined the 1960s and 1970s challenged the enduring culture of sexism and racism in the U.S. film industry. Throughout the 1970s feminist reform efforts resulted in a noticeable rise in the number of women directors, yet at the same time the institutionalized sexism of Hollywood continued to create obstacles to closing the gender gap. Maya Montañez Smukler reveals that during this era there were an estimated sixteen women making independent and studio films: Penny Allen, Karen Arthur, Anne Bancroft, Joan Darling, Lee Grant, Barbara Loden, Elaine May, Barbara Peeters, Joan Rivers, Stephanie Rothman, Beverly Sebastian, Joan Micklin Silver, Joan Tewkesbury, Jane Wagner, Nancy Walker, and Claudia Weill. Drawing on interviews conducted by the author, Liberating Hollywood is the first study of women directors within the intersection of second wave feminism, civil rights legislation, and Hollywood to investigate the remarkable careers of these filmmakers during one of the most mythologized periods in American film history.
While the anti-establishment rebels of 1969's Easy Rider were morphing into the nostalgic yuppies of 1983's The Big Chill, Seventies movies brought us everything from killer sharks, blaxploitation, and disco musicals to a loving look at General George S. Patton. Indeed, as Peter Lev persuasively argues in this book, the films of the 1970s constitute a kind of conversation about what American society is and should be—open, diverse, and egalitarian, or stubbornly resistant to change. Examining forty films thematically, Lev explores the conflicting visions presented in films with the following kinds of subject matter: Hippies (Easy Rider, Alice's Restaurant) Cops (The French Connection, Dirty Harry) Disasters and conspiracies (Jaws, Chinatown) End of the Sixties (Nashville, The Big Chill) Art, Sex, and Hollywood (Last Tango in Paris) Teens (American Graffiti, Animal House) War (Patton, Apocalypse Now) African-Americans (Shaft, Superfly) Feminisms (An Unmarried Woman, The China Syndrome) Future visions (Star Wars, Blade Runner) As accessible to ordinary moviegoers as to film scholars, Lev's book is an essential companion to these familiar, well-loved movies.
A fascinating year-by-year history of American film in the seventies, a decade filled with innovations that reinvented the medium and showed that movies can be more than entertainment. In The Seventies: The Decade That Changed American Film Forever, Vincent LoBrutto tracks the changing of the guard in the 1970s from the classic Hollywood studio system to a new generation of filmmakers who made personal movies targeting a younger audience. He covers in kaleidoscopic detail the breadth of American cinema during the 1970s, with analyses of the movies, biographical sketches of the filmmakers, and an examination of the innovative production methods that together illustrate why the seventies were unique in American film history. Featuring iconic filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola and films such The Godfather, Jaws, Taxi Driver, and The Exorcist, this book reveals how the seventies challenged the old guard in groundbreaking and exciting ways, ushering in a new Hollywood era whose impact is still seen in American film today.
The book focuses on the way various film icons engaged in and helped define some major issues of cultural and social concern to America by making heavily politicized movies during the 1970s.
In 1969, a low-budget biker movie, Easy Rider, shocked Hollywood with its stunning success. An unabashed celebration of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (onscreen and off), Easy Rider heralded a heady decade in which a rebellious wave of talented young filmmakers invigorated the movie industry. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind takes us on the wild ride that was Hollywood in the '70s, an era that produced such modern classics as The Godfather, Chinatown, Shampoo, Nashville, Taxi Driver, and Jaws. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls vividly chronicles the exuberance and excess of the times: the startling success of Easy Rider and the equally alarming circumstances under which it was made, with drugs, booze, and violent rivalry between costars Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda dominating the set; how a small production company named BBS became the guiding spirit of the youth rebellion in Hollywood and how, along the way, some of its executives helped smuggle Huey Newton out of the country; how director Hal Ashby was busted for drugs and thrown in jail in Toronto; why Martin Scorsese attended the Academy Awards with an FBI escort when Taxi Driver was nominated; how George Lucas, gripped by anxiety, compulsively cut off his own hair while writing Star Wars, how a modest house on Nicholas Beach occupied by actresses Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt became the unofficial headquarters for the New Hollywood; how Billy Friedkin tried to humiliate Paramount boss Barry Diller; and how screenwriter/director Paul Schrader played Russian roulette in his hot tub. It was a time when an "anything goes" experimentation prevailed both on the screen and off. After the success of Easy Rider, young film-school graduates suddenly found themselves in demand, and directors such as Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese became powerful figures. Even the new generation of film stars -- Nicholson, De Niro, Hoffman, Pacino, and Dunaway -- seemed a breed apart from the traditional Hollywood actors. Ironically, the renaissance would come to an end with Jaws and Star Wars, hugely successful films that would create a blockbuster mentality and crush innovation. Based on hundreds of interviews with the directors themselves, producers, stars, agents, writers, studio executives, spouses, and ex-spouses, this is the full, candid story of Hollywood's last golden age. Never before have so many celebrities talked so frankly about one another and about the drugs, sex, and money that made so many of them crash and burn. By turns hilarious and shocking, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is the ultimate behind-the-scenes account of Hollywood at work and play.
"Most books about American film in the 1970s tell stories about iconoclastic auteurs working in the shadow of the Vietnam War. Stepping away from this tradition, Todd Berliner gives us a bold and compelling study of the strange, paradoxical narrative style of seventies films, which seemed to flout the canonical structure of the well-made film. Berliner sheds new light on a well-studied period. His lively prose and the delight he takes in explicaring the classics of that era make this book a real pleasure to read."---Stephen Prince, Professor of Cinema at Virginia Tech and author of Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism "The wave of innovative filmmaking that surged in 1970s Hollywood has come to be cherished as dearly by many cineastes as the earlier `golden age' of studio filmmaking. American filmmaking of this period has been much discussed in relation to the crisis of the film industry and the sociopolitical currents of the time, Todd Berliner's important study focuses on what is usually taken for granted in such work: the form, texture, and tone of the films themselves, and the experiences that they create for spectators. His exacting and wide-ranging study explores the interplay between narrative unity and `incongruity,' as it is manifested in different ways in acknowledged classics directed by Coppola, Friedkin, Scorsese, and Cassavetes, as well as in many less well-known films. Berliner also shows how these films have had a lasting impact on Hollywood filmmaking. Hollywood Incoherent provides the sustained and systematic exploration of the aesthetics of the `Hollywood Renaissance' that the films deserve and the field of film studies needs."---Murray Smith, Professor of Film Studies, University of Kent
The Screen Decades: American Culture/American Cinema series is now available as an eleven-volume set: American Cinema from the 1890 to the 2000s. Each volume presents a group of original essays analyzing the impact of cultural issues on the cinema and the impact of the cinema on society. Because every chapter explores a spectrum of particularly significant motion pictures and the broad range of historical events in one year, readers will gain a continuing sense of the decade as it came to be depicted on movie screens across the nation. The integration of historical and cultural events with the sprawling progression of American cinema illuminates the pervasive themes and essential movies that define an era. The series represents one among many possible ways of confronting the past and understanding the connections between American culture and film history.
