For the last twenty to
thirty years film critics and Hollywood has begun to appreciate the movies of
the 1970s.
That they are starting
to do so is yet another example of the nostalgia factor that critics have
because while the decade was going on, most contemporary critics thought the
movies of the 1970s were mediocre at best. During 1975 one critic, looking at
the choices of movies for the Oscars said: “It wasn’t a bad year for movies; it
was a terrible year.” That year the nominees for Best Picture were Barry Lyndon,
Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All
of these films were considered among the greatest ever made within a ten year
period; Roger Ebert eventually put all five among the greatest movie ever made
before he passed. But it tells us how for
many contemporary critics the grass is
always greener in the past.
I digress. The narrative
about the 70s has always followed a certain format. The breakdown of the studio
system near the end of the 1960s let some of the more iconic filmmakers in
history to make some of the greatest films of all time that broke all existing
rules of what movies were capable of. These geniuses – Scorsese, Coppola and
Altman are by far the most prominent names
- ruled the industry and were changing the face of what movies could
look like. And then those upstart hacks named Spielberg and Lucas started
making their kinds of movies and Hollywood followed the money and the Golden
Age was over for good.
It's a great story. It also
has no connection to reality.
Now I’m not going to say
that the films that were made in the 1970s weren’t masterpieces; I’ve seen many
of them and they more than live up to the hype. I’m also not going to pretend
that these movies couldn’t have been made if the studio system hadn’t begun to
completely break down by the end of the 1960s; by 1970 only one of the remaining
guard of Hollywood studio heads was still in power, Daryl F. Zanuck of 20th
Century Fox. He’d be gone by the end of 1971. And it is hard to imagine, given
the kind of hold the dictator like hold these men held over Hollywood even in
the 1960s, that men like Altman or Terence Malick could have been given control
of film and do things the way they wanted. These men had the power to break
careers for forty years and they would never have allowed these kinds of things
to happen.
But where I draw the
line is the idea that somehow money had absolutely nothing to do with how these
films were made or that the directors themselves did not care about it. I
imagine that might be true for some of them - Malick and Stanley Kubrick in particular but
Malick only made two movies in the entire decade and Kubrick was beginning to
take long pauses between his films by this point. (A Clockwork Orange and
Barry Lyndon were the only two movies he made in the entire decade.) And the reason they were given these free reign
to begin with was because the films by their similarly artistic colleagues were
making huge amounts of money as well.
I can dismiss the idea
that these great directors were making these movies purely out of a need for
artistic glory on a conversation that took place in the summer 1972. Peter Bogdanovich
was having a conversation with William Friedkin. Bogdanovich bragged that The
Last Picture Show, his first movie, had been nominated for Best Picture and
he had been nominated for Best Director. Friedkin countered that The French
Connection had beaten won Best Picture and he’d won Best Director. Then Francis
Ford Coppola walked by and said that my first movie The
Godfather was breaking all box office records.
The story may be apocryphal,
but all three men swore it happened. I believe in its authenticity because much
of the filmmaking that took place during the 1970s was as much a competition as
anything else. These directors were all ambitious and they wanted to each
one-up each other and the best way to do that was to be talked about in
Hollywood. The two ways to do that were awards and box office. Don’t tell me
these ‘great artists’ were doing it just for the sake of art.
And for all the talk of
them beating the system, they had to do it. If The Godfather had been a
disaster – which many of the studio heads feared it would be the bigger it got –
Coppola’s career would have been over before it started. Furthermore studio
heads weren’t shouting for ‘the next Godfather’ because they wanted
critics raving about it or even shiny gold statues. The Godfather had
broken all box office records when it came out in 1972, shattering Gone With
The Wind’s thirty three year mark. All of the directors got to make their
masterpieces the same way they always have – at the largesse of the studios.
This somehow gets left
out of so much of the discussion of the
1970s films. Yes they may have all been for adults but the main reason all
these films got made and these directors were allowed to keep making them was
the same reason as always: the movies were making money. They might not have
made the huge profits of The Godfather but movies like Chinatown, One
Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Dog Day Afternoon were profitable.
Some of the artistic masterpieces that were box office successes surprised even
the studios: many were stunned when All The President’s Men became a box
office smash. It’s not much of an exaggeration then many other filmmakers of
the time – I think mainly of Altman and Hal Ashby, whose films almost never had
huge profits – got to make the films they did because these other movies were
successful at all.
This gets to the next
point. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have always been considered lesser
filmmakers then men like Scorsese because, in the minds of film critics, the fact
that there movies were huge box office successes changed how Hollywood worked. This
leaves out the critical fact that Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese were all
friends in Hollywood, along with Coppola and Brian De Palma. Spielberg said as
much in his self-titled 2017 documentary and it’s always been true. Conservations
with all five have indicated that these giants of filmmaking spent as much time
watching each other’s film, trying to outdo the other and also offering criticisms.
In fact these four men
were the first people to see the first cut of Star Wars. After Lucas
showed it to them they told him the movie had potential but was a mess. It was
the idea of Brian De Palma for the famous upward scrolling prologue which
narrated the story and perhaps more than anything gave it a path forward. So if
you want to blame anyone for Star Wars, you need to blame him.
Now to be clear none of
them knew this would happen and it’s not like any of these men weren’t trying
to make money with their own movies. For all the critical success of Taxi
Driver, it was the fact that it managed to do decently at the box
office was one of the reasons Scorsese got to make his next film. That the
movie was New York, New York a ‘lesser’ Scorsese was still the sacrifice
he knew he had to make if he wanted to make Raging Bull. De Palma
similarly could only make films based on box office success and it helped that
in 1976 he made the horror classic Carrie.
Finally there’s the
argument that once Star Wars became a box office smash, Hollywood no
longer had any interest in making ‘adult movies’. This isn’t the case. I have
little doubt that there might have been an audience for it and it was clear for
movies such as Heaven Can Wait, Coming Home and Kramer Vs. Kramer in
the next few years. The problem once that two of those same artistic directors
themselves help kill it.
Francis Ford Coppola’s
production of Apocalypse Now is as famously tumultuous as the film
itself. In fact a documentary about it Heart of Darkness makes it very
clear just what a horror show it was for everybody. Few would deny the film was
a masterpiece and it managed to make enough money to justify the expense. But the
horror show of the production was a red flag as to just how much it could hurt a
studio if you gave a director all the creative freedom in the world.
The nail in the coffin
was, of course, Heaven’s Gate. Michael Cimino, coming off multiple Oscar
wins for The Deer Hunter, had been given free reign to tell a movie set
in 1890 Wyoming about the Johnson Country War in 1890 Wyoming. The movie kept
getting longer and longer (the official running time was 3 hours and 40
minutes) and there were horror stories from beginning to end involving animal
abuses and just how much horror there was on the set. The initial reviews were cruel
beyond words – Roger Ebert gave it ½ of one star and called it laughably bad –
but more importantly it was a box office disaster. It had cost $44 million to
make and it barely made $3.5 million at the box office.
Later reviews have
looked more kindly on the film and said that while it is not a masterpiece, it
is not nearly as bad as was perceived at the time. But the premiere engagement
was so disastrous that it had to be cut by more than eighty minutes for studio
release. By this point the studio were finally beginning to lose patience with
directors having all the creative freedom and leading their businesses into
financial disaster. A lot of the producers who were allowing these films to be
made were getting fired as a result because of these fiascos. Cimino’s career
which had barely started was over before it began.
There’s also the fact,
frequently left out of the discussion of the 1970s that the film industry was
just as committed to cheese as it was before: disaster films like Poseidon
Adventure, Airport and Towering Inferno were huge hits (the latter
two were nominated for Best Picture) as well as movies that had their fair
level of sap (Love Story was the biggest box office hit of 1970 and it
was nominated for Best Picture along side MASH). This is true of every
major decade of filmmaking no matter how much critics want to argue it was better
than other this was the decade of Lost Horizon as much as Cabaret, Blacula
as much as Sounder. Even the great artists were making as many
terrible films as they were great ones: Coppola made The Great Gatsby the
same year he made The Conversation and Bogdanavich’s Daisy Miller did
much to crater a film career that had started with such enormous potential. All
of them had the latitude to make their movies based on their previous
successes. That’s the way all businesses work; I don’t know why one has to
remind them that Hollywood is one and it operates on the same function.
What critics don’t seem to
get about Hollywood is that it has always been ruled by the free market. What
they consider art is a business model for them, designed on how many people
would go to see it. Spielberg’s movies made money and he was allowed to make
more of them and the studies decided to follow his model going forward. Heaven’s
Gate was a financial disaster and the studios decided that his model would
lead them to ruin. Is it fair as far as how art is viewed? Of course not. But as
critics always seem to forget, the movies they see aren’t made for them alone.
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