Hollywood Film Analysis

This essay will take an in-depth look at the history of Hollywood during the late 60s and early 70s. This period of time is considered to have been a renaissance for American cinema, and was titled the ‘New Hollywood’ by cotemporary critics of the time. In order to understand the changes that Hollywood went through the late ‘60s, you first have to examine the preceding era of Hollywood filmmaking during the 30s and 40s. This was a period that is commonly referred to as Hollywood’s Golden Age; when the dream factories were in full swing and the audiences were in regular attendance. This period of time could be defined by a number of social, political or economic contexts, but it’s the filmmaking practices that were employed at the time which
give the shift into the New Hollywood Era its significance. In the Classic Hollywood Era, the role of director was not a highly revered position. They had limited control over their films, and would rarely be involved in the entirety of the production process. It was only the producer who would see a film through from beginning to end. “Directors, on salary, were there to make sure the actors hit their marks while the camera was running … They were low on the totem pole, barely higher than writers.” (Peter Biskind, 1998:19)
In the 1960s it was mainly a younger audience that frequented cinemas. The popularity of drive-in movie theatres was growing, with exploitation films and B-Movies drawing in younger crowds with their graphic violence and explicit sexual content. “A 1967 survey for the film industry’s main trade organisation, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), revealed that ‘half of the United States population 16 years and older almost never goes to the movies’ ” (Peter Kramer, 2005:7). In fact, many of the directors who came to prominence during the New Hollywood era started off their careers by making cheap exploitation films for Roger Corman and American International Pictures (AIP). This generation was profoundly defined by their rejection of their elder’s ideals, and gravitated towards the radical cultural changes that were happening at the time. However the studio system wasn’t producing content that appealed to this audience, which lead to a decline in attendance. The studios had become stale and outdated. While hippie culture, drug culture, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War all had the nation’s attention at the time, none of these topics had managed to make their way into Hollywood. The industry had become fiercely closed off, and had refused to allow any new blood to enter it for a long time, with all the major studios being run by men in their sixties and above. It was an unfortunate scenario were the men who had practically invented Hollywood cinema, where still alive and in control of the industry, but completely out of touch with the new generation that was coming of age in the ‘60s.
It was during this time that a new wave of European cinema began gaining popularity with both American audiences and filmmakers. At the forefront of this influence was the works of the French New Wave. They brought forth new concepts of style and artistic expression that was seemingly missing from American cinema. The term ‘Auteur’ was first conceived by members of the Nouvelle Vague and was popularised in America by film critic Andrew Sarris. It proposed the idea that a director is the sole author of their film, and that they should wield their camera like a writer wields their pen. This concept appealed greatly to the film school generation of filmmakers who would dominate New Hollywood. A common trait found among these filmmakers was an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema. “Previous generations of directors had mostly come from the theatre or learned the job during apprenticeships within the studio system … Filmmakers gaining their education in the 1960s benefited from formal study and from the increased availability of films from the international art cinema, a kind of production in which the vision of the director-as-artist is a major factor.” (Geoff King, 2002:89) They idolised filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks because of their ability to inject their own personal style and aesthetic into their films which set them apart from their contemporaries. It could be argued that the reason this generation was such a creative one, is because they were the first generation that could reflect on the medium as an already established format which they could reinterpreted in their own way. They were raised with cinema having always been a part of their surroundings, and therefore had a unique perspective of the medium. It was a perspective that couldn’t be shared by their predecessors, because it was one that only came with time.
In June 1967, the head of Warner Brothers, Jack Warner was presented with a rough cut screening of a new film titled Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
The film, directed by Arthur Penn and produced by Warren Beatty was about the real life depression era bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The screenplay was written by David Newman and Robert Benton, with additional help from Robert Towne. After Warner watched the film, he proceeded to tell Beatty and Penn how much of a failure it
was.

“Beatty tried to explain the picture to Warner … ‘You know what, Jack? This is really kind of a homage to the Warner Bothers gangster films of the ‘30s, you know?’ Warner replied ‘What the fuck’s a homage?’ ” (Peter Biskind, 1998:35)

Jack Warner couldn’t understand the concept of taking something old from cinema and reinventing it for a new audience. As far as he was concerned, there wasn’t a new audience. It had always been the same audience to him and his generation, and to redo an older idea was simply treading water. There has never been a more perfect example of the different perspectives of cinema there was between New and Classic Hollywood.
Newman and Benton had first started writing the script for Bonnie and Clyde in 1963 after having both being heavily influenced by French New Wave films like Breathless (1960) and Jules and Jim (1962). They set out to write a film that had the same level of moral complexity and ambiguity. The pair wanted their script to resemble a French New Wave film so much that the first person they approached to direct the film was François Truffaut. He did not end up directing the film, but did pass it along its eventual producer and leading man Warren Beatty. The story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow appealed to the writers because of its anti-establishment nature. The bank robbers were seen as folk heroes, modern day Robin Hoods who stole from the banks that were foreclosing on the homes of families. This rebellious attitude that was alive during the depression, spoke directly to the anti-war generation of the 60s. “Bonnie and Clyde’s cross country spree captured the spirit and energy of the youth movement and epitomized the revolt against institutional authority that found support among young moviegoers of the mid-1960s.” (John Belton, 1994:353)
Newman and Benton didn’t get the French New Wave director they wanted, but they did get one who shared the writers’ influences. Arthur Penn brought the style and aesthetic seen in Truffaut and Godard’s films to Bonnie and Clyde. Far away from the watchful eyes of Hollywood, the film was shot on location in Texas. This decision harkens back to the realism of French New Wave and Italian Neorealism before that. The film utilized choppy editing techniques, intentionally breaking continuity of scenes; a technique pioneered by Godard in Breathless (1960). It was used in order to jump ahead in time or to slow down and expand a moment; giving a scene additional impact. For example, in the opening scene Bonnie Parker is seen fidgeting about her room with an overwhelming sense of boredom about her. The scene jumps about with choppy editing, which helps to show her restlessness. In the final scene of the film Bonnie and Clyde are ambushed and mowed down in a hail of bullets. The scene uses quick and startling cuts to match the intensity of the gunfire, and also serves to expand the moment just before the barrage occurs.
Bonnie and Clyde was a watershed picture, and along with other counter-cultural influenced films such as The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), it helped to break down the guarded walls of old Hollywood.
All of these films shared an underdog mentality, and had to fight to be funded and distributed by the studios. However, with each unexpected success, the studios slowly started to realise that these younger directors were able to create films that resonated massively with modern audiences. As they started to lower their defences, a new generation of filmmakers who wanted to break into Hollywood suddenly found doors being opened to them. A new wave of creativity came crashing into Hollywood, spawning a decade of innovative, challenging and artistic
films.

“There was a little bit of a no man’s land … we were just running too fast for anyone to stop us. We never got permission … we just sort of started and by the time they realised what we were doing, we already had those films in production … they hadn’t got their middle management into place.” (Hollywood Insiders, 1996)

With directors being given more control over their pictures, unique styles and aesthetics started to emerge and became recognisable to audiences. It was directors themselves that became selling points of films. Audiences no longer looked at the film’s studio as a marker of quality, but the individual filmmakers and their body of work. The ‘70s brought forth numerous successful films from a wide range of new filmmakers, but as the decade progressed there were also failures.
The two by-products of the New Hollywood era which would cause its ultimate demise were firstly, the rise of the director as auteur. It became a self-indulgent and self-destructive movement. It certainly delivered some of the best films ever to come out of Hollywood, but it also brought overly inflated egos and budgets with it. The new generation of filmmakers that populated the ‘70s were never interested in making commercially successful films. Their manifesto had always been to create artistic pictures, which challenged the culture of the time. The studios had never been content with handing creative control over to individual filmmakers, and as soon as they had the chance to take it back, they did. “Even at the height of the New Hollywood revolution, when Altman and Coppola and Mazursky and Scorsese and Friedkin and Schlesinger were dominating the conversation, the studios were beginning to find a way of creating and selling their product that didn’t depend so much on directors.” (Mark Harris, 2008:419). The second by-product of New Hollywood which would bring the era of the director to a close was that the studios reliance on directors to deliver content which appealed to youthful audiences became unnecessary once films such as Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) came along. The rise of the blockbuster film was the final nail in New Hollywood’s coffin. Filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were both members of the American New Wave. They weren’t the money centric studio executives, and their intentions were not cynical, but their actions ultimately played a part in the demise of the movement. Their cinematic creations helped to create a new blockbuster formula, which finally allowed the studios to distil filmmaking back down to a repeatable and bankable process. They no longer needed to tolerate maverick film directors, and after the dust had settled, many of the directors who came to prominence during the ‘70s found that they were unable to obtain funding from the studios. For all intents and purposes, they had been exiled from Hollywood.