America in the 1960s
At the decade’s beginning Hollywood seemed healthy. The studios still controlled distribution so profits from moneymaking films continued to pass through their hands.
The studios had also made peace with television, selling the rights to air new movie releases to the networks for high prices as well as creating their own TV shows.
However, with American families moving to the suburbs and TV killing off the habitual filmgoer, movie attendance continued its steady decline.
Hollywood’s decline resulted primarily from the refusal to accept a simple fact: the American movie-going audience was changing.
The films of the early 1960s were essentially the same as the films of the 1950s.
Lost 20 million for MGM
Lost 40 million for Fox
Cost 8 million - made 159 million
The massive success of 1965’s The Sound of Music led studios to risk huge sums of money into epic movies that recalled old Hollywood.
But only 1% of the films released between 1960 and 1968 grossed over $1 million.
And time after time, the big budget films that tried to recreate old Hollywood, like the ones seen here, crashed and burned... The fabled Hollywood studios were in serious financial trouble.
Feeling the squeeze, the studios rented their sound stages to television and sold off their back lots to real estate developers.
At their weakest point since the start of WWII the majors were ripe to be bought up by large multi-national corporations.
The studios became distributors for the growing world of independent production, with indie producer Roger Corman sponsoring young directors making their feature debut.
Released in 1966 without Production Code approval, but with an adults-only warning.
A new American cinema and a new American audience announced themselves in 1967.
They’re young!
They’re in love!
And they kill people!
If Bonnie and Clyde was about the type of romantic rebel who would fight the military-industrial complex, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch was about America’s mercenary presence in Vietnam itself.
The film, which opens with a bloody massacre during a payroll robbery, features a gang of aging outlaws who find themselves chased by bounty hunters.
They make their way into Mexico during its civil war and “enter the war” when they take a job stealing weapons aboard an American train for a corrupt commander of the Federale army.
Sam Peckinpah was a filmmaker interested in exposing audiences to certain dark realities of American life that the audience themselves had chosen to ignore.
Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah introduced conventions for the depiction of violence that other filmmakers fully exploited in the 1970s and beyond.
Both insisted on showing the human body as flesh and blood, and that bullets don’t leave
pinpricks, but gaping wounds, and that violence was painful and destructive.
They viewed this as important information to a nation whose children were fighting and dying
in a war thousands of miles from home in Southeast Asia.
Mike Nichols: Best Director Oscar
The film becomes a messy, complicated, love triangle when Benjamin, at Mr. Robinson’s urging,
starts taking out their daughter Elaine, ultimately having sex with her, while still sleeping with Mrs. Robinson.
But ultimately, the film is about the alienation of youth from the traditional American culture and the middle-class morality of the older generation
Director John Schlesinger
Only X-Rated film to win Oscar for Best Picture
Oscar Awards:
Stanley Kramer director
Norman Jewison director
Sidney Poitier Top Box-Office Star in the US
Director Dennis Hopper
Easy Rider shrewdly exploited the paranoia of a new generation of youth that felt itself at war with a hostile and increasingly belligerent establishment that seemingly didn’t want them around.
Produced for $375,000 the film grossed $50 million and convinced Hollywood that a vast new youth market was ready to be tapped.
Studios launched a series of youth pics. Stories filled with sex, drugs & rock-n-roll that focused on campus rebellion, protest and the generation gap in American Society.
With the search for the college audience, studios became open to the storytelling techniques pioneered in the European Art Cinema.
Director Stanley Kubrick
2001 is that rare cinematic achievements:
a big-budget, non-narrative spectacle of technical sophistication that nevertheless makes an original and personal artistic statement about the human condition.
Kubrick said, “the film is a nonverbal experience...it attempts to communicate more to the subconscious than it does to the intellect.”
Section I starts with prehistoric ape-men encountering an alien monolithic slab in the desert. Soon after, they learn to use animal bones as weapons.
Section II shows modern day scientists who have discovered a monolith buried under the surface of the moon, which is emitting a radio signal in the direction of Jupiter.
Section III opens 18 months later with a state-of-the-art spaceship, carrying a team of astronauts and a talking HAL 9000 super-computer, toward Jupiter.
After Hal suffers a paranoid break and kills all but one of the astronauts, the sole survivor escapes the spacecraft and spies a monolith drifting in space.
The astronaut is sucked through space and arrives as an older man in what seems to be a hotel room.