'60s Hollywood, the rebels and the studios
http://www.houmatoday.com/article/20101116/ENTERTAINMENT/101119759/-1/opinion?Title=-8217-60s-Hollywood-the-rebels-and-the-studios
By MANOHLA DARGIS
November 16, 2010
The story of what is often called New Hollywood, the era of the "easy
riders, raging bulls," to borrow the title of Peter Biskind's 1998
best-seller, has been told numerous times. It goes something like
this: By the early 1960s the old studio system was in shambles, run
by old men who, out of touch with the times-they-are-a-changin', were
churning out pricey duds like "Cleopatra" to shrinking, indifferent audiences.
Just in the nick of time a new movie-savvy generation of directors,
influenced by European art cinema, stormed the studios and
reinvigorated American cinema with their independent visions. "Now,"
the director John Milius exulted, "power lies with the filmmakers."
Alas, that power went to their heads, and filmmakers indulged
themselves into a creative dead ends ( "At Long Last Love" ) and
financial calamities ( "One From the Heart" ). The Age of Aquarius
and the auteurs gave way to high-concept hits driven by the corporate
bottom line and toy tie-ins. The rest is history and the end of times
known as Michael Bay.
Over this past decade New Hollywood usually bracketed by the bloody
sensational wow of "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967 and the two-blockbuster
punch of "Jaws" and "Star Wars" in the mid-1970s has been the
subject of so much popular adulation and academic scrutiny as to
become a veritable fetish. This was the era, or so its enthusiasts
insist, when American movies grew up (or at least started undressing
actresses); when directors did what they wanted (or at least were
transformed into brands); when creativity ruled (or at least ran
gloriously amok, albeit often on the studio's dime). Needless to say,
there's more to this rise-and-fall saga, one worth revisiting with
the release of a new DVD box from Criterion, "America Lost and Found:
The BBS Story."
BBS was Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson and Steve Blauner, central
figures in the New Hollywood narrative. In 1965 Schneider and
Rafelson were working in a television division at Columbia Pictures
when they placed an ad seeking "four insane boys, aged 17-21." These
four were for a music group modeled on the Beatles that would star in
a television show influenced by Richard Lester's movies with the
Beatles like "A Hard Day's Night" and aimed at young audiences. Or,
as the show's opening themeput it: "We're the young generation and
we've got something to say. Hey, hey, we're the Monkees." Radio hits,
concerts and lunchboxes followed, with Monkees merchandise pulling in
an estimated $20 million in 1966.
Two years later the show was canceled only to be perversely
resurrected in mutant form by Rafelson and Jack Nicholson as "Head,"
a film they wrote and was produced with money from Columbia.
(Schneider was the executive producer.) Directed by Rafelson, "Head"
hammered the final nail in the pop group's coffin with a cacophony of
self-reflexive gestures and art-house techniques. It bombed, but
before it opened, Schneider shelled out some $350,000 to buy the
rights to a biker movie with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda that
became "Easy Rider" and was distributed by Columbia. It zoomed to No.
4 on the 1969 box-office chart, right behind "Hello, Dolly!"
"Easy Rider" is the most significant and "Head" is the most
subversive of the seven titles in the BBS box, which also includes
"Five Easy Pieces" ; "Drive, He Said" ; "A Safe Place" ; "The Last
Picture Show" ; and "The King of Marvin Gardens." It's a divergent
collection in terms of stories, characters, filmmaking competency,
narrative coherency and degrees of induced tedium.
The classicism of Peter Bogdanovich's lovely, lonely,
Hollywood-haunted landscapes in "The Last Picture Show" speaks to
influences like John Ford. (Another hovering ghost was Orson Welles,
who suggested that it be shot in black and white.) Then there were
the visual and narrative experiments of Hopper's "Easy Rider," his
directorial debut, on which his friend, the avant-garde filmmaker
Bruce Conner ( "A Movie" ), served as an editing consultant.
Much is often made (including in a few of the DVD extras) about
Hopper's and Fonda's work with the independent producer Roger Corman
on flicks like "The Trip" (1967) and how a gig with Corman was
something of a run-and-gun film school. But some of Hopper's larger
lessons were learned from avant-garde cinema, a world he was familiar
with and contributed to. He appeared, for instance, in Andy Warhol's
film, "Tarzan and Jane, Regained Sort of," which was partly shot at
the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1963, the year Hopper discovered Pop art.
( "Little did I know," Warhol later wrote of "Easy Rider," that "it
would be the exact image millions of kids were fantasizing being
free and on the road, dealing dope and getting persecuted." )
The influence of avant-garde cinema, documentary, television and even
Old Hollywood on New Hollywood tends to be underplayed in accounts of
the era. Instead, foreign-language cinema is often reflexively
invoked as the primary influence, which partly speaks to anxieties
and prejudices about no-nothing Americans learning culture from Europeans.
It's unlikely that the usual European suspects would be invoked as
much if films like Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up" (shot in
English and bankrolled by MGM) hadn't also been hits. In 1966
"Blow-Up" raked in more than $6 million on American screens (more
than $30 million in today's dollars). Nicholson, one of New
Hollywood's brightest lights, went on to star in Antonioni's
"Passenger" in 1975, the year "Jaws" nominally changed everything
again by ushering in the blockbuster age.
This isn't to say that foreign-language cinema didn't inspire New
Hollywood, only that its influences were more varied and complex than
is usually stated and at times most evident in the inchoate disquiet
that marks films like "Five Easy Pieces" (1970). Antonioni, in
discussing his 1960 masterwork "L'Avventura," said: "Eros is sick;
man is uneasy, something is bothering him."
Certainly the same goes for Bobby Dupea, the classical pianist turned
oil-rig worker played by Nicholson in "Five Easy Pieces." As directed
by Rafelson and written by him and Carol Eastman, Bobby is an
exemplary alienated dropout, who's walked away from his art-bourgeois
family to drift unhappily among the working classes (including his
girlfriend, played wonderfully by Karen Black) for whom he largely
shows contempt.
"Five Easy Pieces" has its attractions, primarily Nicholson's and
Black's performances, as well as a very specific and textured sense
of place, evidenced by the oil fields, shabby houses, bowling alley,
diner and motel that Bobby passes through before returning to the
high-art mausoleum that is his ancestral home. Opaque yet obvious,
Bobby might seem more ambiguous than the heroes who populate old
Hollywood movies, but he's also on a continuum with the alienated
youth of films like "Rebel Without a Cause" (made in 1955 and
featuring a young Dennis Hopper), whose beautiful angst was sometimes
accompanied by a rock 'n' roll soundtrack.
By 1940 Hollywood already knew that most movie tickets were bought by
people under 30, and that teenagers were a critical market. It began
targeting younger and younger audiences, even while it tried to deal
with the aftershocks of the 1948 government decree that forced the
studios out of the exhibition business. By the time BBS made a deal
with Columbia to make six movies for under $1 million each,
independent productions were the studio rule, and the old system was
gone. In its place was a reconfigured system that had yet to recover
from the devastating impact of television, among other shifts, and
had seen weekly movie attendance drop to as low as 20 million in 1970
from as high as 90 million in 1946.
A familiar take on New Hollywood is that the inmates took over the
asylum. But the truth is that the wardens were also smart enough to
hand over the keys, at least as long as it made dollars and sense.
The history of Hollywood is one of perpetual crisis and retrenchment
and the extraordinary resilience of an industry that continually
co-opts potential threats (television, video, independent filmmakers)
and exploits them to its benefit. There were great films made during
this era, including by filmmakers like John Cassavetes, who had a
tough time with the studios, and others, like Schneider, who already
had a foot in the door. In Schneider's case his father actually ran
the studio.
"We used to call them 'the Hollywood sperm,'" the filmmaker Jim
McBride told Biskind, "because they were all children of successful
Hollywood people."
If BBS earned a reputation out of proportion to its actual
achievements its legacy rests largely on "Easy Rider" and
Nicholson's emerging stardom it is partly because the company's
flashy, short history (it closed in 1975) feeds familiar myths about
Hollywood, including its reputation as a creative desert, when it's
always been defined by its oases. One of the most crucial myths is
that of the triumphant individual be it Schneider in the late 1960s
and early 1970s or Harvey Weinstein in the 1990s who is at once
part of the system and yet somehow apart, and whose cultivated
identity as a rebel only makes the system look better, less
monolithic. The fantasy is that it's the individual who conquers the
system, when it's part of the genius of the system to have, decade
after decade, done much of the conquering.
.
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